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When I started blogging, I honestly thought that my posts would get 100’s of views in hours and that I just needed to pin the images to my Pinterest account, maybe a few group boards every now and then, but I thought the traffic was just going to fly in and I’d be a bigshot blogger in no time. I was pretty adamant that I didn’t need a program to schedule my pins to Pinterest like Tailwind because I ‘knew’ what I was doing………(awkward silence).
Here’s the reality check guys, it’s 9 months on, and I am still very much a small-time blogger, if not smaller than that. I read everything free I could find on Pinterest about gaining more traffic. Everything pointed me towards either Tailwind or a manual pinning strategy.
Manual pinning? Great! it’s free! Hang on a sec though, I have a toddler, and at the time was getting progressively more pregnant with my second child…do I have the time (and dedication) to pin manually? Some days I barely had the motivation to put socks on, let alone pin approximately 50 pins a day to make sure I gained the traffic that I wanted to.
Surely there an easier way to improve my Pinterest account without spending SO much time on it?
There most certainly was! and I haven’t even thought about looking back since. The free trial of 100 pins on Tailwind sold me! Want to try it out already? Take a look here.
What is Tailwind?
Tailwind is a program you can use to schedule your pins. It is there to make online marketing and promotion a breeze! Another thing that is great is that once integrated with your Pinterest account, Tailwind works out the best times for you to post. This means that your only Pinning content when your audience is the most engaged with Pinterest.
Tailwind has some great features that really help to maximise the engagement you receive via Pinterest and makes using Tailwind so damn quick and easy. It has it’s browser extension and the mobile app just to mention a couple.
How does Tailwind work?
It’s pretty simple really. You sign up for Tailwind and your free 100 pins and follow the on-screen super simple, step-by-step instructions on how to link your Pinterest account.
You will then get led through on how to optimise your Pinterest account and boards, as well as have a unique and personalised schedule made, just for you, to make sure that your pins reach the highest amount of people on Pinterest as possible.
You can have as many or as few slots on your schedule as you want, as this is also fully customizable. This is a shot of my schedule for mid-April, which is currently empty so that you can see how Tailwind creates the time slots.
When creating a new pin, you can post to your own boards as well as group boards that you are part of at a frequency that you choose, as well as the time you choose using a great little ‘Interval’ feature. This also creates new pins each time it posts, and we all know that Pinterest LOVES fresh content! I’ve shown you an example with a few of my group boards I am part of below.
All you have to do is to pin your own content and others to fill up your schedule. Make sure you have a realistic amount of time slots available. If you decide to go with 50 a day, you are going to have to try and fill those up for each day, so don’t try and overdo it. Start with 10 or 15 and build it up from there as you join more group boards.
Once the Pins are scheduled you can literally sit back and forget about it until your schedule becomes empty again. It’s an amazing time-saver, which means you can concentrate on other blogging tasks or other priorities in your life without having to worry that your Pinterest account has been at a standstill for a couple of days.
What does it cost?
Tailwind isn’t cheap, however, it is worth its weight in gold for the blogger who is short on time. As with most other subscription services, it works out cheaper to pay for the year upfront. You actually save £5 a month paying for it upfront and get unlimited pin scheduling every month. There are some features that aren’t available with plus, but in all honesty, I haven’t felt like I have been missing a huge part of the program. So I wouldn’t worry too much. The ‘Plus’ subscription offers everything you need to start rocketing your Pinterest traffic.
Below, you’ll see the pay monthly prices. There isn’t that much difference in what they offer one each plan if you pay monthly, except the price obviously. Oh, except your limited to 400 pins a month on the Plus plan?! What is that all about?! I mean, everywhere you read they say to try and pin-up to 50 times a day. With 400 pins a month that means you’ll be averaging about 13 pins a day. When you’re trying to drive traffic to your blog, 13 pins aren’t going to cut it.
The pay monthly option actually doesn’t have that many benefits and nearly isn’t worth it in my opinion. Bite the bullet and pay for the year upfront. Cost-wise it’s going to save you £60 a year, and it gives you unlimited pins every month. No brainer really.
Related:10 Do’s and Don’t of Pinterest.
Is it worth it?
Just take a look at the stats above. The growth you can experience when using Tailwind for Pinterest is undeniable. I know that I have experienced this and have grown my account to over 250 followers in less than a year. I didn’t really employ a growth strategy except using Tailwind to pin approximately 50x per day at optimised times for my followers. In the last month, I gained 42 followers, and this has grown each month. My repin rate also increased when I started using tribes regularly. The stats above really haven’t been exaggerated for marketing purposes, this is REALLY what Tailwind will do for you!
What other Awesome things can Tailwind do?
Tribes
This is an awesome feature that you can use even if you haven’t got a subscription. You can join up to 5 tribes and can add 30 pins a month. I use this for every new blog post, as well as promoting older content. These work just like group boards on Pinterest, so be sure to find some excellent content to repin to your own boards. You can pay for ‘boosters’ which gives you more submissions to tribes each month.
Smart loop
This is the newest feature of Tailwind. Perfect for that evergreen, and seasonal content. You set up the loop by adding the pins you want, selecting the boards you want to pin them too, set how often you want them to pin and then you can forget about it for a while. It will continue to loop these pins to your boards you selected until you tell it to stop. It’s a great way to promote your evergreen content without having to manually schedule it.
Analytics
You get some cool and insightful analytics with Tailwind. These include how many followers you have gained per day, or lost (which I haven’t found on anything else). You can look at your Profile Performance, Board Insights, Pin Inspector, Organic Activity and Referral Traffic. These are much more in-depth than Pinterest’s analytics on their business account. If you haven’t switched to a Pinterest business account yet, go and do it now!
Tailwind isn’t only for Pinterest. They have a whole program for Instagram too! It’s so simple to use, and of course, they give you a free trial. I have literally just finished my free trial, and I cannot tell you how amazing it was. Tailwind gives you an optimised posting schedule, suggested hashtags, a hashtag counter and probably my favourite part of the automation program, AutoPost! This means you can set them and forget them, I was scheduling a week’s worth of content at a time, which freed up so much time during the week. It also meant that I could make sure I had the best content to share on Instagram because I had a whole week to snap those pics!
Why is This a Mum Bloggers Secret Weapon?
I can’t stress enough how much value Tailwind has. This is a shot of my Pinterest Analytics in the month I started to use Tailwind. See that MASSIVE surge in viewers of my account? That’s what Tailwind can do for you. Before I started using the scheduling tool, I was manually pinning, and although I was gaining a small amount of traffic, I wasn’t really seeing the results that I wanted. At the start of my blogging journey, I was so scared to pay for anything, in case it didn’t work out or I gave up, or anything really. I was lucky enough that my other half bought it as a gift for me. I soon realised that it was worth more than the money you paid for it.
Related: Self-host your blog with Bluehost.
Related: 19 Essential Resources for Bloggers.
Tailwind has given me more time with my children, without losing out on potential visitors to my blog.
When I first started out I was adamant that I wanted to do it without paying for all these extras, I was naive and didn’t realise how much time promoting my content would take. Tailwind soon became an essential, not an extra. There are very few if any cons with Tailwind. I highly recommend you take the free trial, and then take the plunge and invest in your business and yourself.
Tailwind will save you time, save you stress and help your business grow to more than you can imagine possible.
So, what do you think? Are you going to do it? Let me know below! I can’t wait to see how your business grows from this amazing resource!
Pin me for later!