Partners in Fire posted monthly updates tracking growth for the first 50 months as an online publication. We decided to keep these updates for posterity, and to help newer bloggers understand the truth about building a website.
Here is our 28th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to provide a little extra context with the benefit of hindsight.
28th Month Update
It’s getting harder and harder to remember which month of blogging I’m in. It’s like forgetting how old you are once you hit your thirties.
The months and years start to blend together, and it’s hard to remember exactly how long you’ve been at it. Or that just might be my social distancing talking.
Either way, our 28th month of blogging aligned with previous months. I’ll take the consistency over massive traffic drops.
Readership
Our readership was down slightly during our 28th month compared to the previous month, especially considering February is a shorter month.
Readership was solid during the first few weeks of the month, but it started to decline. Our average number of daily users was much higher in the first half than in the second half.
I have a few theories about why, which I’ll share below.
Traffic Drivers
Organic traffic and Pinterest continue to be our top traffic drivers.
Here’s how many users visited us from each source.
Organic Search
Organic search continues to be our most significant traffic driver. Nearly 700 users visited our site via organic search this month – one of our best months yet!
I will be so happy when we finally start to see over 1000 users via organic search on a steady basis. We’re not there yet, but it’s slowly creeping up.
Our top page from organic search continues to be “How to be a Twitch Affiliate in 30 Days”. I suspect it might be getting so much traffic because everyone is stuck inside with nothing better to do than play video games, but I’ll take it!
The pandemic allowed me the time to try streaming for myself. I’m using the opportunity to research Twitch to create a content pillar around making money via streaming.
We did create a massive content pillar centered around Twitch, Discord, gaming, and streaming. However, we haven’t updated any of the content in years, and it no longer ranks well. We receive a small amount of traffic to the pillar each month.
I failed to update old articles with SEO in mind. I said I would, but it got away from me.
Updating old articles is crucial to success. Not only do things change, meaning your old article is outdated, but as you improve your writing skills, the older posts will seem out of place on your polished website. You must go back and review old content regularly.
Social Media
Despite maintaining its position as the second-largest traffic driver, social media traffic significantly declined during this period.
Only a little over 320 users found us via social media, a decline of about 50 over last month, which also had fewer days.
If everyone is stuck inside, why aren’t they clicking on links?
My theory is that our content didn’t resonate with users. I tried something new, writing a series about incredible women who did their own thing in honor of Women’s History Month, but it was not well received on social media.
I tried to balance it by writing about current topics, like social distancing, but it didn’t seem to work.
Our Pinterest traffic increased slightly this month, climbing back up to 270, accounting for the vast majority of our social media traffic.
Since I left Tailwind, I’ve been struggling with Pinterest. While it was easy to schedule content with that program, I wasn’t seeing a return on my investment in the form of page views.
I’ve been using Pinterest to find old blog posts for resharing, but I haven’t done much manual pinning.
I’m still a little anxious about my suspension a few months ago, and I don’t want to appear spammy by manually pinning too much. Because of that, I don’t know how helpful the group boards have been for me lately, but I’m not ready to drop out of them just yet.
Over the next few months, I will build content on my personal boards by pinning manually. We will see if having more content directly from the web (rather than Pinterest) increases the number of views and shares.
By this, we meant going to our website and clicking the “Pin it” button rather than uploading a pin from the desktop to Pinterest and adding a URL. We didn’t do this for long enough to notice a difference in traffic.
We saw a massive drop in Twitter traffic during this period. A big part was the aforementioned mini-series on inspirational women, which didn’t get any clicks.
That’s ok, though. I tried a thing and got to write about some fantastic women. It didn’t resonate with users, but I learned a lot in the process.
You win some, you lose some.
I’m still struggling with Facebook. Only four users visited us from the platform this month.
I try to post my most recent article on the Partners in Fire page, but I rarely share it on my personal page and never post any other content.
I keep saying I’ll do better, but I never do.
We never did better with Facebook. We use Revive Old Posts to share content on the platform automatically but mostly ignore it.
Direct Hits
We also saw a decrease in direct hits during our 28th month. I attribute this decrease to the content as well.
Let’s dive into the elephant in the room: Our content.
Content
I loved the content we published this month, but my audience disagreed.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we featured three trailblazing women from history. Our celebration of incredible women included Sue Hendrickson, the woman who found the largest T-rex fossil, Junko Tabei, the first woman to climb Mt. Everest, and Katherine Johnson, the mathematician who helped humanity reach the moon.
These articles received very little traffic.
In keeping with Women’s History Month, I published a post on the Gender Pay Gap and a snarky bit of Financial Advice for Men, which we wrote to mimic the stereotypical financial advice women receive. It was fun to flip that gender script.
We’ve since deleted all the articles except Financial Advice for Men. They didn’t receive any traffic and weren’t serving the audience.
I scrapped my original content ideas due to the quarantine (it’s unreasonable to publish a post on cheap date ideas for spring when we can’t go outside), so I substituted them for more apt articles about social distancing and staying connected.
These posts saved my views for the month since they are much more relevant to the situation we find ourselves in than any of my other posts.
We’ve deleted these articles as well. Since the pandemic ended, they no longer serve a purpose. Content that isn’t evergreen should be purged when it’s no longer relevant.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership
I still have a few ideas up my sleeve for improving our readership.
First, I need to focus on improving SEO. I haven’t updated a post in months.
I also need to write more content related to my highest-ranking posts. That means a few more posts about Twitch streaming (which also means I get to play more video games, yay!).
A second way to improve my readership is to get more involved with the social media platforms I don’t use very much—I’m looking at you, Facebook! I need to work harder to grow my page and get traffic from it. I know it can be done; I just need to find the motivation.
I’m also open to new ideas. What did you do to improve your readership? I’d love to hear about it!