Melanie Allen, founder of Partners in Fire, recorded her blog growth strategies for the first 50 months as a digital publisher. She posted a monthly review of her articles, readership growth and decline, and the mistakes she made while trying to grow the website.
We’ve decided to keep these posts live for posterity but have edited them for grammar, clarity and to add additional perspective from the advantage of hindsight.
Here’s Partners in Fire’s progress after eight months.
Blog Growth Strategies: 8 Months of Blogging
Partner’s in Fire is officially eight months old. Unfortunately, we were on hiatus for most of the month, and our blog statistics show it.
I thought month seven was terrible!
However, there’s a lot we can learn from the break. The disparity between performance from the start of the hiatus toward the end highlights how crucial it is to remain present while growing a blog.
Our readership declined every week during our time off.
The biggest lesson learned is that the longer you take off, the more your blog will suffer.
Your website may survive a two-week vacation, but if you take more time, be prepared for a drastic drop in readership.
Allen was attempting to be optimistic, but she was wrong here. Even two weeks off will hurt your readership, especially in the early stages. While building your blog, you should limit your time off as much as possible. Plan for vacations by scheduling articles and social media posts well in advance. Hire a VA to keep an eye on things while you’re away. The more you can mitigate your time off, the better off your website will be.
Let’s get to how we faired during our eighth month of blogging!
Posting
I only posted a little this period. I published three blog posts from June 27th through July 27th, all at the tail end of the period.
That’s a pretty epic failure on my part.
But, as I’ve said numerous times, you must take care of yourself first. If that means you can’t post for a month or two, so be it.
Blogging will be ready when you are!
While Allen is correct that blogging will be ready when you are, if you want to make a legitimate business, you have to show up. If you’re not prepared to show up yet, that’s fine, but you must accept that it will take longer to build a profitable website. You can’t expect to reap the rewards without putting in the work and making sacrifices.
Readership
Our readership took a massive hit due to our lack of posting.
The first post I published was on July 19, which only gave me seven days to improve my readership for the month. Obviously, that is not enough time.
Our readership dropped drastically during this period. It was our worst month since our first month! We only had 276 users for the period, 62 less than in month seven.
On the plus side, you can clearly see in the graph that our readership started to improve as soon as we started posting again. We only had one day with less than ten users during the week that we started posting again.
The lesson here is if you take a break, your readers will return when you do. And that’s super comforting.
The idea that your readers will return if you take a break only applies to fans, not casual readers. In the beginning, most of your traffic will come from that small following, but as you grow and expand, your readers will be a mix of engaged fans and casual readers who thought your content was interesting enough to click when they saw it in the SERPs or on social media.
If you grow through organic traffic, you can take a week or two off without impacting your ratings. However, search engines constantly update their algorithms. Those who rely strictly on organic traffic can see massive declines when an update hits.
Bloggers can’t put all their eggs in any one basket; they need to diversify traffic from the very start.
What’s Next?
Partners in Fire is trying to move on from this break that we took and get back some of the lost momentum. Seeing such a massive decrease in pageviews isn’t easy, but knowing it was mostly my fault helps.
We have a lot of exciting topics to write about moving forward, so we are hopeful that we will be able to stick to a regular posting schedule for the majority of month nine. Month 10 will be rough, because I have a week-long trip to Germany planned, so I’ll probably skip at least four blog posts that month. But it will be interesting to see how taking two weeks off will compare to taking six weeks off.
Moving forward, we will focus more on Instagram, Facebook, and monetization. Any tips to help us in those three areas would be greatly appreciated!
It’s clear that Allen is still floating between digital publisher and influencer. She seeks comments from her community, focuses on social media, and overshares about her personal life.
Many bloggers have found success through the personal branding route, but you must decide how you want to grow before starting. Allen did not; she swayed back and forth, an indecision that limited Partners in Fire’s growth in the early years.