Ok so 11 weeks just sounds like a really long time. Time is seriously flying and I can’t believe I started blogging that long ago! Good thing we’re getting closer to launch.
Travel!
This was a traveling week, which for me means I felt a little less productive because my days got chopped up. But we had so much fun!! Ryan had work meetings in LA and San Diego so I went along because we figured, hey, why not take a trip with two for the price of one? Plus we just didn’t want to be apart.
LA recap, things we loved:
- Lots and lots and lots of (endless) options for really good food. Our favorite was Pine & Crane, a chill Taiwanese restaurant in Silver Lake.
- Walking on the beaches – my first time ever seeing surfers! (Yes, really.)
- Driving through Beverly Hills to see the crazy nice houses. And seeing bodyguards with someone who was probably a celebrity in the Beverly Hills shopping district.
- We visited a church of a pastor we’d seen a lot of when we were in Redding, CA and felt really refreshed by the passionate worship and people who were crazy about Jesus.
Things we didn’t love:
- It was dirty. And there were a lot of homeless people and that made me sad.
- It’s really spread out and it takes a long time to drive from one area to the next because of traffic.
We were really only in San Diego for one day, but we loved:
- Fish tacos at Oscar’s Mexican Seafood and arcade games at Coin-Op (seriously, that was my first time at an arcade bar and I could’ve spent hours there – a quarter for a game of Super Mario until you run out of lives!)
- The busyness. It was so lively, there were people out everywhere having a good time in the Gaslamp Quarter where we stayed.
Ok now on to blog stuff.
Pinterest Followers and Daily Pin Quota
This last week brought us to 174 followers on Pinterest, up 29 followers from last week. About the same as the 30 follower increase we saw last week. I’ve been still only pinning 30-50 pins a day. My analytics took an initial nosedive when I stopped pinning lots more than that, but they seem to be steadily increasing again. I’ve seen lots of people say this is the optimal daily amount to aim for so I want to try it for a while and see if I can find the same success they’ve found.
How I Keep Track of Group Boards
I applied for 17 more group boards last week and got accepted to three of them. I started using a Google Sheet to track what I’m pinning on each group board and how they’re doing. Once we have our blog live and are pinning our own original content, I’ll use an automated pinning service which will analyze our data for us, but until then I wanted to do a bit of my own studying.
I made individual sheets for each group board, then used the columns “Pin” (title), “Closeups”, “Clicks”, and “Saves.” It takes a couple of days for these stats to show up on Pinterest for each pin, but when they do I enter them into my spreadsheet. It does take some time but not too long, and so far it really has been helpful. I can see which types of pins do best on each board, and I can see which boards are high quality (giving me lots of repins and clicks), and which boards are not.
I also use this document to keep track of the rules of each board and how often to pin, so I don’t have to keep revisiting each board’s individual page to remind myself. Usually I keep this sheet open for reference while I do my daily pinning. I am still using a secret “Pin Later” board to pin everything I want to pin any time of day, but I only pin from it to my boards and group boards between the hours of 2-4PM EST or in the evenings, which are optimal pinning hours. (Pinning to secret boards doesn’t count towards my 30-50 number for maximum daily pins because they’re not live.)
Legal Statements
This week I also wrote our Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, affiliates disclaimer, and liability disclaimer. That took a lot of work, but it was worth it – I believe our blog is going to go big so I want to have all our bases covered from a legal standpoint! The Privacy Policy, and disclaimers for affiliates and liability are legally required for bloggers anyway. This article, Blogging Legally 101, was a great starting point for me.
Facebook Groups and Podcasts
Simple Pin Pinterest Strategy Group has been an amazing resource for me, reading up on other bloggers’ experiences/problems/tips for Pinterest. Simple Pin Media also regularly posts podcasts about how to use Pinterest well. I also started getting involved in a Facebook group called Bloggers Supporting Bloggers, where there’s an opportunity every day to share a link to a post or social media site of your own, then engage with at least five others’. This has gotten us several new Instagram followers, and it’s a great place for networking too!
Ok I’m not supposed to spend tons of time writing these journal posts and this one got pretty long – oops! But I really hope someone finds it helpful someday 🙂 Next week looks like I’ll be applying to more group boards and following up with ones that didn’t respond. I’ll also be beginning to design pins as Ryan continues working on our site’s design!
