Since early on in our relationship, Ryan and I have talked about how fun it would be to have a blog together.
We often talked about how well our skill-sets would complement each other. I love to write and edit, work out a plan and practical details, while Ryan is awesome at design, vision-casting and business aspects.
It wasn’t until about four months ago or so, though, that blogging started to morph from a lofty dream to an actual intention and goal.
Around that time Ryan started talking about blogging for income more seriously with one of his friends, Silas, from Chasing Foxes. Silas and his wife, Grace, are running a lifestyle blog as their full-time income. It frees them up to travel and live in different countries every few months. Their inspiration made Ryan, and then me, believe this could be more than a hobby, but an actual business!
Honestly, at first I was skeptical. I needed lots of affirmation from Ryan that he really thought we could do it, that we were skilled enough, and that we had enough to offer that people would actually want to read our blog. But I quickly got excited about it with him and was on board.
Around the time we decided to pursue blogging, Ryan got offered a full-time sales position for a start-up tech company, Lessonly. He had worked there before moving to California to do Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. They told him he didn’t have to move back to Indianapolis to make it happen. Instead, he could basically work from anywhere in the States. Ryan loved working for them and he accepted, with the vision that his working full-time would give us the income we need to get this blog up and running. Additionally, the job’s flexibility would still allow him the time to invest in the blog as well. He just finished working his first full week for them, and it’s going well!
We are living at my parents’ house in Ohio, which is funny because I never thought I would live here again!
I had moved out at 17 and hadn’t lived here since. But it’s been a wonderful opportunity! Ryan lives in the basement and I live upstairs, and we’ve been treasuring doing life with my parents and other family close by. The hardest thing has been getting internet that’s good enough for Ryan to work from here since we’re very rural. Thankfully, it seems him plugging directly into a new router works well enough!
How We Plan to Fund the Blog
The next question that came up is whether I should work a part-time job. After traveling for three months or so and not working my savings is as low as I want it to get. The blog likely won’t start making income for a few months at least. Ryan has a good income, but since we’re not married or even engaged at this point we aren’t sharing that money. So we found a compromise. Instead of having me work part-time and having that many fewer hours and that much less energy to put into the blog, Ryan is generously covering my living expenses. I just have to work at least 25 hours a week on the blog. It’s like I’m working for him. It makes sense for us, and I think it’ll work well!
I started doing research on starting a blog about three weeks ago. There are lots of “How to Blog” articles on the Chasing Foxes site, so I read all of those and read lots on other sites as well. I took notes on different Google Docs, titling them things like “Content Tips,” “Blogging Legalities,” “Pinterest,” and “Advertizing and Affiliates.” Even though I won’t use some of the information for months, I know I’ll be glad to have the notes when the time comes.
Blog Title
The other thing that was a big challenge around that time was choosing our blog’s name. This took some time. We came up with a lot of pathetic ideas in the process, but eventually we settled on Him Her, Here There. We felt it includes all areas we hope to blog about – healthy living at home, and traveling, for anyone. Telling people our blog’s name felt really vulnerable at first, but we got lots of good feedback so it stuck!
After choosing our name we bought the domain, grabbed the Gmail address, and all social media handles. Then, we started working on our Pinterest. I thought this part was going to be easy. I had a decent number of followers on my personal Pinterest; how hard could it be to get followers when actually trying? But we had a rough start…
Pinterest thought we were spamming a few times at the beginning because I was following all my favorite accounts at once in quick succession, then possibly because I was pinning from my personal account’s boards quickly as well. And no one was following us. So I did more research and we thought maybe Pinterest thought we were spammers and made our account “hidden.”
We contacted customer service on a Saturday, then had to wait until Wednesday to hear back. All they said was that we weren’t hidden or blocked in any way. We still had no followers so we thought about starting over and avoiding spamming accusations this time, but we decided to stick it out a bit longer. I’ve been consistently pinning only popular pins and continually redesigning our profile. Then, after two weeks, we got ONE organic follower!! Obviously this is only a teeny tiny beginning, but even small bits of progress must be celebrated, right?
Next Week
This last week I started tracking my hours and put in nearly 35 as I began writing content. I was able to write eight post drafts our first week which was encouraging! Next week our focus will be on continuing to be consistent with Pinterest and writing more content. We are going to try to get friends and family to follow our blog account on Pinterest to try and get Pinterest to see that our account is legit. Our goal is to have at least 40 posts ready before we launch our site. At this point we’re both feeling excited, a little nervous and discouraged by the Pinterest situation, yet still determined this is going to work!
