Partners in Fire published monthly growth updates for the first 50 months as an active publisher. We decided to keep these old articles for posterity, and to help new bloggers find their path with a realistic idea of what growing a website takes.
Here’s our 49th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to provide additional context with the benefit of hindsight.
49th Month Update
We saw some ups and downs during this period. Although we miraculously pulled off 30K page views, it was very touch and go for a while. A strong finish helped us achieve our goals this month, and we hope this strength continues for a formidable start to the new year!
Readership
Our readership this month was consistent with the past few months. We’ve achieved approximately thirty thousand page views for three months now, which is amazing, but we’re ready to move on and see even more gains!
Why Was This Month Touch and Go?
Unfortunately, we struggled with Google indexing problems for most of the month. The issues started at the end of November, and we didn’t resolve them until late December.
Our content wasn’t indexed correctly, resulting in fewer page views.
Despite those problems, we still averaged about 500 page views per day, which would be approximately 15000 per month. That’s nothing to be upset about, considering we struggled to get to 10K pageviews all summer!
Fortunately, we fixed the problem and our pageviews exploded during the last week of the month!
How Did We Fix the Indexing Issues?
It took us a while to determine the root cause of the problem, but as it turned out, we had an incorrect setting in our Rankmath SEO plugin and needed to upload a new site map to Google Search Console. In addition, we did some work on our site speed and core web vitals. These may not have contributed to the indexing problem, but it’s always a good idea to follow best practices and make your site as user-friendly as possible.
In addition, Google itself struggled to index websites on a broad scale, resulting in delays across the web, which could have contributed to our problems.
We fixed the things within our control and the problem was eventually resolved.
How Are We Getting So Much Traffic?
After we fixed our indexing issues, our traffic picked up for the rest of the month. By the end of the month, we were welcoming 1500-2000 users a day!
I’m still not going to share exactly how we keep getting these amazing results. You can join the TMM insiders SEO Hustle program for just a dollar a month to find out!
The Insiders showed me the strategy, motivated me to keep going with it, and even offered discounted rates for a freelancer to help other members with it (if they don’t have time to do it themselves). There’s a lot to be said for crowdsourcing expensive blogging items, and that’s just one bonus of the group.
This strategy accounted for approximately 80% of our traffic this period, while organic traffic accounted for the other 20%.
As we reported in our other updated articles, we gained so much traffic using Google Webstories. We no longer use them, as it seems the trend has passed. I no longer even see web stories from other sites in my Google Discover tab.
SEO Improvements
Our SEO improvements are finally starting to pay off. One of our most important posts is sitting at position 3 on Google, while the rest of our crucial articles continue to move up the rankings.
Unfortunately, these moves haven’t led to a huge increase in traffic just yet, but I attribute some of that to the holiday season and the fact that nothing is in position one.
Hopefully, we will move up even further in January and see real gains in organic traffic based on all the SEO work we’ve been putting in.
Although we worked diligently on SEO improvements for years and achieved results for a short period, the Helpful Content Updates (HCU) of 2023/2024 destroyed any growth we worked so hard to achieve.
The updates claimed to elevate “helpful” content, but in reality, forums like Reddit and huge corporations like Forbes dominated the search results, whether the content was helpful or not.
However, there is a silver lining. The updates forced us to re-examine our content, and we realized some left a lot to be desired. We’ve since been focusing heavily on revamping all our content to ensure it meets our audience’s needs.
Content
Although our main focus this month continues to be SEO improvements and link building, we still published a good amount of fresh, original content.
We are, however, shifting our process slightly, and rather than writing about anything and everything, are focusing on building content clusters around our important content.
With that in mind, we published an article on the MEE6 Discord bot to support all of our content on Discord, a post on the best apps that pay you to play video games to support our content on getting paid to game, and a journalistic style piece on the issues between Streamlabs and OBS, to support our streaming content.
Moving forward, most of the fresh content will be aligned more easily into these clusters, and we are developing a full content plan to determine how our different pieces and niches fit together.
Although we will still write about our favorite Passion Fire topics, we will be more methodical and ensure our content fits with our goals.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership?
Our goal is clear. We need 100 thousand pageviews to get into Adthrive. Getting there is the hard part but we are employing a variety of strategies to help.
Link building is still the number one strategy for improving our organic rankings. This has been and will continue to be, a top priority. We’ve been reaching out to brands for guest posting, syndication, and collaborations to help achieve this goal.
Unfortunately, email outreach is not very successful. Over the course of the last few months, I’ve cold-emailed about 100 different websites of varying sizes and have been unsuccessful in even getting a response (other than the opportunity for a paid link placement, which Google generally doesn’t like). We will have to look at other strategies for achieving this goal, such as social media and LinkedIn.
As mentioned above, we will continue building content clusters to support our important posts. We believe this will help Google see us as an authority on these important topics, and it will give us the opportunity to offer the content for syndication.
Monetization
Partners in Fire made $600 in revenue this month. About 2/3 of this was via display ads through the ad network Newor, and the final third was a variety of affiliate sales.
We spent about half of that this month running the blog (hosting, SEO Hustle Membership, Etsy Fees, Convert Kit, etc.) but that means we made close to $300 in profits! That’s amazing!!
This is the first month we can truly say that we’re profitable, but I think that as we learn and continue to grow, the trend will continue.
Soon we will be making $500, $1000, and even $2000 in monthly profits!
We had a few great years where profits soared, but now we’re back in the red, trying to rebuild. Google giveth, and Google taketh away.
Continued Growth
We will push hard to get the 100K pageviews we need for Adthrive in January. I know it’s a long shot because we need to improve by 60K pageviews, but I think the strategies we have developed in the past 2-3 months will continue to improve, and they will help us achieve our goals.
We never reached 100K pageviews, but we did get enough to join Mediavine, which in my opinion, is a superior ad network.