Partners in Fire posted monthly updates about their journey for the first fifty months as a publisher. We decided to keep these articles to help others on their blogging journeys learn growth strategies and see how difficult building a website really is.
Here is our seventeenth-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add more context with the benefit of hindsight.
Seventeenth Month Update
Welcome to our seventeenth-month update.
We’ve been blogging for quite some time now, and I think we are finally finding our groove. We had a little over 1700 users this month – without any features or viral pins!
Partners in Fire is growing slowly but surely!
Readership
Nearly 1700 users visited Partners in Fire this month, an increase of about 15% over last month. Even better, we achieved the increase organically!
We had only two days with fewer than 40 users, a vast improvement from last month’s 11 days.
We’re averaging about 50 users per day, but we had more days this month with over 60 than under it.
Traffic Drivers
Social Media
Social Media remained the top traffic driver during this period. Pinterest was the clear winner yet again, but Twitter and Facebook are still bringing in consistent traffic.
We had 765 visitors from various social media platforms this month.
Here’s the breakdown.
Pinterest continues its reign as the number one social media network for traffic, and this was without any viral pins.
Interestingly enough, nothing I pinned this month drove traffic. The same two pins from the previous month (one on “adult conversations” and another on becoming a Twitch Affiliate) continued to drive the most traffic.
An older pin about being unable to have biological children also drove some traffic to the site. I rescheduled that pin using Tailwind, and it took off.
Overall, 613 users came to the site from Pinterest, a 27% increase from last month. This really shows how important it is to make awesome pins and use a scheduler. Pinterest has been a lifeline for my blog traffic!
A quarter of my traffic came from Pinterest, but it’s best not to have all your eggs in one basket.
We no longer use Tailwind. Pinterest changed algorithms numerous times over the years, and rescheduled pins stopped performing for us. We haven’t tried again in a long time. However, with platforms constantly changing, testing products to see what works never hurts.
Facebook was my second biggest social media traffic driver this month, but it’s not even close to our Pinterest traffic. We had 90 Facebook users this month, compared to 56 last month.
I think most of this was my post on my cat’s surgery. Many real-life friends know how important Caesar is to me, and they tend to find my blog through Facebook.
We deleted the post about Caesar’s surgery as it didn’t serve a general audience. We no longer share personal articles, as we are more interested in writing content users care about.
Twitter was the third biggest source of social media traffic this month, with 61 users.
I wasn’t nearly as active on Twitter this month as before. I broke my phone for a few days, which limited my ability to post, but I was also very distracted by the emergency with my cat, so I didn’t interact with people or post as much as I would’ve liked.
I also completely failed at reposting old blog posts. That was a good experiment, though, because now I know those tweets drive some traffic.
We stopped using Twitter regularly when it morphed into X, a pay-to-play platform. Although we still share old posts on it using the Revive Old Posts plugin, we don’t get much traffic because we refuse to pay to promote our content on the platform.
I got a big fat 0 users from Instagram again this period. I even lost about 20 followers. I need to focus on this platform.
When I broke my phone, I lost a lot of photos that I was saving to post on Instagram. I also lost my favorite app for tracking unfollowers, and I can’t find it again. All the apps now make you watch annoying 10-second videos before you can do anything.
I’m not big into the follow/unfollow game, but I hate it when I follow someone who has followed me only to have them drop me. I use the app to unfollow anyone who does that.
The worst part about my Instagram failure is that I tried to make my account pretty. I made this fancy blue-blue-white pattern, which looked fantastic when the white was in the middle. I gave up on it and decided just to start posting whatever.
That strategy seems to work on Twitter, so I may as well give it a go on Instagram as well!
We never performed well on Instagram. Although we tried on and off for many years, we never broke the code. Whenever we tried, we lost more followers than we gained.
Organic Search
We grew organic traffic by 82% this period, making it our second biggest traffic driver after social media. Five hundred seventy-five users found us via organic search this month.
This month, I improved some of the site’s technical aspects. Page speed is vital to SEO success, as nobody wants to visit a site that doesn’t load properly.
I used the Hummingbird plug-in to identify and fix things that were slowing me down, and I’ve seen a noticeable increase in traffic. My site still isn’t as fast as it could be, though, so a goal this month is to increase the speed even further.
I also did one guest post this month for Government Worker FI (backlinks really help SEO!) and updated my first four posts.
The update work helped us see how far we’ve come as writers and publishers. Looking back, we can see how awful the first photos were and how confusing the meta-data was. We fixed those early articles, hoping they’d be more attractive to search engines.
I will continue working on my SEO this month because it seems my strategy helped a lot! I will update a few more posts and look into deleting some heavy plug-ins that slow my site down.
It took us 17 months to focus on the technical aspects of SEO. We should have been thinking about things like page speed, metadata, and user experience from day one.
We now use WP Rocket for page speed enhancements and Rank Math for help with metadata.
We’ve also been focusing heavily on cleaning up older posts. The view from five years later is much different than the view from a year and a half later. We realized that many of our oldest articles no longer served a purpose, and as sad as it was to throw away all the hard work, deleting them was best for the website.
Over the past few months, we’ve worked tirelessly to save the older posts that were worth keeping. This work will continue for the next few months until we have only content on our website that we’re proud of.
Direct Hits
During our seventeenth month, 381 users came to our website via direct hit, a 39% increase. Getting those subscribers is really paying off!
We have no evidence that all those 381 users came via subscribers. In fact, most of the evidence points to the contrary. We have nearly 3x as many subscribers as we did back then, and we’re lucky to get 100 monthly site visits.
Those direct hits were likely bot attacks, and referrals Google Analytics couldn’t place.
Referral Traffic
Our final traffic driver was referral traffic. During this period, we only had 12 users referred from other sites. Clearly, we need to step up our referral game!
Guest posting will do more than just help our SEO; it should also help drive some referral traffic.
Referral traffic via guest posting isn’t a primary way to gain traffic. Although it can help boost your stats, unless you’re posting on a big, popular website, it probably won’t drive many users.
However, driving tons of users doesn’t have to be the primary goal. Guest posting is a way to improve your backlink profile and get your content in front of new audiences. You may gain one or two dedicated followers from it, and that’s worth the effort.
Content
I love the content I published this month (and I hope you did, too!).
We got personal with the article about my cat’s accident and surgery. It was one of the roughest weeks of my life, and sharing it online helped release some of the pent-up stress I felt during the ordeal.
We have since deleted the article as it no longer serves a general audience.
I also had some fun with my content, writing the Anthem of Financial Independence and Being a Spoiled Brat.
Those were fun posts!
Diversification was vital this month. In addition to those fun posts, we published an article on blogging, side hustles, and the psychology of money.
We also deleted “The Anthem of Financial Independence.” Although it was fun at the time, it had no lasting value.
Monetization
Although we are seeing improvement in many places, the monetization piece isn’t there yet.
I get a few clicks to Amazon daily, but none resulted in sales during April. I’m also affiliated with Bluehost and Inmotion for web hosting (I’m happy to promote both because I’ve used both and love both of their services. I’m currently with Inmotion because I have two blogs, but I started with Bluehost, which is perfect for beginners) and Ultimate Bundles for a variety of different packages.
None of these affiliates has resulted in any income yet, but I believe in all these companies, so I will continue working with them.
We never heavily monetized through affiliates. The bulk of our income came from display ads. Although we’re still affiliated with all those programs, we don’t push any of them and don’t make any money off them.
What’s Next?
We still have room to grow, and we will get there.
Our goal is still to get over 2000 monthly users. We were close this month, but we didn’t quite make it. I did achieve the goal of averaging over 20 users per day via organic search, but I still had plenty of days below that.
The goal is now to get 20 or more every day. If I keep on track with my SEO strategy, that’s definitely doable!
I’m looking forward to our 1.5-year mark to be spectacular!
Great post! Thanks for sharing. I am so going to check out Tailwind.
You should! It really helps out with Pinterest