We did it! We achieved thirty thousand page views! And not only that, but Partners in Fire is Profitable! After 47 months of blogging, we’ve finally had a month where our income exceeded our expenditures and got the page views that we’ve been working so hard to achieve. We are well on our way to becoming a fully profitable, legitimate web resource.
Here’s where we stand after 47 months of blogging.
47th Month Update
Readership
We had an amazing spike in readership this month. We ended the month with 25K users, 26K sessions, and 35K pageviews. This was our best month ever at Partners in Fire, and we look forward to further growth.
How Did We Increase Our Traffic So Much?
We were well on the path to this explosion in growth at the end of last month, and the status is the same. I’m still not going to divulge the juicy details of exactly what we did to grow so fast – if you really want to know, you will join the SEO Hustle Insiders group that I’ve talked about every month for the past year and a half.
Not only did they show me this strategy and help me get started, but they also helped motivate me to keep it up, even when things didn’t seem to be working. And here I am, finally getting my page views up. I’m excited to see what the next few months will bring. I think that if I continue on with this strategy, I will make it into Ad thrive by January!
Content
This month, we shifted our focus away from original content and on to other things that are necessary to make the blog work. This includes marketing, link building, and the secret sauce strategy that we didn’t mention above.
We did, however, publish one great piece of original content this month. I had the opportunity to interview the CEO of YouNow, an amazing alternative to Twitch for streamers, about the future of online content creation in a world of Twitch breaches and Facebook outages. It’s one of the best and most informational pieces we’ve published in a while, so make sure you check it out!
The rest of the content we published was syndicated content from our partners. A great bonus of the group I’m in is that content is never hard to come by. Via the group I’m in, I have syndication agreements with a wide variety of amazing publishers. These posts are just as well-written, informative, and fun as my original posts, and having the ability to publish this great content ensures that we are able to cover a variety of Passion Fire topics every week.
Our other content strategy for this month was to refresh and republish some older pieces that needed a bit of a facelift. We enhanced numerous articles this period and republished them, ensuring that we stay current on all the trends and resources you’ve come to love from us.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership?
Our main goal now is to maintain our readership and grow enough to qualify for ad thrive. It took us 47 months to get to 30K page views, but I think getting from 30 to 100K will be far easier than getting to 30K was.
We have a lot of great strategies in place to help us improve our readership. Link building and partnering with other brands and websites are at the top of that list. Most of my focus this month went away from creating new content and was geared towards building these links and partnerships. Although writing content is my favorite part of running a blog, I understand that I need to sacrifice a little bit to ensure that my labor of love is not in vain and that people can find us on the interwebs!
Therefore, this month, and probably the next few months, I’m taking a break from writing a lot of fresh new content and focusing on these partnerships. I think it will pay off in the long run with improved organic search results.
Monetization
Partners in Fire was profitable this month! We made nearly $600 in revenue this month and spent a little over $400, which means we made nearly $200 in profits!
The majority of these gains were from our new ad network, Newor. About 80% of our revenue came from display ads during this period. The rest of the revenue was a mix of affiliate revenue from the various platforms that we are on and Etsy.
I realize that counting Etsy sales as blog revenue might be a stretch, but I count it for a few reasons. First, I never would have started an Etsy store if not for the blog. Second, I market my Etsy products with my blog resources – not only on the blog itself but through the social media accounts associated with it. I consider my digital products that are available on Etsy an extension of the blog. Perhaps one day I will host them on Partners in Fire, but until then, Etsy is a great option for selling digital products.
Continued Growth
Although we were a month late with our 30 thousand page views, we’re happy we achieved it. The focus now will be to continue to improve upon that, continue to grow, and work towards the 100 thousand pageviews needed to join Ad thrive. Our new goal is to achieve this by January, but if we can continue to explode our traffic in the next three months the way we have been in these past two months, that should be an easy goal to achieve.
Melanie launched Partners in Fire in 2017 to document her quest for financial independence with a mix of finance, fun, and solving the world’s problems. She’s self educated in personal finance and passionate about fighting systematic problems that prevent others from achieving their own financial goals. She also loves travel, anthropology, gaming and her cats.