Partners in Fire published “end-of-year updates” after the first two years as an online publisher. Though we stopped creating these articles, we decided to keep the two older posts for posterity and to help others on their journeys.
Here’s what we learned after two years of blogging, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add extra insight with the benefit of hindsight.
Lessons Learned from Two Years of Blogging
Partners in Fire is officially two years old! I’d love to say that blogging has been an easy journey and that we’ve made tons of money, but those things aren’t true.
It’s been a fantastic journey, but none of it has been easy. And we only made about forty-five bucks in our two years of blogging, so we aren’t in it for the money!
We learned the reality of blogging during our first year when we realized it’s a massive challenge that takes time, dedication, and hard work.
During year two, we learned more about ourselves and our commitment to the website. We also learned a great deal about monetizing and networking.
Here are our biggest takeaways from two years of running a website.
Commitment to Blogging
Partners in Fire published two articles per week every single week during our second-year blogging. If that doesn’t show serious commitment and dedication to blogging, I don’t know what does.
I even got ahead and posted from the mobile app if I was out of town. That’s way better than last year when I let myself get caught up in life and took a six-week hiatus. That hiatus taught me that if I’m going to make it as a blogger, I must take it seriously.
It’s been nearly seven years, and we publish at least one new article per week. Since we’ve been publishing for so long, we have a lot of outdated content, so rather than writing two new articles per week, we dedicate the extra time to updating/refreshing old content to keep it relevant.
We also discovered the magic of post-scheduling. We no longer need to log into mobile apps while traveling; we can simply schedule the posts to publish at the appropriate date and time.
In it for the Long Haul
As you know from my sarcastic posts about how I make so much money blogging each year, I am in it for the long haul. When I started Partners in Fire two years ago, I expected it to take two to three years to gain traction and make money.
Now that I’m at the two-year mark, I know that wasn’t an exaggeration. It was a realistic expectation as to how blogging works.
I’m so happy I took the time to write a blog growth strategies post every month because I could go back to my 12th-month update and see how it compared to the 24th. I had almost double the page views during my 24th month – and it was a good comparison because I didn’t get any significant features either month.
All the views were due to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media marketing. Seeing my progress from the previous year was fantastic and gave me insight into my growth as a writer.
I also checked my analytics for the past few years. In 2018, we had about eight thousand visitors to Partners in Fire. In 2019, we more than doubled that with about eighteen thousand. That’s ten thousand more users in our second year over our first – which is pretty awesome.
We still review those old growth strategy posts, which allow us to see how far we’ve come. In our very first month of blogging, we had 89 visitors. Today, we see quadruple that number daily.
Getting Those Page Views
I also learned how difficult it is to build traffic to a website.
I was rolling for a few months during my second year of blogging. I was inching closer and closer to two thousand page views per month and seeing growth month after month.
Partners in Fire was arriving!
But then, around month 20, my page views inexplicably started dropping. Most of my traffic came from Pinterest, and that was steadily decreasing.
I still haven’t figured out why. Month after month, I’ve seen a drop in my page views from the platform.
I learned from this Pinterest debacle that you can’t put all your page view eggs into one basket. I don’t own Pinterest, I don’t know how their algorithm works, and I have no idea what makes a pin go viral. There are beautiful pins that are cleverly designed with clear calls to action, which get zero traction, and there are hideous pins that have no point which go viral. It’s difficult for me to determine what will be popular and why. That means I must find other ways to drive people to my blog.
Learning not to put your eggs in one basket and to pay closer attention to algorithms is an invaluable lesson that all bloggers must learn. Platforms come and go. They change with new management or new direction. You must diversify and adapt to stay relevant.
SEO
One of the main lessons I learned during year two is that SEO is king.
Yes, google constantly changes its algorithm, and you never know what the new systems will do for you. However, the basics remain the same. Write good long-form content. Use long tail keywords that are easier to rank for. Build backlinks and authority. These SEO building blocks don’t generally change much with Google’s algorithm changes.
I’ve been focusing on SEO for the past few months, and I’ve seen significant improvements. One of the main things I’m doing is going back to earlier posts and rewriting them for SEO. Google loves to see fresh and updated content and things that follow its SEO rules. Updating an old post kills both of those birds with one stone.
It’s also important to write new posts with SEO in mind. I use Uber Suggest to find keywords and use my ten free monthly searches with Moz.
These tools help me find excellent long-tail keywords with less competition. I’m obviously not killing it in the SEO field yet, but slowly but surely, I’m building it up.
SEO was king until Google changed its algorithm to promote big brands and its own AI answers. Though most of our traffic still comes from organic search, it’s not as much as before the algorithm changes.
While SEO is still crucial (we never know what Google will change, and other platforms are gaining more market share as customers abandon the platform), we need to find other sources.
Social media and community building are crucial to diversification.
Monetization is Hard
I’ve been trying to monetize Partners in Fire since day one. So far, most of my actions have been failures. To be fair, I doubled my blogging income during my second year, but I still made less than a hundred bucks.
It’s tough to make money off a blog that doesn’t have many page views. I’m sure you will see posts on Pinterest about how some bloggers do it, and that’s great! I’m not saying it’s impossible; it isn’t the norm.
Page views translate into dollars.
If you want to monetize your website, you need traffic.
Affiliates and Ads
The more people visit your blog, the more likely someone will click your affiliate link. That’s just basic math. If 1% of your visitors buy something, you will make more with a hundred thousand visitors than with 100 visitors.
It’s also difficult to monetize with low page views because many companies don’t want to work with you. You have to have a certain number of page views for most ad networks, and many affiliate companies will reject your application if you have low traffic. A few companies will give small bloggers a chance, but it’s harder for us.
Some companies will even kick you out of the program if you don’t make a sale. I’ve been rejected from nine out of ten affiliate programs that I applied to on CJ, and CJ will kick me out if I don’t make a sale during the first ninety days. How am I supposed to make a sale if none of their partners will accept me into their programs? It’s a problematic catch-22 for newer bloggers, but one that I’m trying to navigate.
Amazon will also kick you out after three months without a sale, but since it’s all one company, you automatically have access to their entire inventory of products. That makes Amazon an excellent option for newer bloggers trying to monetize.
Seven years in, we don’t push many products. We make a handful of monthly sales, resulting in less than $10 a year in revenue.
We rely on display ads for revenue, and since we don’t have hundreds of thousands of page views, we don’t make that much.
Pageviews are the most crucial metric for monetizing a website. If you don’t have those, you won’t make money.
Sponsorships
I haven’t even tried to get a sponsored post. If my page views are so low that I’m struggling to get companies to work with me through affiliation, why would companies want to pay me for a sponsored post? Maybe I could look into super niche companies looking for nano influencers, but I’d rather work on getting my page views up and get companies to want to work with me.
That means my goal for year three is to get enough page views to be seen as a serious partner for companies. I want to engage in sponsorship opportunities, but I also want to make sure I’m providing tremendous value to the companies that I work with (and to all of my wonderful readers—I won’t take partnership opportunities unless I genuinely believe in the product and the company! Keeping it real is the most important thing to me!).
Sponsorship opportunities fell flat after COVID. We never made any money with them. A few programs claim to connect website owners with companies for sponsorship, but most are looking for paid link insertion, which goes against Google’s terms of service.
A real sponsored post should be marked “sponsored,” and all links should be no-follow. If a company wants a follow link for a “sponsored” post – it’s not a sponsored post.
How To Increase Page Views
In trying to find ways to increase page views, I had to examine what I was writing that resonated most with people.
Which of my posts are getting the most page views, and why?
My top-performing post of the year was the article on attempting a No Spend Year Challenge. It went viral on Pinterest, and I tried to follow up with monthly updates (which unfortunately didn’t do so well).
After the first month or so, the page views on that dried up.
The two posts that consistently drive the most traffic are Adult Conversations You Must Have Before Moving in Together and How to Be a Twitch Affiliate in 30 Days. The funny thing is that both of these posts were written during my first year, but they continue to drive consistent traffic through Pinterest (though clearly, they are getting dated because the traffic is drying up. Maybe I should try creating new pins for those two articles).
I never created fresh pins for those. Maybe I still should.
The two posts that consistently drive traffic via SEO are Fundamentals of Fire and Barista Fire. I wrote these during my first year, and they still drive consistent traffic.
I updated them both recently for SEO, which has helped drive continuous traffic via organic search.
It’s fantastic that two posts specific to the FIRE movement are getting traction. I’ve tried to parlay that into further success by writing extensively about Coast Fire, Passion Fire, and other aspects of the FIRE lifestyle, but unfortunately, I haven’t found as much success with that. It’s something I will continue to do during my third year, though. We wouldn’t be Partners in Fire if we didn’t talk about FIRE, now would we?
Algorithms change, and those articles no longer rank well. The article on the FIRE movement dropped off completely, though to be fair, we haven’t updated it since 2020 (it’s on the list for the next few months). We last updated the article on Barista FIRE in 2023, and it’s ranked on page four of Google, where no one will ever find it.
However, we aren’t as focused on ranking those articles, as they have relatively low search volumes. Less than 1000 people per month search for those terms. We’d rather focus on ranking articles with higher search volumes.
What Sells
Unfortunately, I have nothing to sell on the posts that get the most page views. I’ve tried writing some affiliate posts for Google (the ten best personal finance books is a good example), but those keywords are pretty saturated, so it’s hard to rank for them.
A big focus moving forward is writing good SEO for posts that sell something. It’s a difficult task—I don’t want to be overly selly or sell products I don’t believe in, but I also want to start generating enough income via blogging to at least cover my expenses.
That will be incredibly difficult if I don’t have anything to sell and cannot drive traffic when I do.
Over the years, we’ve written a handful of articles focused on selling products. We limited it to items we believed in and thought served our users. Some examples include drawing tablets, gaming laptops, personal loans, and books about productivity.
We’ve also incorporated other types of affiliates, like app downloads and website sign-ups.
Affiliates make up a tiny portion of our content. Any “sales” content is notoriously difficult to rank, and we aren’t heavily focused on it.
Networking is a Must
Another huge lesson I learned during my second year is the power of networking. I’ve been a steady part of the personal finance Twitter community since I started (and man, those people are the best!,) but meeting some of them at Fincon sealed the deal for me. I’m so glad I went. It helped me put names to some of my Twitter friend’s faces, and I also met many other awesome people.
Speaking of Twitter, it is the best for networking. Everyone on the platform is always willing to help – whether giving you a click to achieve a goal or providing advice when life isn’t cooperating. My Twitter friends have been more supportive than my real-life friends in some cases, and I’m super thankful to be a part of such an incredible community. A lot of my page views have come from there as well. Partners in Fire wouldn’t be where it is if it weren’t for all the wonderful friends I’ve made on Twitter.
Twitter lost its appeal after Musk bought it and changed its algorithms. Now, it’s harder than ever to network on the platform.
During our third year, we joined a blogging mastermind group, which offered the much-needed network and a plethora of tools and resources that skyrocketed our growth.
What’s Next?
Partners in Fire has existed long enough to be considered an established blog. We want to parlay that longevity into more search engine trust.
Our main goal for our third year is to increase our reach via organic search. That means building backlinks, updating old posts, and even moving to HTTPS.
A secondary goal is to identify and fix whatever went wrong on Pinterest. We’ll start by creating new pins for our highest-performing posts on the platform. We’re also open to investing in a Pinterest class to see if that helps.
A final goal is to build up our other social media platforms. Twitter has been great, and I’m sure we’ll get past the 5K mark this year, but I will be bold and make it a goal to get to 10K. I still haven’t found my footing on either Facebook or Instagram, but maybe the third year is an excellent time to dive into one of those platforms and increase my reach there.
If we do these things, we’ll see a massive increase in page views, and from there, we will make enough money during our third year to at least break even on the blog. Follow along with our blog growth strategies to see how we do!
We never found our footing on Facebook or Instagram but never focused much on the platforms. We ignored Pinterest for many years. For as much as we discussed spreading our eggs among multiple baskets, we didn’t deliver.
However, looking back, we realize how ambitious we were. Partners in Fire is a one-person show, and that one person also has a full-time job. We could not accomplish everything we wanted, and that’s okay.
We focused on what we thought would be most beneficial, and let the rest go. Our growth is slower than others, who blog as a full-time job. Everyone’s journey is different, and that’s okay.