Partners in Fire published monthly growth updates for the first 50 months as an active website. We decided to keep these old articles for posterity and to help other bloggers gain a better appreciation of the journey.
Here’s our 47th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add a little context with the benefit of hindsight.
47th Month Update
After 47 months of toil, we finally achieved thirty thousand pageviews!
And not only that, but we also made a profit! We finally had a month where our income exceeded our expenditures and we achieved our pageview goals.
We are well on our way to becoming a fully profitable, legitimate web resource.
Here’s where we stand after 47 months of blogging.
Readership
We had our best month ever at Partners in Fire, ending the period with 25K users, 26K sessions, and 35K pageviews.
How Did We Increase Our Traffic So Much?
We were 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. If I continue with this strategy, I should make it into Adthrive by January!
The “secret” was web stories, which drove loads of traffic to everyone who used them for six months to a year. The going was good for a while, but like many things in blogging, the good times didn’t last.
Content
We shifted our focus away from original content during this period to focus on crucial activities to help grow the blog. The month was all about marketing, link building, and web stories.
However, we still published one great piece of original content, an interview with the CEO of YouNow, one of the fastest-growing Twitch alternatives.
YouNow now looks more like Only Fans than a streaming platform, and we’ve since removed the interview.
We filled in the rest of our content with syndications from our partners. With the Insiders, I have access to a wide range of great content from publishing partners in various niches. These pieces are well-written and informative and allow me to cover a wider range of topics every week.
Though we still think content syndication is a great strategy for sharing information and building partnerships, we no longer participate as much. We prefer to write our own.
Since I wasn’t spending as much time writing original content this month, I took the opportunity to refresh and republish some older pieces that needed a facelift. We enhanced many articles to ensure they still provide accurate information and to improve the user experience.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership?
Our current goal is to maintain our readership and grow enough to qualify for Adthrive. It took us 47 months to get to 30K page views, but I think getting from 30 to 100K will be far easier.
We never made it to Adthrive, but we did get into Mediavine, and we’re still with them today.
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 the list. Most of my focus this month went away from creating new content and was geared toward 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
For the first time ever, 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 about $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 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 on Etsy an extension of Partners in Fire. Perhaps one day I will host them on Partners in Fire, but until then, Etsy is a great option for selling digital products.
It took me three years, but I finally opened a shop on Partners in Fire and host my digital products there. They’re also still available on Etsy.
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 Adthrive.
We hope to achieve it by January. If we can continue to explode our traffic in the next three months the way we have been in these past two months, it should be pretty easy!
Web stories brought us wonderful growth for about six months, then they stopped working. It did help us get into Mediavine though, and for that, we’re forever grateful.