Week 12 marks 3 months of full-time blogging!
How does it feel?
I feel great. Honestly I’m more excited about the blog than I’ve ever been before. The closer we are getting to launching, the more I feel like, “Wow, we can actually do this! This will be successful!”
Week 12’s Accomplishments:
- Reached 218 Pinterest followers, up 44 from last week! That’s the most we’ve grown in one week so far!
- Reached 100 followers on our Instagram! We only have 9 posts, so I feel like that’s pretty good.
- Figured out PicMonkey (mostly) and have made our first 20 pins – and honestly, we are extremely happy with how they’re turning out!
- Applied for 16 more group boards, followed up on boards applied to in the past, and got added as contributors to 3.
Here’s what helped us get followers this week.
1. Participating in the Bloggers Supporting Bloggers Facebook group’s daily challenges. I can’t participate in many of them because they require you to have a website, but I did participate in sharing my Instagram for follows in exchange for engaging with other bloggers’ Instagrams. Time will tell whether any of those bloggers unfollow me later on (as I honestly will probably unfollow many I’ve followed), but I think it will help us get going.
2. I did posts for the first time to my personal Facebook and Instagram accounts, telling about our soon-to-launch blog and asking people to go follow us on Instagram and Pinterest. More people followed Instagram than Pinterest, but we definitely saw a boost on both!
Pinterest Update
Yep, I’m still only pinning 30-50 per day. Nope, it’s not doing any better so far than pinning lots like I did before. I don’t know why. My analytics go up and down and up and down without any real trend. It’s pretty annoying but I’m not too worried about it at this point.
I’m also still keeping track of how all the pins I post to group boards are doing in my Google Sheet (which I talked about in my week 11 journal). I’m definitely seeing which boards have good engagement and which don’t, and it’s helped me a lot in figuring out which types of pins do best on each board.
Backend Update
Ryan and I worked all night Friday and most of the day on Saturday. I was designing pins and he was working on backend security stuff. He had two calls with a guy in weeks past who does website security. He was extremely helpful in walking Ryan through all the things he needed to get in place for our blog to be secure.
Ryan was also uploading some of my posts and using Yoast’s SEO tool to see where they needed editing for optimal Google SEO stats. I was SO glad he was doing that and not me – once I’ve written a post it’s hard for to be motivated to go back through it and edit.
PicMonkey for Designing Pins
I’ve read multiple articles on how to design good pins, and I’m not going to share them all here. The one resource I would recommend to anyone, however is a walkthrough video tutorial of how Rosemarie from The Busy Budgeter makes pins for Pinterest using PicMonkey. SO HELPFUL.
Next Week
That’s it for this week! Next week we’re very excited to meet, in person, our friends Silas and Grace from Chasing Foxes for dinner over in Indiana. I believe they’re coming from Morocco, so we will have lots of travel tales to hear! I’m sure we will talk about blogging too. Ryan will go to Indianapolis for a couple days and I’m staying here so that will be rough (ha). But, I’m excited to keep pounding out pins. Hopefully we’ll feel lots closer to our launch by the end of the week!
