Partners in Fire published monthly updates highlighting wins, losses, and growth for the first 50 months as an online publisher.
We decided to keep these old articles for posterity and help new bloggers understand what it takes to grow and maintain a website.
Here’s our 44th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to provide additional context with the benefit of hindsight.
44th Month Update
They say that the summer is the worst time of the year for blog traffic and that July is typically the worst month of the slump.
Everyone is out vacationing, enjoying the outdoors, the warmth, and the long summer days, and nobody is inside reading blogs. That checks out because our 44th month left much to be desired.
It wasn’t all bad. We remained consistent with last month, and while we didn’t quite reach 10K pageviews, we were pretty close!
If this is a “summer slump,” I can’t wait to see what the fall will bring!
Readership
We averaged about two hundred users daily during this period, with only a handful of days under that.
Most of the low points were weekends, supporting the theory that summer is causing the pageview slump more than any algorithm change.
Traffic Drivers
Organic Search
Organic traffic accounted for just over half of our total traffic during this period. A little over four thousand users found us organically through search engines.
We’ve been putting much work into link building, press releases, and SEO, but we also understand it’s a long-term game.
Google can take anywhere from 6 to 18 months to start ranking new posts, so we may not see any gains from the improvements we’ve been making today for quite some time.
That’s okay, though, as we started this process nearly a year ago.
The posts we wrote with SEO in mind last year are finally gaining some traction, and I believe we will see an explosion of organic traffic in the next few months.
With changes in Google’s Helpful Content algorithm update (HCU) in 2023/2024, we lost much of the ranking we had gained over this period.
Top Pages
Our top five pages have remained unchanged. How to Become a Twitch Affiliate, Reaching Coast Fire, FU Money, How to Gain Twitter Followers, and Alternatives to Twitch remain the top five.
All these posts are over a year old.
One interesting exception to this rule is our number 8 organic traffic driver, Discord Emotes. We published this post in the spring, only four short months ago, and it’s already starting to rank.
The fast ranking shows that although, in general, it will take over a year, you never know. Sometimes, you write a spectacular post that Google can’t help but rank. Hopefully, this post will shoot up to the top of page one in the coming months, and we’ll finally have a new champion driver of traffic!
Other posts are also starting to pick up steam. Our posts on Capture Cards, Generational Wealth, and How to Avoid Being Taken Advantage of as a Female Breadwinner are all in the top 20 and written within the last 12 months.
We were getting better and better at writing content with SEO in mind. However, the HCUs claimed to elevate “helpful” content; they often elevated big brands at the expense of small, independent publishers.
We lost a lot of rankings in 2023/2024.
Our focus morphed, and we began a massive content review, which helped us realize our content wasn’t as useful and engaging as we thought. We’ve been updating our older posts to improve their quality.
Direct Hits
Over 1500 users found us directly this month, a little less than last month. Although it’s impossible to determine exactly where this traffic is coming from, it’s a mix of email subscribers, people typing our URL directly into Google, and random links that Google doesn’t record.
You could be one of them by subscribing to our email list!
Referral Traffic
Our referral traffic remained consistent, but our article about honoring our grandmothers received the most this month, as it was featured on All-Star Money and Campfire Finance.
I’m so glad the article resonated with people the way it did. Sharing my grandmother’s story and promoting women’s rights here is one small way I can honor her.
I hope the post made her proud.
GitHub continues to drive some traffic, as does MSN and a handful of other sites. I love seeing referral traffic because links to Partners in Fire are all over the web!
Social Media
We did not do well on social media this month, and it wasn’t even for lack of trying. Only 350 users found us from all of our social channels combined.
I did better on Pinterest by consistently pinning until the last week of the month. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to increase traffic from the platform, and traffic declined despite the effort.
Pinterest’s algorithm constantly changes, making the platform seem like a confusing free-for-all where some folks get lucky and some don’t.
However, the overall decline in traffic could be due to the traditional July slump. At its core, Pinterest is a search engine, so the lower traffic during this period could easily be due to fewer people searching.
We should have a better idea of whether that’s true come fall.
I plan to keep trying on the platform by pinning consistently, at least a few times weekly. Let’s see if this helps increase my traffic from the platform.
It took another two or so years to post consistently on Pinterest. We finally see results after about a year of commitment to the platform.
Twitter and Facebook
Twitter and Facebook made up the rest of my social media traffic (most of it anyway; some other sites sent onesies and twosies). I do not see much traffic from either channel, but I’m also not focusing on using either for traffic, I see any pageviews from either site as a bonus.
I increased my reach on Facebook this period by running a Facebook ad to get page likes.
While the added resulted in 50 additional likes, it did not result in traffic. While I did get about 50 more likes, it did not result in a traffic increase. In fact, I had the same amount of traffic from Facebook in July as I did in June. Still, the experiment of running a Facebook ad was worthwhile. I learned that Facebook ads for page likes aren’t worth the money, so I won’t invest in those anymore.
We ran another Facebook ad for page likes at the end of 2024, which resulted in 90 additional likes. We ran this campaign for branding rather than traffic, as we’re hoping that increasing our reach on social media will improve our brand recognition.
Twitter is still a great networking tool. I’ve made many connections on the platform, leading to guest posts, collaboration opportunities, and interview requests. I use the platform for this, and any traffic I get from it is a bonus.
I no longer use Twitter (now X) as a marketing tool, as the changes made it impossible to connect with like-minded people.
Content
We published a ton of fantastic content this month. I published (mainly) all my own posts again, and they were killer!
We started with an epic post on How to Find Your Passion because finding your passion is the first step to achieving a passion-fire lifestyle. This post also heavily promotes our excellent Etsy product, the How to Find Your Passions Worksheet Bundle.
We also host the product in our store.
Next, we published a post on Creative Writing Prompts, which ties into The Arts, a staple of Passion Fire. We hope to drive folks to our Esty store via this article, as we’ve created a few genre-specific creative writing prompts, which are available for sale on Etsy.
We also threw in some fun this period, with posts on the best retro games, deep-sea fishing, and creative hobbies to pursue. Almost everyone can find something they enjoy in one of these three articles.
We rounded out the month with an article on Abstract Art for Sale, which showcases some of my own work and helps people find the pieces that work best for them, and a post on the different types of journals available to supplement our journaling content.
Overall, it was an epic month with a wide variety of killer content.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership?
We are still working hard on SEO to improve our readership. Link building continues to be one of our biggest priorities. This month, we are leaning heavily into HARO to try to score links from some more prominent publications, but those are difficult to come by.
One of the best things I ever did to help improve my SEO game was to join the Money Mix Insider’s SEO Hustle program. Not only do they offer a mastermind group dedicated to helping with every part of the blogging journey, but they also offer some great SEO tools to help you with on-page SEO and help you get your content syndicated on other websites.
It’s been such a great experience and has helped me immensely.
Monetization
We made nearly $200 this month but spent over $500, so we are in the hole for $350.
I believe it takes money to make money, and this month’s costs were worthwhile for future growth (except the seventy dollars in Facebook ads – worth it for the experiment, but not for growth!).
We almost made enough to cover our recurring costs of only $210. I invested a little more money this period to publish a press release on our new post and Etsy product, How to Find Your Passion. The hope was that this press release would help SEO on both the post and the product and drive sales to the Etsy store.
Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out this month, but we all know SEO is a long-haul game, and I’m hoping that post will start ranking in 6 months rather than 18 months.
We made money in various ways. This period saw a tiny increase in ad revenue, and we also made a few affiliate sales and sold a few copies of our creative writing prompts.
It seems weird to include Etsy sales with blog revenue, and I often side-eyed bloggers who included seemingly unrelated income in their income reports in the past. However, I would never have created an Etsy store if it weren’t for my blog, and I use it to drive traffic to the store.
These are digital products I’ve created because of my blog, and I’m simply hosting them on Etsy for sale. So, in my opinion, it counts as blog income!
We now host them all on our website, so it’s even more intertwined.
Continued Growth
With all the awesome content and SEO work we are doing, I think we can get 30K pageviews in September. I know it’s only two months away, but the summer slump will be over, leading to a natural increase, and these two months of SEO hustling will give Partners in Fire the boost it needs.
I’m up for the challenge and love that you’re along for the ride!
Congrats on the traffic! Looks like all your hard work is paying off!