It’s so crazy to me that I’ve been going at this for seven weeks already!
Time is flying, and it scares me a little bit to be honest. That’s the thing about routines and being busy that I’ve never liked – it makes time go so quickly. I sometimes feel almost frantic to grab onto time and make it stop for a day.
But, I’m so thankful for what we’re doing right now. Blog stuff is coming along, slowly but surely. And, our time here living with my parents has very clear purposes.
I continued doing mostly the same things on Pinterest last week, and we got 11 new followers this week. That brings our total to 77!
Should I Follow People on Pinterest to Get Followers?
One new thing I tried doing on Pinterest seemed to backfire. We got advice from a big blogger to go to group boards with topics similar to the ones we want to focus on, and follow lots of the contributors. The idea is that for every so many you follow, someone is bound to follow you back.
Unfortunately, it seems that Pinterest has cracked down on how many people any user can follow in a given period of time. So, my following activity was blocked after 15 follows or so the first couple of days. Then, as days progressed, I could follow fewer and fewer. No one I followed has followed me back yet. I noticed after a few days that analytics took a nosedive the day I started mass following!
Needless to say, I’m not going to try that tactic anymore, and I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m guessing it probably used to work better than it does now, because Pinterest has probably become stricter about it.
Another thing I noticed from analytics is that pins I was pinning while on other websites were getting tons more exposure than pins I repinned from my feed. They weren’t necessarily getting pinned more, but that may have been the quality of what I was pinning. I’m going to try and be more consistent about pinning off other websites than just Pinterest.
Unwelcome Pinterest Changes
Pinterest did something incredibly annoying this week that means I barely pin from my main feed anymore. They took away the number that tells you how many times any given pin has been pinned. From the beginning I’ve been only pinning very popular pins, because I read that it makes Pinterest think you’re influential. So for the most part I only pin pins which have a thousand or more repins already. Now that I can’t see how many times a pin has been pinned on my feed, I don’t pin from it. I really don’t know why they took that away! I’m guessing they either want the feed look cleaner with more white space, or they are trying to keep people from only pinning popular pins.
Instead, I now pin from three other areas that still show the number of repins. My Pinterest feed on my iPhone, the notifications of what people I follow are pinning, and other people’s boards all still show repin counts.
Pinterest Customer Service
Pinterest doesn’t have any customer service options for talking directly to a representative (which is a little scary to me). They also don’t have any place specifically for submitting complaints. I have thought about emailing them about some of my suggestions/complaints, so I’m keeping a list of things I wish they would change! Unfortunately, even with emails to their customer service it takes several days to get a response. I’ve had a few experiences of them not even answering my question once they finally replied.
This all does NOT help me feel great about relying on Pinterest to be my #1 traffic source. But, it seems to be the most effective option by far for our blog, so we’re sticking with it. We know we need to diversify our traffic sources more though! So we’re aiming to get our Instagram going next week.
Other than all this Pinterest stuff, this week we’ve done more research into templates for our blog and think we have probably settled on the one we’ll purchase! I also wrote a few new articles. And, I finished going through all of the posts I’ve already written and brainstormed title ideas for each of them. I used the fill-in-the-blank title templates I shared in last week’s update.
More Title Confirmations!
We are feeling great about our new blog name! I had another funny thing I consider a “confirmation” that we chose a great name (like the mustard bottle in week 5). I was listening to one of my favorite healthy living podcasts, That’s So Maven (I highly recommend you check it out!). The episode was about an essential oils company called Saje whose founder she was interviewing. I kid you not, this man used the phrase “uncommonly well” probably ten times in the duration of the podcast! It seems to be his catchphrase for how their company wants to help people live.
Next week we hope to set up a time to chat with some of Ryan’s blogger friends (makers of Chasing Foxes). They had a lot of success getting on Pinterest group boards early on, so we’ve been waiting to request to be on group boards until we can hear more about how they did it. I also hope that next week we will finally buy the template (been saying that for weeks) and get a few posts on our Instagram account!
