Well, we didn’t launch this week. We’re pretty sad about it.
It was definitely a really good idea (credit goes to Ryan) to make our site live first, test everything, and wait to launch (spread the word on social media and start pinning) until we get any kinks worked out. We had quite a few kinks show up this week:
- Ryan spent hours trying to get our email newsletter signup to show up on our site.
- Even though our site was https, it was still showing up as “not secure.” We’ve hired a website developer who (thank goodness) was able to fix that pretty quickly.
- Slooooow site loading time. Sometimes our site takes 10-15 seconds to load. That’s not ok. We’re still trying to figure out how to fix this one.
- Plugins not working. We tried different social media sharing buttons that either didn’t show up at all or didn’t show up consistently.
- We never get submissions made through our contact form. Also still haven’t fixed this one.
- Getting error messages with our site not loading at all, saying it’s down, when it shouldn’t be.
- Finally, the worst one, Google doesn’t think our site exists. Seriously. Haven’t figured this one out either.
As you can imagine, this has all been pretty frustrating. Ryan loves problem-solving and he’s amazing at it. But when he’s spent hours on something and even had our developer look into it with no progress, it gets old. We are literally praying these issues get resolved miraculously, because we’re not sure what else to do.
Thankfully, we were able to make some progress in other areas this week!
I got started with BoardBooster and skyped with Grace from Chasing Foxes who graciously explained to me the whole process of how she uses it to get amazing results on Pinterest. I’m all ready to go with that, as soon as we launch!
We applied to Amazon Associates and inserted Amazon affiliate links into all relevant posts. (When people click those links and make a purchase we’ll make a small commission.) The way it works is we need at least three people to make purchases through our links in the next 180 days, then our site will be reviewed by Amazon and (hopefully) approved to be a true affiliate partner site.
We got a lot of new Pinterest followers this week because I shared our Pinterest profile a few times on the Bloggers Supporting Bloggers Facebook page we’re a part of. We’ve gained over 50 new followers in the last two weeks! Hopefully that multiplies when we start releasing our own pins.
I spent a lot of time uploading more of the posts I wrote in past months to WordPress and creating pins for them. We won’t launch with these, but they’ll be ready to publish in coming weeks when we’re ready to add more content.
