Blog: Our Candle Making
Clicky stats
MDBP Leaderboard (I’m on page 2!)
What I’ve Done
Since the last update, I finished the course emails and even added another two emails to the series. I decided that when I write a post this early on that could be interesting to everyone (cornerstone content), I’m going to add it to the series. There are currently a total of 8 emails in the series.
I also contacted a couple bloggers to see if I could write them guest posts for their own blogs. There aren’t any candle or craft blogs in the MDBP, but I did find a couple that deal with parenting and approached them with a couple ideas (candle-making as activities with kids). So I’ll be getting my first guest posts out there pretty soon! The first one has been submitted to Perfecting Parenthood and will get run mid-November.
I’ve still got the bad habit of checking my stats every day after I do something on the site, but this time things finally are paying off. Out of 7 visitors, 5 were from search engines. I’m on page 1 of Google for more than a couple of the major search terms I’m going for! Because of my previous searching, I also know that OurCandleMaking.com is the only blog that has the info people will look for.
We had our first list subscriber yesterday too! That’s more exciting that I thought it would be. I want to email that person and give them a free candle or something. 
Oh, we also shot our first video.
What I’ve Learned
One thing I’ve learned that I didn’t expect at all is that reaching out to other bloggers not even in your niche is an excellent idea. In talking to Alex of Perfecting Parenting, I got an idea for my first candle-making ebook! It’s an idea I would never have thought of on my own, and in talking to a few people about it, it could be lucrative (well, as lucrative as it could be, I suppose).
Honestly I think one of the major factors in getting listed higher up in Google (aside from making sure I do really good research for my posts) is being listed in high-level blog directories. Alltop and BlogCatalog both list OurCandleMaking, and I really think that made a difference.
Finally, this month’s biggest lesson is in using reddit. I’d used it before with not really much success, but I think I figured out the problem. There are two important things you need to know to use reddit effectively:
- Find the appropriate category to post your links in. There’s no really good way to do that. You could search for things related to your link and see where they’re getting posted, or you could look through them all to find the right one. Just like you’re blogging to a niche, reddit is so big you need to post links to a niche as well or no one will see them.
- Engage in the reddit community. Don’t just post your own links. In fact, you should be posting many links that are not your own for every link you post that is your own. Leave comments on other posts. Answer questions and build up a reputation that people will trust. Only always dropping your own links in there won’t get you many visits.
Following my own advice, my secrets to success post got me nearly 500 visits in one day and a few subscribers. Before that, I had only gotten 200 visitors in a month. Obviously that’s going to taper off, but it was a pretty cool boost.
What I’ll Do
Before the next update, I will have the video edited and uploaded. I need to write other cornerstone content to link up to some static pages, and I’m going to write another guest post.
On the business end, though, we need to make some candles to sell. I don’t know if I’m going to meet my goal of having candles sold at Rostov’s by the end of November because I don’t have any money to invest in those supplies until we sell some of the candles we’re currently working on.
I’ll also continue with my reddit strategy and also work on other link-building strategies to improve that Google ranking.
I'm Jason, and I like to write.