Partners in Fire published monthly growth strategy updates for the first fifty months as an active publisher. Though we stopped publishing these status reports, we decided to keep the old ones for posterity and to help new bloggers gain a better understanding of what blog growth takes.
Here’s our 45th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add additional context with the benefit of hindsight.
45th Month Update
We didn’t see any improvement in our 45th month compared to the 44th, but we didn’t see any declines either. The month brought consistency through the summer slump.
We reached our goal of 10K pageviews, but just barely. Notably, our best days were toward the end of the month, when school started again, as opposed to the beginning of the month when people were trying to enjoy the last days of summer.
Weekends remained our worst traffic days, which supports our theory that when people are out doing things, we get fewer page views.
Readership
We’re averaging between 250 and 300 users per day, but there are clear valleys on the weekends and mountains on weekdays.
Our readership fell below 200 on the weekends but soared to over 300 during the week.
Traffic Drivers
Organic Search
Organic traffic accounted for just over half of our total traffic during this period, but we didn’t see any growth from the source. Approximately 4000 users found us organically, which is in line with last month.
Some of the articles we wrote last year specifically for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are starting to rise in the ranks, but not enough to boost traffic.
We will continue to build legitimate backlinks and improve on-page SEO, which will hopefully make an impact in the near future.
Some will say SEO is dead and that the only way to rank is to build strong brand recognition. While Google’s Helpful Content Updates (HCU) of 2023/2024 penalized independent publishers in favor of big brands, there’s still some opportunity for the little guy.
We’ve shifted focus to creating great content, with SEO as an afterthought. We’re editing all our old articles, and realizing that our “great” posts weren’t as good as we thought. We hope these fixes will help us recapture some lost organic search rankings.
Top Pages
Our top five organic search drivers remain consistent: How to Become a Twitch Affiliate, Reaching Coast Fire, FU Money, How to Gain Twitter Followers, and Alternatives to Twitch still drive the most traffic.
All of these posts are over a year old.
However, our article on financial responsibility, which we published about a year ago, started gaining traction this month. It’s slowly rising in the ranks, and it will be interesting to see if can hold its position.
Our article on Discord Emotes remains an exception, as it appeared in the top ten in just a few months. It’s currently on page 2 of Google, so I’m trying to build links to push it up to page 1.
Some of these articles still rank, though they no longer drive as much traffic. As we’re improving the articles, we’re watching rankings improve. The article on Discord Emotes fell off Google for a long time but reappeared shortly after we updated it.
Direct Hits
Direct hits continue to be our second-largest traffic driver. People seek us out directly by typing the URL into the search bar or via our email subscribers.
The direct hits also include any traffic Google can’t account for, and there’s no way of knowing where it came from. About 1500 users found us directly during this period.
Referral Traffic
Nearly 700 users visited us via referrals from other websites this month. The bulk came from Github, with over 300 users. I still have no idea how they are finding us there, but hey, I’ll take it!
MSN was our second biggest referrer, with a little under 200 users. I’m not quite sure where that traffic came from, as the traffic was divided among three different articles. I may have gotten a feature, or it may have been from an older feature that still generated views.
The rest of the traffic came from a wide range of sites, with a handful of traffic coming from all over the web. The vast array of websites referring users to Partners in Fire shows that our backlink-building strategy is working to drive traffic.
Social Media
While last month we barely eked out 350 users from all the platforms combined, we had a little over 400 users during this period. We consider any improvement a win!
The bulk of social media traffic came from Twitter, specifically to our article on Twitch Alternatives. It appears as though a user found it on Google, and then posted it to their Twitter account, which resulted in a wonderful traffic boost.
We shared more on Twitter during this period, so it’s not surprising that we saw more traffic, but I’m still using the platform to network rather than as a traffic driver. I’ll take all the pageviews I can get though!
Since Twitter morphed into “X” it’s no longer good for driving traffic or networking. We’ve abandoned the platform, only maintaining our account so the plugin Revive Old Posts can share old articles. We don’t receive any traffic from it.
Due to the decrease in users last month, I neglected Pinterest this month, and only 100 users visited us from the platform.
I’m hoping that Pinterest figures out what it wants to be, but it seems like the platform is trying its hardest to keep folks on it (much like Google and every other big brand), so it’s pushing the idea pins that don’t have links more heavily, which tends to hurt the traffic of brands and blogs which rely on it.
This is an excellent reminder not to put all of your eggs in one basket and to try to get traffic from a variety of different sources.
Pinterest moved away from idea pins in recent years, and it’s become a top traffic driver for a lot of website owners after Google’s disastrous HCU. We’ve focused a lot more heavily on the platform, and receive nearly 1000 visitors a month.
Facebook and the Others
The rest of our social media traffic came from Facebook, YouTube, and a variety of other small platforms. I didn’t post much on Facebook, so it’s exciting that my Revive Old Posts plugin continues to drive a little traffic.
It’s also exciting to see a tiny bit of traffic trickle in from YouTube. I’ve been leaning into that platform heavily, and although I haven’t monetized it yet, it’s nice to see the efforts pay off at least a tiny bit in terms of traffic.
Check us out on YouTube! And don’t forget to subscribe!
We don’t have the time to create videos for YouTube anymore but will focus on the platform again once we finish our full content review, which should take another year. The videos we have are still great though!
Content
We published a fantastic mix of content this month, starting with an in-depth look at how the Law of Attraction really works, and how you can use it to improve your finances. I enjoyed writing that because it’s a mix of finance and lifestyle with a tad of esoteric wisdom thrown in.
Next, we published a post for our gamer friends sharing how to improve your viewership on Twitch. The 40-item listicle served as a perfect addition to our Twitch content.
Speaking of lists, we published a tongue-in-cheek post about the virtues of list-making and wrote an article about our favorite productivity hack: bullet journaling.
We rounded out the month with an epic post on all the best things to do in Pennsylvania, the state I’m currently living in (I’ve done more than half of the things on the list personally, and the others are high up on the bucket list!) and a post about dream jobs (hint: they aren’t real!).
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership?
We have the same answer every month: SEO, backlinks, SEO.
I know it’s a long-haul game, and I’m in for the long haul. As I mentioned above, an article we wrote a year ago is just now making its way to the front of Google, and I didn’t start focusing on SEO until around October of last year.
I think it’s just a matter of time until the posts I wrote last year start ranking (and I will boost them as much as possible with backlinks when I can!).
We lost nearly all our SEO growth in Google’s 2023/2024 HCU updates, but we’re still in it for the long haul. We’re going to improve our readership by improving the content on our site, leaning more heavily into social media, and eventually creating a community of people who want to improve their lives.
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. Not only do they offer a mastermind group dedicated to helping with every part of the blogging journey, but they also offer an abundance of SEO tools for on-page SEO and help you get your content syndicated on other websites.
Monetization
We are only in the hole about $100 this month, which is actually an improvement from the previous months. Unfortunately, we still aren’t turning a profit, but I think we will be by the end of the year.
One massive change we made this month was switching ad networks. We were earning less than $10 in RPMs with SheMedia, so we switched to Newor, which accepted us with low pageviews due to a partnership with the Insiders.
We lost a few days of ads in the transition, and so far earnings remain low, but anytime you change ad networks, it takes a few weeks to ramp up.
I won’t know whether this was a positive change until the middle of next month.
Continued Growth
Is thirty thousand pageviews in September out of the question? Possibly.
But with the summer lag coming to a close and more of the posts we wrote last year rising in Google, I won’t count it out just yet. Maybe we will see 15K in September, 20K in October, and 30K by the end of the year. I’d be happy with that too.
In the meantime, we will continue doing what we’ve been doing: writing great content and building links to it. I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I do!