Eight Acres has moved!

Welcome to my new blog!  It was a lot of work behind the scenes to move here, nearly as much as moving house I reckon, but it will be worth it.  We even did a photoshoot, Pete behind the camera and the dogs photo-bombing half the photos!

You might be wondering why I wanted to spent weeks moving my blog over to a new website..... well when I started this blog seven years ago on the free Google platform "blogger" I had no idea what I was doing.  I just thought it would be fun to share some photos and stories, mostly with friends and family.  What I didn't realise was the amazing community of like-minded people I would meet by sharing what I was learning here on our small farm.

As I started to follow more blogs myself, I saw that other people were "monitizing" their blogs with advertising and products.  I never knew that it was possible to do that, so I didn't really start out with all the right things (like my own domain name and not using blogger etc).  I don't like ads and I only share affiliate links for products that I use.  I wrote a few eBooks so that I would have something to sell, but you may have noticed I have tried selling them from Scribd, Lulu, Amazon and now Etsy, there was nowhere to sell from my blog, so it was a bit clunky.  I just wanted to make a little bit of money to cover the time I was spending on my blog.

And then I started selling soap on Etsy and its been going really well.  I still work fulltime, but I like to keep this soap business in the background, ready to ramp up production if need be, because we are in a rural area and if the place where Pete and I work was to close down, we need a back up plan.  It wouldn't be just soap, but that would be one component of an varied income from different things we can do here.

We have the bees as well, and I have been selling a lot of beeswax on Etsy, but I can't sell honey there (and our honey has also been very popular).  So now you will see that the blog and my growing range of products are all in one place.  And I can sell whatever I want on my own website!

I also got my own domain name (its feeling like a proper professional blog now!) so that I am not relying on blogger (they have been known to close down blogs at random).

Now that I have got most of the work out of the way, I can get back to actually writing blog posts again.  When I moved them I found out that I have over 800 posts here!  So one thing I want to do is keep going back through the old posts and updating them, I will continue to share them with you.

If you are not already on my email list, you can sign up here, that's the best way to get updates on new posts, old posts, new products and discounts.

Now, can I ask a favour, can you please go and click on everything and tell me if it doesn't work the way you think it should?!?  I find proof-reading hard and I find checking a website even worse!  I would really appreciate if you could send me your feedback or leave a comment here.