Blog Growth Strategies – Our Third Month Blogging

We recorded our growth trajectory and strategies for our first 50 months as an online publisher. We decided to maintain these articles for posterity and help new entrepreneurs understand the challenges and opportunities inherent in growing a website. 

Here’s where Partners in Fire stood after three months live, editing for grammar and clarity. 

Wow, three months of blogging in the books. I am halfway to becoming a real blogger! Let’s see how I did!

At the time, Partners in Fire was a personal blog. The common thought back then was most bloggers quit before hitting the six-month mark, hence the comment about “halfway to becoming a real blogger.” Over the next six years, the website morphed from a personal blog into a digital publisher. 

Blog Growth Strategies for Our Third Month

Readership

The blog readership continues to grow slowly but surely.  According to Google Analytics, Partners in Fire had 516 users this month, compared to 305 during month two and a paltry 89 during the first month. 

How Did We Increase Our Readership?

Many of our users find us via various social media platforms, and we continue to grow and expand these while maintaining a sense of community. 

Over half (270) of our users came from social media during this period. 

This month, Facebook was our top-performing platform because we regularly shared our posts on our personal pages. Sometimes, building a following starts with your own network.

We also got quite a few direct hits (198!) during this third month. Much of that was J publishing and sharing his struggles with people he used to know. A lot of his friends and family didn’t know about his bipolar disorder or his battle with alcohol, and they were interested to learn those things.

Note: J left Partners in Fire shortly after, and we eventually deleted his content. However, the critical point is that sharing with your personal network can significantly improve your reach when starting. 

Posting

I’m pretty amazed that I (mostly) stuck to my posting schedule this month.  I only missed one day, and considering how crazy this month has been, I’ll count that as a win. 

Instead of posting that day, I redid the “About Us” section and changed some photos around on the blog. It was cathartic and a good move for me.

My life is calmer now, so I should stick to Sundays and Thursdays for month four. Here’s to hoping, anyway!

Sticking to a schedule is crucial. Not only does it help your growing list of followers know when to expect new content, but it also helps search engines take you seriously and find the motivation to write. 

For many years, the “About Us” section remained too personal. We recently overhauled it to showcase Partners in Fire as a legitimate company rather than a personal project. It would have been better to consider it its own entity from the start. 

Social Media

Social media continues to be a top growth channel. 

A considerable portion of our traffic came from Twitter. Although I didn’t gain many new followers this month, I’m pleased with the community I’ve built there.

We killed it on Instagram, increasing our following by over 600 users! Our Instagram game and engagement helped increase our traffic this month. Although Google Analytics only recorded 18 referrals from Instagram, it might be a little higher. 

You can’t directly link from Instagram to a website, so I think some Instagram users indirectly copied and pasted the URLS that we posted with our photos. My hunch comes from the massive amount of direct users we saw this month. I don’t think all 198 direct users were J’s friends reading about his struggles with alcohol. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know for sure. 

Finally, we saw a slight upswing in Pinterest traffic due to Tailwind. It was our first month using the resource, and we hope to grow as we learn best practices. 

Monetization

Affiliates

I am still working on monetizing the blog through the use of affiliates. We actually aren’t doing too badly on Amazon!  

We had 16 clicks and four ordered items from Amazon in the last 30 days; we made about five bucks. Obviously, that isn’t enough to gain financial independence, but it’s a great start! 

I’ve also utilized the other affiliate programs, but we haven’t seen any results from them. We are members of Flex Offers, Share-A-Sale, and Clicky-Homes affiliate programs, and although we’ve received a few clicks, we haven’t had any sales from those platforms.

Clicky-Homes no longer exists.

Ads

We are still using Adsense to generate ad revenue. Currently, we’ve made about twelve bucks total with it (and they don’t give you a payout until you reach 50). We hope to get enough unique visitors and page views in the next few months to upgrade to a better ad program. I keep eyeing Mediavine, but I don’t have enough users yet!

It took four years to get to the 50,000 pageviews needed for Mediavine. At the time of writing, it was only 30,000.

What’s Next?

This next month is going to present a unique challenge for me. With J and I no longer living together, he will no longer contribute to the website. He insisted on still managing the Instagram account, but we will see what happens.

J stopped contributing to Instagram shortly after publication. 

For this next month, I’m going to continue to focus on improving as a writer, and I’m going to focus heavily on gaining traffic from Pinterest. I hope to maintain over 500 users for the month on my own without the help of J’s network. I think it’s doable!

Our 3rd-month update showcased that Partners in Fire was still very much a personal pet project. Although we heard people say, “You need to treat it like a business,” we didn’t fully understand what that meant. It took years to shift our mindset. 

If you get one takeaway from these old updates, let it be this: Treat your website like a business from day one. It’s an entity completely separate from yourself.