$1MBP Update 3

Blog: Our Candle Making
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MDBP Leaderboard (I’m on page 5)

Time for the mid-month MDBP update!

What I’ve done

I’m not sure what happened, but I got incredibly pumped one day to knock out a bunch of stuff for the site.

All of the lesson emails for the “how to make candles” course have been written. I ended up adding an extra lesson to the course, so I have 2 more articles to write. There are 7 lessons in all, and it’s all free. I’m really happy with it. By the end of the lesson, my readers will know all the basics and have made two kinds of candles. That is far more than any other candle blog I’ve seen.

While writing the lessons I got some great ideas for monetizing. Since the blog is about making candles, and I’ll sell my candles there too, I am going to offer my readers a storefront. This will be great for them because (hopefully) I’ll be one of the top blogs for candle making, so there will be a large number of potential customers. It’ll be great for me because they’ll pay me a monthly subscription to sell. I may offer a free tier, a monthly tier, and a lifetime tier (maybe 3 years’ worth of subscriptions). A site like Shopify might be good for that.

I also started to create a Facebook page for Our Candle Making. Special Request: please visit the page and “like” it so I can get the 25 likes I need to get a “normal” URL and not just the string of numbers. Thanks!

Most of my readers will be ladies, and my sister is probably the key demographic. She is ALL OVER facebook. I think that will be important. It’s very crude at the moment, but I’ll finish it by the next update. I also created a Twitter account you can follow.

I started brainstorming videos as well. The first video will likely be on making a watermelon gel candle. Bought some fragrance the other day!

What I’ve learned

In trying to find places to promote the candle blog, I am really having a hard time finding active forums and blogs to comment on. I’m learning that I need to be more creative in the promotion of the blog. I have a few ideas, like buy some product from a couple of the more internet-social companies, review it, and then ask them if I can write some guest posts.

What I plan to do

Before the end of the month I’ll finish the course emails and plan out at least one video. A friend at work just gave me a Flip camera, so now I have no excuse!

Kathy and I will also start some production on candles to sell. We found some candle making supplies for not much money. Selling just a few of the candles we’ll be able to make will pay for it.

I also want to have a prototype or a few to take to the local coffee shop. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I am going to try some soy candles with scents of coffee flavors that Rostov’s makes. It’ll incorporate their beans into the candle design, so I think they’ll really like it. Maybe they’ll order some before Christmas!

Ps> You may have noticed that this post has a lot more links to the blog than usual. That’s intentional. I did some keyword research to get some good link text. Jayzilla’s been around for a while, so we’ll see if it makes a difference.

-j

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• $1MBP Update 1
• The Million Dollar Blog Challenge – Accepted