It’s been quite some time since I posted something helpful about blogging. Today, we’re going to talk about Tailwind for Pinterest, how it works, and if it helps to grow traffic to your blog.
I already got a short answer for you: yes, it works. But it does take some time and dedication to make fresh pins and learn how to design them so they get enough engagement and clicks (or you can buy templates if designing is not your thing).
What is Tailwind for Pinterest
Tailwind is, simply put, a scheduling tool for pins on Pinterest. You can upload your pin designs, put in a title, a description, a link to a page on your website, and the boards you want to post them on. Then, Tailwind schedules them on the ideal time (i.e., when your audience is most likely to see them), which it calculates from your Pinterest statistics.
How Tailwind Helps with Your Blog Traffic
So, that sounds great, but how does that increase traffic on your blog? Well, this will take some time, but eventually, your impressions will grow, and with more people seeing your pins comes more clicks, especially if they’re designed well.
The best feature on Tailwind to help with this is Tailwind tribes. These are ‘communities’ where you can put your pins, along with pins of other bloggers. You can repin the pins from these other bloggers, and they can repin your pin, thus increasing the impressions on yours.
Make sure that the tribe you follow is one that is suitable for your niche. For instance, I looked for ‘books’ and ‘writing’ for tribes consisting of book bloggers and writing bloggers.
Some Nice Graphs & Numbers
As I’m sure you’re thinking: well, that sounds great, but I’m gonna want to see some proof. Here you are!
So, I created my Pinterest account in May (and at the time of writing it’s September), and I started using Tailwind, I think a week after that. That means I started from scratch; I had no followers whatsoever.
The picture below shows my impressions over the last 30 days. As you can see, it’s grown quite substantially. This is mainly because I’m finally starting to get what my audience wants and focusing more on writing those types of blog posts. In saying so, Tailwind was a big help, especially with tribes, to get my pins to a broader audience to engage with them.
This next picture is the number of clicks over the past 30 days. As you can see, it’s still a bit low, but it’s growing. As I’m learning, I keep on improving my pin designs to generate more clicks, along with knowing better what topics will interest my intended audience. So I expect these clicks to grow more over the next months. I’m still pretty psyched with this beginning, though.
And, last but not least, some numbers, also from the last 30 days, compared to the previous 30 days. So, as you can see, there’s definitely growth there. And Tailwind plays a large role in that. The first number is the number of impressions, with the growth percentage, then comes the total audience, engagement actions (i.e., link clicks, enlarging pin, repin) and lastly my engaged audience.
Some Guidelines on using Tailwind for Pinterest
Intrigued? Want to try it for yourself? Great! Here are some things to keep in mind:
1. Tailwind saves time, but it still takes time to schedule
I spend probably two hours or more each week, depending on how much time I spend on designing the pins, creating pins, putting them in Tailwind, prepare them, find other content I want to repin, and then schedule it all. You can still pin your pins each day yourself, but Tailwind pins them at ideal times (which are times when I’m not even awake, such as 2 am), and, for me, it takes away the stress of going to Pinterest to pin each day.
2. Create an overview with your blog, pins, titles, descriptions & keywords
It can get pretty tedious otherwise to search for all the information you need each time you plan your pins. Trust me, I wasn’t organized at first, and it cost me a lot more time to schedule my pins. I still don’t have the perfect system, but I’m planning to make a Google Sheet for it. That way it’s also easier to put the stats next to each pin I used to compare results and optimize my pins and content.
3. Buy templates to save time
There’s a bunch of Pinterest canva templates (just search canva templates on Pinterest, and you’ll find loads). They cost some money, but some of them are great, and they take away the stress of designing your pins yourself. You still have to make them, but the layout of the pin is there (you can even keep the color-scheme the same). It’s perfect when you’re not great at designing pins. I do a mix, where I got some premade templates, but I also design my own templates to mix it up a bit.
4. Don’t get too caught up on the impressions metric
This metric fluctuates all the time, and it’s not the most important one. You want the clicks to your blog, after all. It’s true that the more people see your pin, the more clicks you’ll get, but the clicks are dependent on more than just impressions, such as how you pin looks, if the title is enticing, if it has a clear CTA (call to action), and if the person is actually interested in the topic of the post. I’m still learning to make this more optimized myself, so I can get higher conversion for my pins.
5. Check your statistics at least monthly
Tailwind keeps track of how your pins perform, and it really helps to keep track of that every month. This way, you’ll eventually see a pattern on what type of content people are more likely to click on, if there’s a specific design that works well, or doesn’t work at all, and which headline works best. This is where that spreadsheet would come in handy that lists all the pins you made for which blog post. It will help you improve, and get more traffic to your site!
6. Pin mostly your own content
If you want to drive traffic to your site, you should pin mostly your own content. Somewhere along the lines of 80-90% of the pins you pin should be from your own website. Then the rest of that can be other great content that is in line with the topics you pin about on your boards.
Try out Tailwind yourself!
If you’re still not quite sure if you want to invest in Tailwind, I suggest you should try it out! Tailwind has a free trial that lets you pin 100 pins for free. Granted, you can go through those 100 pins pretty fast (like, a week), so don’t expect any changes to come from that, but you can get a feel for the app and see if it’s something you want to invest in.
Honestly, there’s still a lot more to say about Tailwind and on Pinterest. If you want to get really into it, I’d suggest taking a course (I took this one, and it’s excellent! Helped me set up everything right from the get-go).
