This post is not sponsored, and all the ideas are mine and genuine.

Today I am going to share what I recently learnt about increasing your traffic and promoting your posts with you.  

When I first started my blog I didn’t have any idea about how I should promote it and gain followers. After a bit of research, I decided that I would start with one social media platform at a time, as everything else was already overwhelming. I created a Pinterest account and a board with “My Posts” as well as  other boards with my personal interests, blog, and non-blog related things, and started adding pins.

The problem was that nobody was following me. I didn’t expect lots and lots of people, but I just couldn’t figure out how to engage with others.

After reading about tailwind I decided to give the trial version a go and see if I got better results with this – as at the end of the day what’s the point in writing articles if nobody is there to read them?

If you are not familiar with tailwind it is a scheduling tool for Pinterest which allows users to share their content as well as other people’s content. It is so great because it allows you to schedule pins even when you’re working with different time zones. I am in the U.K. and before I was pinning for about 20 minutes once per day – in the morning when I had the time available, but I realised that people from the other end of the world would never see my pins. With tailwind you can make your pinning more intentional and target a wider audience as you can spread your pins to reach all time zones!

I know, I know, let’s just jump in quickly as it is exciting! I’ll take you through it step by step and give you a clear idea of how to join and how to start using it and getting results from it.

So first, you’ll want to go to their website and start with the free trial and sign up. The free trial only allows you to pin about 100 pins and after that, you will need to upgrade, but by then you will have a clear understanding of how it works and you will start to see results.

When you decide to upgrade there are two options:

SIGN UP

So this is the home page. You’ll want to go to the Dashboard, as that is where all the magic happens!

INSTALL THE BROWSER EXTENSION

You’ll want to install the tailwind browser extension in the Publisher page now. Go to Left bar -> Publish ->Drafts. It is available for Safari, Google Chrome and Firefox. This will enable you to schedule pins faster and more easily.

Now that you have your magic button installed, this is how it will look in your Chrome browser:

and in your Safari browser

SET UP A SCHEDULE

The next thing that we will do is set up a schedule for your pins. I would say aim to pin between 20-30 pins per day, but there is no right or wrong here.  In the beginning you can add time slots randomly, and after a little while tailwind will come up with time suggestions tailored for you.

To add a timeslot you’ll go to Publish->Your Schedule.

 

 

The grey slots are the slots that I set up initially, the green ones are the ones for which I receive the most engagement, and the dotted ones are the ones that tailwind has tailored for me.

ORGANISE YOUR BOARDS

You can add similar boards under one board list, so when you want to pin to multiple boards in one go you’ll just add them to the desired list.

SCHEDULE

So let’s start scheduling some pins now!

Let’s say that you are on Pinterest looking for some great office spaces and you find a couple of articles you would like to pin to your board. All you have to do is to click on your magic button (the tailwind extension to your browser) and it will open a window like this one:

In this window, you can choose the images that you want to pin and then hit Go Schedule.

Now, you’ll want to choose the board on which you want your images to go. If you don’t have a designated board for them already you’ll need to go to Pinterest and create one first, and then come back to this window and locate it in the search bar. I am adding these images  to “Office at home” then I’ll click Schedule All.

You have two options here. You can either send it to queue and it will go in the next available slot that you have in your schedule, or you can allocate it a specific time.

Here are all the Drafts (pins that you didn’t select a board to go to yet) and Scheduled Pins, which went into a queue.

You can also Shuffle Queue to mix your pins before they go live – for example, if you selected multiple pins from a board with the same topic, you can mix them with pins from different topics.

HIGH FIVE YOURSELF!

Yes, you made it, and that’s all! You can do the same to schedule your own posts too. Have fun and schedule some pins and let me know how it goes. If you have any questions I’ll be happy to help!

One more thing