Our 35th month blogging proved that the ten thousand pageviews we received during month 34 wasn’t a fluke! This is our second month in a row with so many pageviews! Find out how we plan to keep improving from here.
35th Month Update
Readership
We had over 200 users on all but three days this period. Two were Saturdays, and the other was the Friday before Halloween (but we were so close that day – 197!). Our lowest day this period was the Saturday before Indigenous People’s Day, but I can imagine that a lot of people were travelling and getting outside on the last nice holiday weekend of the year.
This month brought the same random spikes as last month. Though I’m still skeptical that these spikes are caused by bots rather then real people, I’ll take the extra pageviews since they push me over that ten thousand mark.
Traffic Drivers
Organic Search
We are still getting a ton of traffic via organic search. Unfortunately, we didn’t see the exponential growth that we’d like to see. We only had a handful more users finding us via organic search this month than last month, even with all the post updates.
Still, small growth beats no growth, and I’ll take it. I’m thankful that we were able to do so well with all the indexing errors Google reported over the past few months. So far, only one of my posts was affected, and it was only affected after I tried to update it for SEO.
I updated an old travel post “How to Avoid Pickpockets” because it was in position 98 or something ridiculous in Google Search Console. I did my thing, changed the keyword, added relevant information, turned it into an epic post, and guess what? Google decided to de-index it. And with all the issues they’ve been having, they took away the option to request indexing. This amazing rewritten post is just hanging out not being seen by anyone. Good times. Hopefully whatever is going on with Google will be resolved soon, and I’ll be able to request re-indexing of the post.
Top Pages
I’m sure you can all guess what the top post via organic traffic was again this month. Fifty percent of our organic traffic went to “How to be a Twitch Affiliate in 30 Days”. It’s great that we are getting a ton of traffic to that post, but I’m still trying hard to diversify so as to not put all our eggs in that basket.
Our old post on Twitter strategies is still in the number two spot with over 400 users, and rounding up the top five were Buffy is the Greatest Show, How Do Twitch Affiliates Make Money, and Pet Regret. These are the same top five as last time, but the cool thing is they all had more entrances than last month. During that period, they all had between 130 and 160, but this month they were all over 200! I’ll take that growth!
We had more entrances for pretty much every post in the top ten this month. They all had over 100 users, which is awesome considering we were struggling to get to 80 with some of them last month. Our page two is still improving as well, with half the posts getting over 50 users, and the final five working hard to get to that 50 mark. If this trend continues, I’ll be getting over 50 users a month on 30 of my top posts! That would be a pretty epic milestone.
Direct Hits
We had ton of users find Partners in Fire via direct hits this month – nearly 2000! I’m sure some of these are our wonderful subscribers – if you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, what are you waiting for? Where else will you get blog strategies, travel tips, finance tips, and gaming advice straight to your inbox?
Not all of the users via direct hit are from subscribers. I’m certain that some referral traffic is being recorded as a direct hit. We are the top-rated FIRE blog on Wealthtender at the moment (be sure to leave us a review to keep us there!) but I don’t see any referrals from them. I’m sure we’re getting a few, and those are probably counting as direct hits.
Social Media
We saw a little bit of growth in our traffic from social media this month. We had nearly 700 users find us via all the social channels combined, which is a pretty nice improvement from the 400 we’ve been getting these past few months.
The biggest growth in social media came from Pinterest. We had over 350 users coming to us from Pinterest this month, a huge improvement from last month!
The main reason we were able to improve our reach on Pinterest is due to the Pinterest Ninja Course. I still haven’t finished the course (life gets in the way unfortunately) but we doubled our Pinterest reach in one month by implementing the tools taught in just the first third of the class. That’s pretty epic.
If you are struggling to grow your reach on Pinterest, I highly recommend this course. It’s been incredibly helpful for me in boosting my performance on the platform. And maybe I’ll find time to finish it this month!
We only had about 80 users from Twitter this month, which is weird considering our plug in, Revive Old Posts, was working for the entire period.
I did not do a good job of interacting on Twitter this month. I was tired, and unfortunately social media is one of the many things that fell to the wayside. It’s one of those things where you need to be constantly interacting, and if you don’t your views interactions and influence will suffer.
But, sometimes that’s okay. It’s okay to take a break from social media, and it’s okay to not be able to put 100% into everything all the time. As we learned from a post I wrote last month, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
We saw another huge improvement on Facebook this month. We went from 20 to nearly 70! Most of these users are because we got the plugin, Revive Old Posts, working properly. This goes to show that you can actually get traffic from a social media platform if you post to it regularly. Amazing, isn’t it?
Referrals
We got a ton of referral traffic this month from a variety of sources. All the link building I’ve been doing seems to be paying off! But the top referral traffic source was from Personal Finance Blogs – my post on Money Conversations got featured there early in the month, and they sent us a handful of traffic.
The rest of my referral traffic was from a ton of different sources, but mostly blogs where I did a guest post awhile back or published a syndication on. This type of stuff really pays dividends, not only is it great for SEO, but you can get some nice traffic from it eventually as well.
Content
We are still pumping out some amazing content. The month started with a tribute to John Lennon near what would have been his 80th birthday. Although he’s not traditionally associated with the FIRE movement, I think some of his music and ideas actually did help influence me to pursue it. We also published a post with 18 epic ideas for fall fun to help you and your family have a great time before the weather gets cold, and a few motivational pieces about redefining success, improving your life, and resources to help you be more productive.
The last post we wrote this month was for our gamer friends, or for anyone who might be interested in pursuing gaming as a side hustle. We answered the all-important question: how much can you make? This post is a great compliment to our other posts surrounding gaming as a side hustle, like how to become an affiliate and how to make money as an affiliate.
Guest Posts
We rounded out the month with two guest posts. The first was from a surprising source – one of my streamer friends wanted to write a post for me on broadcasting lessons. I never thought that becoming a streamer and making friends in this community would lead to awesome content for Partners in Fire, but here we are. The post author, who goes by Doughz1lla on Twitch, takes these lessons to heart, and his streams are always engaging and entertaining. If you are looking for a new streamer to follow or just getting your feet wet with Twitch, he should be at the top of your list.
The final post was a guest post from Max at the Free Times. He wrote an epic post on ways to pay for an MBA. If you are interested in getting one but unsure of how to pay for it, check that one out for some great advice.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership
Our readership remained stagnant from last month – but hey I’ll definitely take stagnant at 10000 pageviews over stagnant at 2000! Still, we’re looking to grow.
One of my goals this month will be to update and improve more of my old travel content. I did update 3 posts in October, but so far they haven’t moved as far up in the rankings as I’d hoped. These things take time, so I hope to see the improvements over the next few months.
Writing specifically for SEO is another thing that we’ve been focusing on. We’re doing keyword research for almost every post and choosing content based on what can rank. It does take a long time to see results from this, especially with newer posts, so I’m hoping we will start seeing it around January, which is about six months from when we started with this new method of posting.
Monetization
I thought that once you got to 10 thousand pageviews, the money would just start flowing. That is clearly incorrect. Monetization is difficult, but I’m still trying a bunch of things to crack that nut. We did make a tiny bit more money this month, but it’s definitely not enough to support us job free yet.
Ads
$63.65
Our ad revenue remained stagnant this month when compared to last month. That makes sense considering we had about the same amount of page views. I am slowly phasing out one of the ad networks. This means I’m not including their ads in any new posts, and every time I update a post, I’m deleting their ad and replacing it with the new network. This is going to take a few months, so I’ll take the money while the ads are in my old posts.
Affiliates
$68.27
We made a handful of affiliate sales this month, and that accounted for a little over half of our revenue. I wrote a lot of posts this month and last specific to affiliate sales with the hope that they will eventually rank on Google. The goal is to write one or two posts each month with the intention of getting affiliate sales, but that also offer great value to the reader. Hopefully my posts with affiliate links have accomplished that.
Gross earnings: $131.92
Expenses:
Money Mix Insiders – $120
Total expenses: $120
I actually made money this month!! After subtracting my one expense, the Money Mix Insiders, from my earnings, I made a little over 11 bucks. This includes hosting as well, because a big advantage of joining the Insiders is that hosting on their high-speed server is included. This means my only blog expenses are the Insiders and the domain name registration, which is 12 bucks a year.
The truth is, joining the Money Mix Insiders has been worth every penny. I never would have made any money blogging without them. They taught me SEO tips, gave me access to resources I didn’t even know existed, and helped me with a back-link building strategy. My domain authority skyrocketed since joining, and my pageviews are obviously increasing as well. The last thing that needs to improve is my monetization. I think with all the work I’m doing, that will come in the next few months.
Continued Growth
We aren’t exactly where we wanted to be at the end of this month, but that’s okay. We are taking the lessons learned these past few months and applying them to both new posts and old. I really thing that with the help of the Insiders, we will continue to grow, and will be a profitable blog in a matter of months. I look forward to sharing our continued growth with all of you!
Congratulations on another month of 10K+ page views, Melanie! And thanks for the Wealthtender shout out! 😀 We’re working every day to increase traffic as well and to drive referrals to your site and other featured blogs.
In fact, our still relatively new Guide to Top Financial Independence and FIRE blogs is already ranking 14th for keyword ‘financial independence blogs’ which isn’t bad for how new it is, but we’re going to keep focused on it until it ranks on page 1 and drives traffic to featured FIRE blogs, of which, as you noted, yours is at the top!
Keep up the great work and thanks for your support!