This week was a busy one. We hung out with Silas and Grace from Chasing Foxes while they are in the USA for a short bit, spent 5 days in Indianapolis together for Ryan’s work, and made lots of pins.
Highlights from Hanging out with Silas and Grace:
- It was my first time meeting them and they are just all-around incredible people!
- Hearing about their nomadic lifestyle made possible by their blog. They came from Morocco and are headed to the UK next!
- Learning more about how they manage their blog and the projects they’re dreaming up and working on next. They are extremely inspiring!
Highlights from Indianapolis:
- I decided to go with Ryan last-minute! For my first night I negotiated a hostel down to half-price.
- I thrive in the city. I felt so continually inspired by the creativity, whether in people’s street style, design of coffee shops, amazing food, and continual activity going on everywhere. It was refreshing.
- Eating tacos at Bakersfield and brunch at The Garden Table (pictured above) with some of our dearest friends.
Now on to the blog side of this week!
Week 13’s Accomplishments:
- Reached 244 followers on Pinterest, up 26 from last week.
- Reached 119 followers on Instagram, up 19.
- Applied to 30-40 more Pinterest group boards, though we only got added to 1.
Designing Pins
Yeah, so our growth numbers aren’t super impressive, but I’m ok with that this week. What feels really important right now is getting pins made, and we have made a lot of progress on that! It’s pretty time-consuming, especially because Ryan and I both want to tweak each pin until we feel it’s the best it can be. Plus we’re still learning how to do it well. But we are overall very pleased (and somewhat surprised, honestly) at how well they’re turning out!
I’m continuing to be involved on the Bloggers Supporting Bloggers Facebook group, which has gotten us some more Instagram followers. Ryan also mentioned our blog account in his personal account (subtly) so some of his friends followed it. We’re seeing some really good engagement with our posts this week, with several comments and good numbers of likes! The hashtags really make a world of difference.
I also had another beginner blogger reach out asking for input from us for the first time via Instagram! It was a small thing, asking if I’m seeing any success getting on Pinterest group boards. But it was exciting to us because we hope in the future we’ll be able to use what we learn to help other people succeed often!
Our analytics have continued to be all over the place, and overall we’ve had lower engagement this week. It could be because I wasn’t very good about pinning in the peak hours this week, or it could be something else. But we’ve decided not to be worried about analytics until we’re pinning our own pins.
Next Week
One of our main goals for next week is to pick the 25-30 posts we want to launch with, then prioritize getting our pins made for those posts. We also have to make a horizontal photo with the title on them because of the way our website template is designed. Each post on the homepage and through the navigation bar will need a horizontal photo to go with it.
I’m also going to keep applying to group boards and follow up on some of the ones I applied to in the past that I haven’t heard back from yet.
Those are our main goals! Just a few weeks away from our goal launch date, we have a lot of work to do but it still feels doable 🙂
