Week 9 was a really good one! I’m feeling more excited about the blog than ever, probably largely due to the call we got to have with our friends Silas and Grace from Chasing Foxes.
We spent Tuesday through Thursday in Indianapolis so Ryan could attend a work event, and I enjoyed the change of setting! I really enjoy having the freedom to work from a variety of different places.
Friday was our scheduled call with Silas and Grace. Ryan knows Silas from college, and hearing about their blogging success was basically what made us want to start our own blog. The blog is both of their full-time jobs, and they get to travel the world doing it. Literally. They were in Morocco when we Skyped them!
First of all, they’re just amazing people. Incredibly kind, interesting, smart, hard working, ambitious, the whole lot. It was my first time meeting them and I loved them right away. They spent a good amount of time on our call just encouraging us, telling us we can do this and how worth it it is!
Advice from Silas and Grace
- Grace gave me lots of practical advice on how to request to join group boards (what to say) and how to pick with ones to join (by looking at which boards the big bloggers are on).
- They advised us to use PicMonkey to create our pins.
- Also, they told us to start out our blog ads with Google AdSense then to switch when we reach a certain number of page views.
- They also enlightened us on the fact that there is a time (when you start to go big) to switch from BlueHost to another hosting provider.
- Finally, they told us about a couple of great Facebook groups for chatting and networking with other bloggers.
They just gave us a lot of practical, super helpful advice – we were incredibly grateful as you can imagine!
I started applying to group boards right away after our call with them and have been ecstatic about getting a few favorable replies! I hope to do lots more of that next week.
We reached 115 Pinterest followers this week! We also posted a few more pics to Instagram and have been really happy to see that our hashtags work – we are getting likes and even a few followers. Soon we will actually try to get our friends to follow the account and all that.
Ryan also spent a big chunk of time during his weekend (bless him!) working on the blog’s design – so exciting!!! I’ve been super pleasantly surprised to find that things aren’t seeming to take as long as I expected, and it is honestly already looking amazing. Ryan is killing it. He’s so good at this stuff!
We are very excited because we feel like we are totally on track to launch by our initial goal date, October 31st!
Next week will be: getting on more group boards (believing that we will anyway!), researching how to make good pins for our posts, and networking with other bloggers.
