Our 49th-month blogging had some ups and downs. Although we miraculously pulled off 30K page views, it was very touch and go for a while. A strong finish helped us achieve our goals this month, and we’re hoping that this strength continues for a formidable start to the new year!
49th Month Update
Readership
Our readership this month was consistent with the past few months. We’ve achieved approximately thirty thousand page views for three months now, which is amazing, but we’re ready to move on and see even more gains!
Why Was This Month Touch and Go?
Unfortunately, we struggled with Google indexing problems for the majority of the month. The problems started at the end of November, and we weren’t able to resolve them until the 23rd of this month. This meant that a lot of our content wasn’t getting indexed correctly, and it showed in the lower amount of pageviews during the course of the month.
Still, even with those problems, we were seeing an average of about 500 pageviews per day, which would be approximately 15000 per month. That’s nothing to be upset about, considering we struggled to get to 10K pageviews all summer! Fortunately, the problem was fixed and the last week of the month our pageviews exploded!
How Did We Fix the Indexing Issues?
There are a multitude of reasons why a site might be experiencing indexing issues. We had an incorrect setting in our Rankmath SEO plugin and needed to upload a new site map to Google Search Console. In addition, we did some work on our site speed and core web vitals. These may not have contributed to the indexing problem, but it’s always a good idea to follow best practices and make your site as user-friendly as possible.
Sometimes, there are problems on Google’s end that affect the indexing of websites. There were reports in November and December of some issues with Google Search Console and delays in indexing, so it’s possible that this was a contributing factor to the problems I was having.
Ultimately, it was probably a combination of all of those things. We fixed the things we could, and it seems like the problems are straightened out.
How Are We Getting So Much Traffic?
After we fixed our indexing issues, our traffic picked up for the rest of the month. We started seeing 1500-2000 users per day by the end of the month, which is amazing!
I’m still not going to share exactly how we keep getting these amazing results. You can join the TMM insiders SEO Hustle program for just a dollar a month to find out!
This group showed me the strategy, motivated me to keep going with it, and even offer discounted rates for a freelancer to help other members with it (if they don’t have time to do it themselves). There’s a lot to be said for crowdsourcing expensive blogging items, and that’s just one bonus of the group.
This strategy accounted for approximately 80% of our traffic this period, while organic traffic accounted for the other 20%.
SEO Improvements
Our SEO improvements are finally starting to pay off. One of our most important posts is sitting at position 3 on Google, while the rest of the posts we are focusing on continue to move up in the rankings.
Unfortunately, these moves haven’t led to a huge increase in traffic just yet, but I do attribute some of that to the holiday season and the fact that nothing is in position one just yet. Hopefully, we will move up even further in January and start to see real gains in organic traffic based on all the SEO work we’ve been putting in.
Content
Although our main focus this month continues to be SEO improvements and link building, we still published a good amount of fresh, original content. We are, however, shifting our process slightly, and rather than writing about anything and everything, are trying to really focus on building content clusters around our important content.
With that in mind, we published a post on the MEE6 Discord bot to support all of our content on Discord, a post on the best apps that pay you to play video games to support our content on getting paid to game, and a journalistic style piece on the issues between Streamlabs and OBS, to support our streaming content. Moving forward, most of the fresh content will be aligned more easily into these clusters, and we are developing a full content plan to determine how our different pieces and niches fit together.
Although we will still be writing about our favorite Passion Fire topics, we are going to be more methodical about it and ensure our content fits with our goals.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership?
Our goal is clear. We need 100 thousand pageviews so we can get into Adthrive. Getting there is the hard part but we are employing a variety of strategies to help.
Link building is still the number one strategy for improving our organic rankings. This has been and will continue to be, a top priority. We’ve been reaching out to brands for guest posting, syndication, and collaborations to help achieve this goal.
Unfortunately, email outreach is not very successful. Over the course of the last few months, I’ve cold emails about 100 different websites of varying sizes and have been unsuccessful in even getting a response (other than the opportunity for a paid link placement, which Google generally doesn’t like). We will have to look at other strategies for achieving this goal, such as social media and linked in.
As mentioned above, we’re going to continue focusing on building content clusters to support our important posts. We believe this will help Google see us as an authority on these important topics, and it will give us the opportunity to offer this content for syndication.
Monetization
Partners in Fire made about $600 in revenue this month. About 2/3 of this was via display ads through the ad network Newor, and the final third was a variety of affiliate sales.
We spent about half of that this month in running the blog (hosting, SEO Hustle Membership, Etsy Fees, Convert Kit, etc.) but that means that we made close to $300 in profits! That’s amazing!! This is the first month where we can truly say that we’re profitable, but I think that as we learn and continue to grow, this trend will continue. Soon we will be making $500, $1000, and even $2000 in monthly profits!
Continued Growth
We are going to push hard to get the 100K pageviews we need for Adthrive in January. I know it’s a long shot, because we need to improve by 60K pageviews, but I think that the strategies we have developed in the past 2-3 months will continue to improve, and they will help us achieve our goals.