Partners in Fire published monthly reviews of their growth for the first fifty months as an online publication. We decided to keep these articles for posterity and to help new bloggers navigate their own journeys.
Here’s our 36th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add extra context with the benefit of hindsight.
36th Month Update
Our 36th month of blogging marked our third month in a row with over ten thousand page views. We made a few changes this month but continued with many of the processes we’ve been working on previously, so I’m excited about the consistency but looking forward to continued growth.
Readership
We had a handful of days this month with under 200 users, all at the beginning of the period. I was worried during the first week—it looked like our winning streak was coming to a halt and that our viewership was declining.
Thankfully, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. We had a few rough days, then scored an epic win and had a fantastic month.
Traffic Drivers
Organic Search
Organic search still tops our list of traffic sources.
I’m not going to lie; I’m getting impatient while waiting for the organic growth explosion. While I’m thankful for the consistent numbers, I’m ready to see some increases from all the work I’ve been putting in.
Top Pages
The top page is still “How to be a Twitch Affiliate,” and “How to get Twitter Followers” is still number two, but “Reaching Coast Fire” made a surprise surge to third place this month. “How Do Twitch Affiliates Make Money” and “Buffy is the Greatest Show” rounded out the top five.
All five top articles received over 200 users during this period.
One fascinating win for this month is that our post “FU Money” made its first appearance in the top 10.
It’s one of the first articles we wrote using our fancy new SEO tools, and it’s exciting to see it appear in the SERPs.
Does this mean the other posts we wrote with SEO in mind will be following in its footsteps? Only time will tell, but I hope the answer is yes.
Referrals
A surprising feature on MSN marked our biggest win of the month. The feature resulted in over 1000 pageviews via referral traffic and contributed significantly to the 10K pageviews for the month.
MSN showcased our article “How to Change your Life,” which led to a ton of pageviews for posts linking to it, like “Self-Care Sunday” and “Adult Online Education.”
It was my first time being featured in such a mainstream publication.
Direct Hits
During our 36th month, nearly 1500 users came to us via direct hit, which wasn’t as many as last time but is still pretty awesome.
Many of these direct hits are from 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, money advice, gaming info, and art ideas straight to your inbox?
Social Media
Our social media reach declined slightly during this period, but it wasn’t drastic, and I expect slight variations from month to month.
Compared to last month, we had about a hundred fewer viewers from all social media channels combined. A little under 600 users found us via our social networks.
About 250 users found us on Pinterest this month, representing our most significant decline.
Our Pinterest stats were all over the place this month, with over 20 users on some days and less than two on others.
I wonder if we get more engagement from the platform on the days we actively pin and see falloffs on the days we don’t. I’ll have to record the days I pin in the future to see if this might be the case.
We never did that.
Unfortunately, I still haven’t had time to finish the fantastic Pinterest Ninja course. Since I implemented the few strategies I learned, I have increased our reach on the platform by over 100 visitors each month.
I’m confident I will find time for that this month, and I expect to see a surge in traffic when I implement all the strategies.
Ninety users found us on Twitter this month, which is a little more than last, but still not much. I’m starting to learn, though, that Twitter isn’t the best tool for driving traffic. It’s excellent for networking, building an audience, and engaging with like-minded folks, but it’s not the best for traffic.
Twitter, like most social platforms, wants to keep users on it. The algorithm devalues posts with links. Now, with X, the platform devalues users who don’t pay.
Still, I love Twitter, and I try to be active on it. I made some of my best virtual friends there, and if it weren’t for the platform, I would never have learned about the SEO Hustle group I’m in, which showed me how to attract users from Google.
I loved Twitter – I hate X. The platform has changed so much that it’s hardly worth my time. I use Revive Old Posts to automatically publish older articles on the platform and get a handful of traffic.
It’s no longer relevant as a networking platform.
Our reach on Facebook was consistent with last month, all due to the Revive Old Posts plug-in.
Nearly 70 users visited us from the platform, most of whom came when old posts were randomly published. It’s cool that some of my old stuff is getting a bit of fresh engagement.
The only problem is that some of my old stuff is…not good. But that’s okay. We learn and grow with every post.
We’ve been working tirelessly to update old content so that the website doesn’t have any “not good” articles. We’re about halfway through.
Content
We published a variety of excellent content this month, spanning different niches.
Many people say that to be a successful blogger, you must pick a niche and stick to it, but I tried that for a long time (as a money blogger), and it didn’t work. I was bored, and since it was a YMYL (your money, your life) topic, it was hard to rank.
We decided to change things up this month.
We are shifting to focus on a passion-fire perspective. It’s not a massive change—we’ve already incorporated gaming and travel into the blog—but this month, we’ve added art and changed our organization structure to better align with what we write about.
Our approach of “niching up” rather than “niching down” helped us grow for a long time, but we lost many rankings during Google’s HCU disaster and beyond. Thankfully, we didn’t receive a ban, and we’re slowly rebuilding those lost rankings.
Back to the Content
Our content ran the gambit this month. Some articles focused on SEO, while others were written for Pinterest engagement. We wrote a few with monetization in mind, but others were just for fun.
We started with an article on alternatives to cable and then gave some excellent wellness information on setting intentions and living in survival mode.
Next, we went back to our financial roots with 22 small ways to save and wrote a fun post about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which does relate to life and finance, I promise!).
We tip-toed into the world of art blogging with a post relating painting to a side hustle, and we plan to post more art-related content regularly.
Of course, we had to discuss thankfulness on a holiday dedicated to it, and we rounded out the month with two epic gift guides, one for gamers and one for artists.
All in all, it was a fun and unique mix of content!
We’ve since updated all those articles, except for painting as a side hustle, which we removed.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership
For the past few months, we’ve been stagnant at about 10K pageviews, and our biggest goal is to move beyond that.
To do that, we’re focusing heavily on SEO. Our hard work is finally starting to show (with our post on FU money slowly creeping up the ranks).
Unfortunately, SEO takes time. Articles take anywhere from six to eighteen months to appear at the top of Google, so it can be disheartening to do all this hard work and not see results for such a long time.
Patience is definitely vital.
I wrote FU Money in August, and it’s now moving. That was the first month I seriously started writing for SEO, and it’s just now making a dent. I’m hopeful that I will see a lot more movement in the coming months when the posts I wrote after that start to rank.
In addition, branching into art and other passion-fire topics helps improve our readership. We’ve just explored the abundance of fascinating topics available and will continue to do so.
We’ve started with gaming and art and have already seen some success. We hope this new organization and branching out will improve our readership in the long run.
Diving into the Passion Fire topics did improve our readership. However, we also did a great job keeping everything organized and related. We invented Passion Fire, then decided which topics were related, and focused our website on those. So technically, we’re still “niche,” but we set the rules of what that “nice” is.
Monetization
We made more money this month than last, which is good because we are seeing consistent growth in this arena. It’s still not enough to quit the full-time job, but hey, if we grow exponentially, it will soon!
It’s been about three years since we first published this article, and we’re still not making a full-time income.
Ads
$84.28
Our ad revenue grew by about twenty bucks during our 36th month, which is better than nothing.
I made one significant change that helped us earn more ad revenue. One of my top-performing articles had no ads, so I added one.
It also helps that this time of year always sees increased RPMs, but I can’t count on that moving forward.
Affiliates
$172.82
We did a lot better on affiliate sales this month, and it accounted for a considerable portion of our monthly revenue.
We sold some books on Bookshop, made a handful of Amazon sales, and received a commission for getting more folks to join our blogging group.
One cool thing about these affiliate sales is that some were from posts we wrote specifically for it. Making sales on items we believe in and actively promote is a wonderful feeling.
Gross earnings: $257.10
Expenses:
Money Mix Insiders SEO Hustle – $170
Total expenses: $170
We made $87 this month, which is massive growth over the last month, even with the slight increase in price for the insiders!
This month, I decided to upgrade to the full SEO Hustle option of the Insiders group, which gives me full access to MOZ and other SEO tools.
Getting this stuff with the group means I get it at an incredible discount (MOZ alone is a hundred bucks a month!), and I also get to be in the mastermind group that helps everyone with their SEO goals. It’s well worth the price.
I would still be earning $0 in revenue and having no page views without the group’s guidance and direction.
Continued Growth
Partners in Fire is continuing to grow and evolve. All the work we are putting in now will pay off in the not-too-distant future. I’m excited to see where it takes us!
Thanks for sharing your growth details! Congrats on getting on MSN! That is exciting!
What do you think is your most powerful piece of SEO insight? I am looking to improve my SEO but am reluctant to invest since my blog has yet to break even…. 😅
You’re welcome! I sent you an email with my best ideas – I hope that helped!