Partners in Fire published monthly updates showcasing our growth for the first 50 months as an online publication. We decided to keep these older articles for posterity and to help other bloggers on their journey.
Here is our 40th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add extra insight with the benefit of hindsight.
40th Month Update
It’s been a long, fun, crazy road, and 40 months is quite the milestone.
We had more page views than ever and are looking forward to continued growth!
Readership
We only saw a single day with under 200 users during this period. On the opposite side of the spectrum, we saw quite a few days with massive spikes!
The weekends are typically the worst days for traffic, but we had one really off Wednesday at the end of the month. I hope this was an anomaly and not a precursor to April.
Traffic Drivers
Organic Search
Over 60% of our users this month came from organic search, and we were only 25 shy of our 5000 target.
We’re working on some SEO-related projects that will hopefully bump that number up. The goal is to get 30-50K pageviews by July!
Top Pages
Our top organic traffic driver remains “How to be a Twitch Affiliate,” which accounts for about a third of the traffic. Nearly 1500 users found us while trying to become Twitch Affiliates.
The following two pages are still “How to Get 500 Twitter Followers,” with about 400 users, and “FU Money,” with nearly 300 users.
“Alternatives to Twitch” and “Why Buffy is the Best Show” rounded out the top five, each with over 200 users.
The rest of the top 10 posts all had over 100 users, and even the next ten are getting close to that.
Three years later, despite numerous updates and content improvements, none of these articles appears on page one. They bring a handful of traffic but nothing near their historic levels.
Direct Hits
Our second biggest traffic driver during this period was direct hits. I’m still not entirely sure what this encompasses. I know it’s a catch-all for traffic that Google isn’t sure how to record, but it also includes traffic from my subscribers via newsletters.
This month, a little over 1,000 users found us via direct hit, which is more than usual. I think some of our referral traffic is being recorded as direct hits.
Referrals
Nearly 1000 users found us from referral traffic during this period. Our articles on Financial Freedom and conducting a Brain Dump were both featured on MSN this month, so those were nice traffic boosts.
We also received a lot of traffic to our old post on cutting cable, which was linked on MSN last month. I guess they recycled some posts, and it went in front of fresh eyes—that was a pleasant surprise!
We’re also still getting a ton of traffic from Github. I’m incredibly thankful to whoever is posting my link there!
Social Media
We did better on social media this month, but that was mainly due to one post. Sometimes, a post goes viral and gets tons of shares, but those results aren’t typical.
Nearly 700 users found us via social media this month, about 200 more than last month.
Pinterest was our highest-performing social platform, which is quite nice because we didn’t do much on the platform. The best thing about Pinterest is that it can be passive for a short while.
However, you must remember that your views will decrease if you ignore the platform in the long term. We still had over 200 users from the platform, but it was a little less than last month.
This was our second month of inactivity on Pinterest, and it’s apparent in the declining views from the platform.
Our views from Twitter exploded this month! About 200 users visited us via the platform, most of whom enjoyed our article Female Twitch Streamers. The lovely ladies featured in that post shared it all over their timelines, and it was a huge success.
Sometimes, sharing the love with others will help you get more love in return.
I wasn’t focused on getting pageviews from Twitter. It was an exceptional circumstance. My main focus with that platform is still to network and engage with folks in many niches, and I think I’m doing that well. I’m doing great in the finance space and have also started cultivating many followers in gaming. I lack followers in the art community, so that might be my next area of focus.
My goal on Twitter is to have over 10K followers by the end of the year (which is about double what I have now). It’s a tough goal, but I think I can achieve it.
Twitter morphed into X a few months after this article was initially published, and it got much more challenging to grow a following unless you paid to elevate your content. We refuse.
One of the ladies I featured in the story on Twitch Streamers decided to post it on Facebook, and as a result, nearly 150 users visited us from the platform.
Those results aren’t typical, but it is awesome to see the power of sharing.
Content
One of my favorite things about Partners in Fire is the eclectic mix of content you can find here. Most blogs try hard to stick to one niche, but all the huge publications are niche-less, so why can’t a blog be?
I’ve embraced that idea over the past few months, and the content shows.
This month, we discussed productivity with a brain dump, mobile apps with our Lucktastic review, and how to make money playing video games. We also explored how to create a Discord server and a financial plan, two drastically different topics in different niches. But lots of folks are moving to Discord—you might be surprised how relevant that really is in every niche!
We removed the Lucktastic review, as it no longer serves our audience.
We rounded out the month with a post on the different painting techniques you should use to make a successful still-life painting and the epic round-up post featuring the best new female Twitch streamers.
Overall, it was a great month with a wide variety of content.
To Niche or Not to Niche is a great debate that constantly rages online. Many niche sites were decimated entirely in Google’s Helpful Content Updates (HCU), but others who focused on a very specific niche-niche didn’t see as big of losses.
We could change direction and niche down, but we don’t want to. We don’t want a third party to dictate how we run our site. That might mean traffic losses in the short term, but we think it will pay off in the long term (and I mean very long!).
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership?
SEO is still the name of the game. I’m working hard on building backlinks to my most important blog posts, and this should help show Google that Partners in Fire is a legitimate website and should be considered a big player.
That’s not as easy as it seems, though.
Link building isn’t easy. To achieve this hefty goal, I will need to do a lot of guest postings, syndications, forum lurking, and outreach! We need to earn the links, and that takes a ton of work. But we’re willing to put in the effort.
We no longer understand SEO. The Google HCUs of 2023 and 2024 changed the game, elevating major brands over independent publishers. No matter how good our content is, we can’t compete with names like Forbes or Reddit. Instead, we’re offering products, improving our content, building our email list, and focusing on social media—hoping to build a reputable brand.
Monetization
This month was a slow month for income. We only made a little over seven bucks in affiliate sales and fifty-seven dollars in ads, for a total of sixty-five bucks.
We spent far more than that with our blogging mastermind group and emails, so we are in the hole two hundred dollars this month. But as they say, making money takes money, and I’m hoping these investments will pay off soon.
Continued Growth
I’m investing so much money into the blog because I believe I can grow it into a successful business.
We will continue to invest in SEO and building our email list, and I think that if we continue to do this, we will see a huge spike in pageviews and revenue by July!