Partners in Fire published monthly updates of their blog trials and tribulations for the first 50 months as an online publisher. We decided to keep these older articles for posterity and help upcoming bloggers know what to expect.
Here’s our 41st-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add extra insight with the benefit of hindsight.
41st Month Update
Our 41st month was just as good, if not better, than our 40th month, which is impressive considering that we’re moving into nicer weather and people are ditching their computers for the outside world.
However, we strive to make Partners in Fire a website that people use throughout the four seasons, a feat that works if our pageviews are any indication!
Readership
Our readership was solid this month. We had a handful of days with under 200 users, including weekend days with nice weather. People are excited about finally getting out, and I don’t blame them!
Unfortunately, not as many people are searching for Twitch and money, but we’ve known it is coming and are trying to adapt.
Blog traffic is seasonal, as specific content types do better in winter, and others do better in the summer. We try to create a wide variety of content to mitigate the seasonal changes.
Traffic Drivers
Organic Search
About 57% of our traffic this period is from organic search, but it’s down slightly from last month. Some of that has to do with the nice weather, and our changes haven’t led to instant results.
Of course, these traffic lulls serve as our primary reason for branching out. Finance and gaming content doesn’t do well when it’s nice outside, but perhaps travel and wellness stuff does.
We’re going to find out!
Top Pages
Our top organic traffic driver remains “How to be a Twitch Affiliate,” with under 30% of the traffic. About 1200 users found us while trying to become a Twitch Affiliate.
Hopefully, they will join the discord and get the help they need!
We had a thriving streamer support Discord community during the pandemic, but we gave it to one of our favorite gamers when we stopped streaming.
The following two pages are “How to get 500 Twitter Followers” and “Alternatives to Twitch,” while “Calculating Coast Fire” and “FU Money” rounded out the top 5. All posts in the top 5 saw over 200 visitors during this period.
Interestingly, my top five posts span three different niches: gaming, social media, and personal finance. Is this proof that Google doesn’t care about niches?
Nobody knows what Google wants, especially after the Helpful Content Updates (HCU) of 2023/2024. None of the top-ranking articles from our 41st month still rank in the top 10 today.
Referrals
Referrals were our second biggest traffic driver. We got a ton of traffic from MSN this period, and our post on Hustle Culture was featured on All-Star Money, bringing in a lovely traffic boost.
The best part is that I wrote that post specifically for All-Star Money. I’ve been watching, researching, and paying attention to what kind of content they feature, and I thought a piece on the dangers of hustle culture would be a great fit. I’m proud that I was right about it. I didn’t ask them for the feature or anything! It’s probably the biggest blogging win I’ve ever had!
All-Star Money was a Motley Fool initiative driven by J. Money of Budgets are Sexy fame. It no longer exists.
Direct Hits
We had a lot of page views coming via direct hit this month. Many of these are from our lovely email subscribers (you guys are gems!), but I also realized that many are coming because people find an article another way and click on the blog, which is exciting!
I love that users find us via referral or organic search and then click around because they find more of our content useful or interesting.
We had about 1200 users via direct hit this month, which is on par with last month.
Social Media
Our social media reach is back to where it was before last month, which I anticipated.
Fewer than 500 users found us via social media during this period. It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing.
Pinterest didn’t perform well this period but was still our top social referrer. Slightly over 150 users found us on the platform even though we didn’t do anything with it.
I made a ton of lovely pins for many different blog posts, but I haven’t posted them. They say you have to pin at least three times a day for Pinterest to pick you up, and unfortunately, I don’t have the time to do that.
I will keep making pins and doing some pinning on the weekends. Hopefully, one of them will magically go viral.
About 100 users found us on Twitter during this period, which is pretty typical. I don’t try very hard to get pageviews from Twitter, but I share a post whenever I write it, and I also have the Revive Old Posts plugin that automatically shares older content via the platform.
Although my big goal is to gain 10K followers on the platform, I haven’t been as active there as I need to be. Can I do it in seven months? I would need 4400 more followers – that seems tough! But we shall see!
We stopped caring about Twitter when it transitioned to X. We have over 6,000 followers on our author account. We also created a branded Partners in Fire account with only a few hundred followers.
Nearly 100 users found us on Facebook during this period. Most of this was the lingering effects from last month’s “Female Twitch Streamers,” but the Revive Old Posts plugin works for Facebook, and some users found other posts.
Other than posting my newest blog post each week, I do nothing with my Facebook page. It’s there, and perhaps someday I will try to build it up, but it’s not a priority right now.
Content
As always, we wrote a ton of fantastic content this month! We got more into art, with two art posts instead of the traditional one.
I wrote an article about my favorite art style, abstract expressionism, and published my art writer’s post, designed to help people figure out what they should paint. Be on the lookout for our art section to expand into other types of art, including creative writing, crafting, and maybe even visual arts, over the coming months!
Next, we continued with our series on Discord, writing a comprehensive guide on Discord emotes.
We only have a few more Discord posts planned, so we started our next series on journaling.
Of course, we stuck to our finance roots with an article on how to build a nest egg and a post decrying the toxicity of hustle culture. It wouldn’t be us if we didn’t find political nuance in the financial world, am I right?
We rounded the month with an epic travel post on the Best Things to do in California, which will hopefully help us maintain traffic in the summer travel season (more travel articles to come!).
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership?
Improving readership is a constant struggle. SEO is a long-haul game, but it’s frustrating not to see any results. It’s been about six months since we started taking SEO seriously, and most experts say it takes six to eighteen months for a new post to get picked up by Google.
We are at the very early end of that and are already seeing some results. It’s wonderful to see the initial results, but knowing how long the entire process can take is still challenging.
However, it’s not just about writing for SEO.
We’re also focused on link building, which is much more challenging. I’ve been working hard to build legitimate links via outreach and forum posting. In addition, I’ve been trying to get my content syndicated on other websites.
I even purchased a press release for one of my most important posts at the end of the month, so we will see if that helps.
One of the best things I ever did to help improve my SEO game was to join the Money Mix Insider’s SEO Hustle program.
It’s a mastermind group offering assistance with every aspect of blogging. Your membership includes access to some of the best SEO tools to help you with keyword research and on-page SEO.
The group has helped me immensely.
I still love the group. It’s changed over time as blogging has changed, but I’m thankful to be a blogging community member with such a vast wealth of knowledge and experience.
Monetization
We’re still not making enough money with the blog to cover our expenses, and we’re spending like crazy!
The press release I mentioned above was $150, the mastermind group is $180 (which seems expensive, but it also includes access to MOZ – which is a hundred bucks by itself!), and my convert kit plan is $30.
I also signed up for Blog Engage this period to help get my content syndicated, which is another $30 (not sure how effective it’s been, but I’ll give it another month) and paid a VA to help with outreach and link-building for $65.
That’s nearly $500 invested into the blog this month.
Earnings
I didn’t make even close to what I spent.
Affiliate sales were meager this month, and I only netted a dollar. We did better with ads this month, netting about $85. I hope our investments this year will pay off big in the long run.
We decided to branch out with monetization this month. Instead of focusing on ads and affiliates, we launched a digital product store on Etsy.
We have a few journaling prompts for sale in the store, and we also have many products in development. The goal is to use the blog to drive traffic to the Etsy store and make sales.
We will keep you posted on the results in the coming months, but I’m confident it will be positive, especially as more products become available.
We recently added the products to our website rather than hosting them only on a third-party platform. They’re still on Etsy, but you can also find them in our store!
Continued Growth
Partners in Fire is on the cusp of greatness. I can feel it, can’t you? We look forward to continued growth, and with all the work we put into SEO, I’m hoping we can get to 30K pageviews by July!
It’s a lofty goal, but I think we can do it. Don’t you?