Week two is complete! This week I put in about 25 hours. My goal is more like 30-40, so I have some room to grow. I had a couple of things planned with friends during the days which took away from hours worked. Plus I’m still working as a writer for someone from my church in California, and I spent most of my working hours doing that on Thursday. I’m realizing going forward that I want to limit the number of things I schedule during the daytime. Maybe I’ll keep it to one thing per week, and see if I can get more hours in that way.
Even only putting 25 hours in, I was able to write 12 posts, so we’re up to over half of our launching goal, 21 of 40!
I also spent considerable time editing posts I wrote last week for better structure and readability. Ryan pointed out that I was writing in long paragraphs and lots of good content was somewhat hidden in wordiness. So I spent time spacing things out more, adding subheadings, bulleted and numbered lists, etc.
Social Media Growth
Growth on Pinterest has been slow but steady. I’ve been consistent in spending at least 15 minutes pinning each day during peak hours (2-4pm or 8pm-1am EST). My mom offered to do a post on Facebook asking her friends to follow us on Pinterest to help Pinterest think we were legit. We said, “Sure, why not?” It ended up boosting our following significantly! About 20 of her friends followed us, so we reached 30 followers by the end of week 2. We’re getting repins more often, though still just a few a day. I’ve found it encouraging to watch our analytics as overall our reach is going up day by day, even if it’s slightly.
Update on Blog Title
Ryan has been very busy and focused on getting back into the swing of things with his other job, so he hasn’t been able to devote much time to the blog this week. Though I’m eager to get the design going, we realized we want to change our blog’s name. So it’s actually a really good thing we hadn’t hired a designer yet!
Though I like “Him Her, Here There,” as I’m writing content we don’t feel that it fits very well. I think it sounds like a travel blog rather than a lifestyle blog. Plus, Ryan doesn’t like the look of the name. So we’re going to change it, but thinking of a new name is tough. We’ve been brainstorming some, but we haven’t had any good ideas yet. Any good idea that I think I have ends up being taken already… Coming up with a new name is a big goal for next week! Then we’ll have to change our email address and social media accounts accordingly.
I’m really enjoying being a blogger! I love being able to tell people that we’re “starting an online business,” though I don’t always enjoy having to explain what that means to people and sensing skepticism. It will be easier to explain to people once we’ve launched and can simply give them our link. Ryan has been extremely encouraging about my work so far, and my friends and family are supportive and excited for us, which is helpful. I’m excited to see what week 3 will hold!
