Blog Growth Strategies – Our Fifth Month Blogging

Melanie Allen, founder of Partners in Fire, kept an online log of her blog growth strategies for the first 50 months. She posted a monthly review of her publications, readership growth and decline, and the methods she implemented to grow the website. 

We’ve decided to keep these posts live for posterity but have edited them for grammar, clarity, and to add perspective from the lens of hindsight. 

Here’s Partners in Fire’s progress after five months. 

Readership

Our readership exploded in month five!  But only for a day.

We ended the month with a whopping three thousand users!  It’s a new record!

How Did We Get So Many Users?

Partners in Fire got featured on Rockstar Finance this month!  

Our article The Worst Financial Mistake of My Life was featured in Rockstar Finance’s April 10th Features! I’m unsure how it was chosen, and I didn’t even realize it at first! 

 I thought something strange was going on when I kept getting legitimate comments on the article. After some online sleuthing, I found my post on the Rock Star Finance main page! 

After a fantastic day of page views, we were also featured in The Financial Diet’s weekly round-up!  What an amazing week for Partners in Fire!

In 2018, every financial blogger dreamed of getting featured on Rockstar Finance. It was the biggest, most well-respected financial blog, with an immense readership. After numerous ownership changes, the website fell from grace. Although it’s still live, it’s nowhere near as powerful as it once was. 

Posting

I did an excellent job of sticking to my posting schedule this month. Unfortunately, I got sick during the last week and missed the last Thursday. I even had everything drafted up and ready to go. I didn’t have the energy to do all the social media posting and proofreading, so I decided to wait and post it next week. 

Sometimes life happens, and that’s ok.

Social Media

Most of our users this month came from Rockstar Finance and The Financial Diet, but we did pretty well with our social media platforms.

Our Pinterest referrals are picking up steam. We had 174 referrals from Pinterest this month, almost 100 more than last month!  It outpaced Twitter for the first time ever! The Tailwind account is starting to pay off. It hasn’t led to monetary conversion, but pageviews must come first.

With 96 users, Twitter was our second biggest social media referrer this month. We didn’t do as well on Facebook this month as last month, but I think that is because I skipped sharing a few of my posts on Facebook. 

I didn’t want anyone to take offense at things that weren’t meant to be offensive, so I decided not to share.

When deciding to share your life online, you must be aware of how others might take it. Many website owners choose pen names or remain anonymous to protect their personal lives. Some don’t mind sharing things on their personal social media platforms. However, when deciding how to present yourself, you must examine the pros and cons. Sharing your website on your personal Facebook page could create problems in your personal life, depending on what you choose to share. It’s an essential aspect of owning a website that many people don’t consider until it’s too late. 

Monetization

Affiliates

Though being featured on some significant Personal Finance sites led to many page views, it led to few affiliate clicks or sales. We did have a handful more clicks to Amazon than in previous months, but it did not generate any sales.

Our other affiliates, such as Flex Offers and Clicky Homes, still haven’t generated much interest. 

I refuse to sell products I don’t believe in, so I’ve greatly limited the types of campaigns I will run from Flex Offers. 

Clicky Homes is a great program, but it only helps a small subset of the population (realtors). I’m okay with both of those things, though. If people visit my site and click through to an affiliate, they will find it useful. That’s more important to me than making money.

Initially, Partners in Fire signed up for nearly every affiliate program they were eligible for. We didn’t consider our primary audience or their needs. We signed up and realized we could not drive traffic to the affiliate. 

Reducing the number of affiliates to only those that fit your brand is far better. We should never have partnered with Clicky Homes, as we aren’t a real estate website. Over the years, we also experimented with several other affiliate programs that we never should have considered. 

Ads

You’d think that with over 3000 pageviews, my ad revenue via Adsense would have increased. That was not the case. I think I only have Adsense ads on a few of my pages, and those were not the pages that got the views. 

According to Adsense, I only had about 300 page views last month, which wasn’t enough to make a dent in our earnings.

I don’t want to destroy any user experience I have, so I won’t change how my ads are laid out. However, if you are interested in monetizing via Google ads and notice a discrepancy between your Google Analytics pageviews and your Adsense pageviews, this may be worth looking into.

We absolutely did not understand how display ads worked during our first few years as an active website. To monetize with a display ad program, you must understand exactly how the ads are filled, where they are displayed, and whether they affect user experience. Every ad platform will be different. 

What’s Next?

I slayed my goal of 500 users for this period!  But I know I got super lucky with that wonderful feature, so I don’t think 3000 views every month is sustainable. 

Partners in Fire did get a few extra subscribers from that, though, and I’m getting better and better at Pinterest, so I think getting to 500 without any special features is doable this next month.

I am keeping my expectations low, though, because I have a lot going on in my personal life this month, and I know I won’t be able to stick to my posting schedule. I have SCUBA lessons next week, which will take a ton of time (but will be worth it!), and I have a girl’s trip to Vancouver coming up, so I won’t be posting at all that week.

 Can I get to 500 while skipping three posts?? That’s the goal, so we shall see!

Here, owner Melanie Allen highlights that Partners in Fire was very much a personal project at this point. She didn’t treat her website like a real business for many years. However, if you had asked her if she treated it like a business, she would have said, “Absolutely!”

The beauty of hindsight is that we can see that’s not the case. Businesses don’t close up shop because the owner wants to do something fun. 

Partners in Fire was also directionless. Was it a publishing platform, or was the owner attempting to become an influencer? Influencers generally share their personal lives, while publishing platforms stick to content. Allen tried to do both but didn’t excel at either. 

It wasn’t until she gave up on becoming an influencer and focused on digital publishing that Partners in Fire started to gain steam. It’s crucial to determine precisely what your business will be and focus on that if you want to be successful.