Pinterest is one of the most, if not the most important, platform to help drive traffic to your blog. With a following large or small, catering your content and pins to potential blog readers is essential to having your readership and page views grow. But who has time to spend all day on Pinterest pinning pin after pin after pin? We don’t, that’s for sure. So that’s why we can’t say enough about how much we love Tailwind.
How To Grow Your Pinterest Traffic With Tailwind
What Is Tailwind?
If you aren’t familiar with Tailwind, it is a platform that can help you schedule your pins on Pinterest. It gives you optimal times to schedule your pins and pin multiple images at once. Tailwind does so many more things, but we want to scratch the surface today on steps to take to totally revamp your Pinterest game and set your blog up for success.
If you’re just starting out, or even if you’re a veteran blogger, we’d suggest going through and scheduling every single blog post in Tailwind. (Note: while going through your old blog posts to schedule pins, this is also a good time to update SEO on older posts.) Tailwind lets you bulk schedule every image at once, and add them to whatever boards you’d like to. This makes scheduling pins out easier and saves a lot of time.
How To Use Tailwind To Schedule Your Pins
Step One – Set Up A Schedule
The main way that Tailwind works is by scheduling out your content. But you have to first set up the schedule! It analyzes your Pinterest page and gives you times that are when you receive the highest engagement/activity from your followers. You can select however many times you’d like. There’s no set number of pins that are good or bad for your schedule, it’s just whatever works for you. If you’re just starting out, you can start by just scheduling 2-3 pins a day. Once you feel more comfortable with adding content to Tailwind, you can always adjust and update this schedule.
Step Two – Set Up The Tailwind Extension
To easily get your pins into the Tailwind schedule, we use the Tailwind extension. This is just like the Pinterest bookmarklet or extension that allows you to simply click the icon in your web browser and it pulls the images.
You can see below that once you click the Tailwind bookmark your photos from that page will populate. You’ll be able to set the bookmarklet up once you sign on with the app. Below are the images that populated when we clicked the bookmark on this blog post. Click the images you want to schedule, they’ll then be highlighted blue. After that, click the Go Schedule on the bottom right corner.
The next thing that happens is a pop-up appears with all the images you selected and it asks you what board(s) you want to add them to. We recommend pinning vertical images, as they perform better than horizontal images. You also have the ability to bulk group boards together through the Tailwind App so that you can streamline the whole process when pinning content to similar boards. This is the page where you will add your pins to the boards you want them to publish to. You can also add them to your Tailwind Communities (formerly known as Tribes) and also add them to your Smartloops. When scheduling, you have two options. They can shuffle into your queue, or you can manually schedule them out.
One thing to keep in mind, pins won’t be added to Tailwind Communities until they have been published to Pinterest. Manually scheduling is probably best for timely things you want to get out at a certain time. Evergreen content can shuffle throughout your queue.
How To Use Tailwind Communities
The final aspect of Tailwind that can really catapult your Pinterest following is utilizing Tailwind Communities (formerly known as Tribes). Whether you start your own or join an existing one (if you are a member of The Blog Societies, we have our own member-exclusive community you can join), these are an easy way to get your pins in front of fellow pinners. How it works, is that you submit your pins to the community and the members of that group can then re-pin it to their Tailwind queue. Most communities have “rules” for their members to follow as well. You can see the rules for the TBS Tribe on the left side of the screenshot image below.
What Are Smartloops And How To Use Them
Smartloops are a fantastic way to organize your content based on seasons. And truly one of the best ways to grow your Pinterest traffic with Tailwind. We all know that holiday content needs to be pinned from July through December. But remembering to do this in the summer can be a challenge. That’s where Smartloops in Tailwind come in handy. These are basically batches of specific content and you can create lots of rules. From scheduling, to which boards, and how often to post.
For the holidays, these are great to add your content over the years to a holiday Smartloop and set it to pin from July through December. You can tell it to always pin to whichever holiday boards you want and however many times a week. It’ll typically suggest a schedule based on the amount of content in your Smartloop and the timeline.
A few other Smartloop ideas could be new year’s content for December/January. Or seasonal recipes or fashion like spring/summer and fall/winter. Or maybe you’re in a group board that only allows you to pin 2 pins a day and that’s it. This is a great way to control that without spamming a group and risking being kicked out. Or totally forgetting to pin those two silly images every single day. Let the Smartloop do the work!
How To Use Create To Make More Pins Quickly
Now that you’re Tailwind is set up to publish your pins, let’s MAKE pins. It’s definitely recommended to create some Pin templates in Canva with your colors, fonts and good engaging layouts. We have some in our TBS Library for members to download here. While we encourage you to do that most of the time, if you’re in a pinch or feel overwhelmed by it all, Tailwind has their own CREATE feature. It creates pins for you. Yes, that’s right. It’s super easy to use and is sort of mind-blowing!
Just head to the Create tab and paste your blog post URL that you want to turn into pins. You can make a few selections of which images you want that it pulls from the URL, edit the text it pulls and so on. Then you can select how many images you want in the pin (maybe for recipes you just need one, but for style or travel you may want 2-3) and it’ll populate your pins. You then just save up to 5, and schedule them out. It is insanely easy. You can also upload your fonts and colors so that your pins are on brand. Definitely take a few minutes to do this!
This is a great feature to use if you’re in a hurry and just need to make a few pins for your new posts before you batch create in Canva. This is the strategy I am currently using and it helps me stay on top of my pin creation at the bare minimum.
Pinterest Best Practices To Grow Your Referral Traffic
Tailwind is just a scheduler for your pins. So Pinterest best practices still apply here. Keeping images and keywords in mind, it’s always key to pin relevant content to relevant boards, and include descriptions that are engaging and include keywords. Pinterest is a search engine at the end of the day, so keywords are KEY!
Another important tip is to create pins just for Pinterest on top of your regular photos. Pin templates are easy to make in Canva (we have a set in The Library) You can also use Tailwind’s “Create” feature to make pins as well if you’re in a pinch. But we still always recommend making more on brand and engaging pins on top of the ones in Create.