We finally launched our blog on Tuesday this week!
Our blog had been live for a couple of weeks, but we wanted to get as many kinks worked out as possible before we shared the blog on social media. Thankfully, on Monday the two biggest issues, our contact form not working and our site not showing up in Google searches, got fixed! (The developer we’ve hired figured out the contact form issue, and the Google issue seemed to resolve itself in time.) So on Tuesday we scrambled to get our posts written for Facebook and Instagram, then put our link out there for the world to see.
It was just as fun as I hoped it would be!
Since the minute we launched, we’ve hardly been able to peel ourselves away from watching our site’s analytics. With Google Analytics we can see how many users are on our site at any given time, as well as where in the world they are, and what page of our site they’re viewing. It’s so much fun to watch!
Blog focuses this week:
- Creating our Facebook page, sharing it when we launched, then posting to it when we published two new posts during the week. The page only has 22 likes so far. But, when we shared our new posts to it we got a lot of clicks from them!
- Reapplied to Google AdSense. We haven’t heard back yet. Praying we get approved soon! AdSense will publish ads on our site and pay us according to how many people see and click the ads. This is the first step to monetizing our site.
- Brainstorming how else to get our blog out to the world. One thing we tried is commenting on other people’s blogs. On some blogs when you comment it allows you to link back to your own site. We did this on several blogs and saw that some people did click through to our site! I created reminders for myself to do this once a week.
- Ryan also reached out to a few bloggers whose recipes we used on our most recent recipe post, 12 clean eating recipes we’ve loved this fall. He tried to get their attention by engaging with them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, then contacting them to tell them we featured their recipe. The best outcome would be one of them sharing our post, but that hasn’t happened yet. At the very least though we’re getting our name out there and trying to network.
- Figuring out BoardBooster. BoardBooster is a tool you pay to use that will automatically pin your pins for you to the boards you choose. Making BoardBooster work for us has been a big challenge this week. The biggest reason for this is because we have made several versions of pins for each post we’ve published. I won’t go into all of that here, but in the future we would love to write a post about how to get started with BoardBooster, so that we can hopefully help other people struggling like we have.
Growing Our Blog
Pinterest is growing more rapidly (33 new followers this week). Some of our own pins that link to our site are just starting to take off as well! We know Pinterest takes time to grow, and we’re prepared for that. But next week we are going to accelerate that process up by applying to more high quality group boards. I’m hoping we will have a better chance of being accepted now that we have our own content.
The first two days after launching our blog had great traffic, mostly through our Facebook and Instagram links. Now that that initial traffic has died down, we need to start seeing most of our clicks come through Pinterest, and that’s happening more and more! Now that BoardBooster is set up, as long as we are continually releasing new content, we feel confident we are on our way to success!
Next Week
Along with applying to group boards, next week we hope to release our first couple of original recipe posts! Developing my own recipes isn’t something I even considered doing until very recently. But now that we’ve decided to go for it we are very excited! Ryan is doing the photography and I’m doing the recipe creation. I’m also brainstorming some more holiday themed posts which I hope to write next week.
