How I increased my page views by 2442% in just five months using Pinterest and tailwind. How I use Tailwind and Manual Pinning to explode my traffic

How to Optimize your Pinterest for Maximum Pageviews for your Blog

I love Pinterest. Even prior to starting a blog, I had tons of boards and was always pinning.

When I started my blog, I didn’t realize how big of a role Pinterest would play in driving traffic to my website.

Over the past year, I have really experimented with Pinterest and in return have had some very solid results. In fact, over 90 percent of my traffic is driven from Pinterest.

Time on Pinterest, is time well spent. More than any other platform, Pinterest has given me the best return on my time investment. Quite frankly, I am horrible at social media platforms.

However, while you can be social on Pinterest, it’s not a social media platform. It’s a search engine. Using Pinterest as a search engine I was able to bring in a ton of traffic by using Tailwind and manual pinning strategies in just five short months.

Now, take my word for none of this. These things have worked for me. I went from averaging 20,000 Pinterest views to 600,000 views in five months. What’s important about this? I see a direct correlation to the number of page views my website gets. Let’s get started on how I use Tailwind and Manual Pinning to explode my traffic.

The following post includes affiliate links for Tailwind which I use and love!

Take a look at the Numbers

September 2017 – 42,053 Average Monthly Viewers

This was a big month for me. I mentally decided to “relaunch” in September and look at my blog as a business. Not a hobby. This is when I decided to implement strategies and not just throwing posts to the wind.

October 2017 – 182,449 Average Monthly Viewers

November 2017 – 442,577 Average Monthly Viewers

January 2018 – 628,349 Average Monthly Viewers

As you can see here, I finished off the end of the month with 726,918 views. As of February 06, I am at 833K monthly viewers.

Why is this important?

Because I currently have 1674 Pinterest followers. Nothing to crazy. On October 1st 2017, I had 1105. While my followers have increased, not significantly enough to give me the numbers above.

This showed me strategy is FAR more important than followers.

Big Deal, You Have alot of Pinterest Views

My first thought used to be who cares how many Pinterest views you have. But what I found is there is a direct correlation to my websites page views going up, as my Pinterest views increase. Here’s more pudding for your proof.

How I increased my page views by 2442% in five months.

September 2017 – 1,541 pageviews for the month

At this point, I was only manually pinning here and there. I was not consistently creating new content, pins or adding them to Pinterest.

As you can see my this showed in my monthly stats.

It was then I decided to stop fluffin’ around and get things done. The right away. You can read more about the improvements and things I needed to change.

January 2018 – 39,179 pageviews for the month

After implementing changes, blogging consistently and using Pinterest, I was able to create an upward trend month over month and increase my pageviews 2442% in just five months.

Related Post:

January Blogging Report

So, what’s my “secret”?

So what’s the secret to killing it at Pinterest? It’s a strategy. The first thing is setting your Pinterest profile up for success. The second, is a series of getting your pins, tons of them, out there. I do this in two ways: manual pinning and using tailwind.

How I used tailwind to go from 20,000 to 600,000+ page views in five months.

Let me be clear. You’re not going to just sign-up for Tailwind and your Pinterest impressions are going to just explode simply by using the service. To say otherwise would be misleading.

Tailwind is a tool for you.

Now used the right way, with a well-rounded plan, your Pinterest impressions, and Traffic to your site can explode.

A Strategy for Tailwind

Think of painting a room. Have you ever painted a room? Ask any professional painter and they will tell you a majority of the job is prep work. It’s filling in holes, sanding the wall, degreasing, prepping the trim, protecting the floors, etc. It’s not just slapping a coat of paint on the wall.

Your tailwind strategy is much like those final coats of paint. It’s going to bring everything together and create a finalized product, but you need to do the prep work.

Preparing for Tailwind:

There are probably about 100 things you need to do to get your Pinterest ready for takeoff.

I could easily turn this into an e-book. For optimized results, it’s important the following things have already been taken care of.

Sign up and start your free trial of Tailwind.

Your Profile

Your profile is a business Account (for Measuring Metrics) A business account will let you view your analytics so you can see your successes.
You have Rich pins enabled. This will show your post tile and description as well as your blog’s name.
You are naming your Pins and Filling out enticing descriptions: When you upload your pins to your post. Make sure you are filling out a title and description. This will show up in your rich pins.
Your Profile is unique and tells what you offer and is heavy with keywords. Make sure you fill out your profile. As a newer blogger, it can feel cheesy. I get it. I struggled with this. But if you leave it blank it will not entice people to follow you or visit your blog. Use keywords that describe your blog so easily pull up in Pinterest searches.
You have a clear and personable profile photo: I personally find that I connect more with a face then a logo. I have also found in the multiple profiles I have had through Pinterest you get much more engagement when you have a picture associated to your profile.

Your Pins

You truly* have pretty pin worthy pins: Make sure your pins are truly pretty. :
Use keywords in your pins descriptions: Use keywords in your description to help Pinterest sort your pins and show them to the right people. Keywords are search words people would use. For example, in this post, my keywords include: growing blog traffic, increase page views, etc.

Compare yourself to others

To tell if your pins are truly “pretty” compare your pins to others.

Look at boards you created. What did you like about the pins you saved to them? How do your pins look in comparison?

When I first started I thought this was a good pin:

I thought people would be blown away by the knowledge I could offer. Needless to say it never “took” off.

Improvements: Instead I brightened my pins up and made them VERTICAL. I also used more enticing titles to add value to the post, used stock photos and took better quality pictures.

My pins are all made in adobe photoshop. When I first started I would size them too big, like 2000PX by 4000PX as a result Pinterest would shrink them down causing them to be blurry. Now I stick to between 700-1000 PX by 1400-1800PX. I also started saving images as a .PNG vs. a .JPG.

See:

Here’s what my pins today look like:

They are much cleaner, prettier, and pinned more often.

How do your pins stack up next to other pins on the board? Do they blend right in? Do they look like you made them in paint?

Create Multiple Pins

Create multiple pins with titles that encourage urgency, mystery or a call to action. Play around. There are lots of times I am surprised when a pin takes off. Others I think are great, and they never fly. Create as many pins as you want sometimes I will create 10 or more pins per post.

The more pins you have, the more bread crumbs you’re leaving trailing to your website. Send them out a few at a time into the Pinterest Universe and see what works. Repin and schedule those popular pins with Tailwind.

Example of Multiple Pins:

For my post 19 Creative ways to get more from your Christmas budget I created three different pins.

One Two Punch for for Maximum Results

Profile. Check. Pins. Check. Now time for a strategy. This is how I use Tailwind and Manual Pinning to explode my traffic.

I prefer to use a one, two punch for maximum results.

1. Manual Interaction

I find that it’s completely necessary to manually interact with Pinterest. I will manually pin to my boards everyday, probably at least 10 pins. Pin top trending pins, pins from your group boards and pins that best fit with your own boards.

It’s also worth mentioning to keep your public boards inline with what you blog about. If you’re a food blogger don’t have a board for hairstyles. Instead make it secret. You can still pin to it, but it won’t be confusing for your readers. Everything is now about your readers. Pinterest is a tool to showcase your brand.

2. Use Tailwind

Tailwind allows me to auto schedule pins at optimized times throughout the day. Since I can’t sit around pinning all day, Tailwind makes it a breeze to sit down and schedule pins out to all of my group boards in a few minutes.

Tailwind helped me increase my views by allowing me to pin to various group boards with minimal effort.

They also allow you to join “tribes.”

Tailwind tribes are groups of bloggers in similar niches to your own where you can share your pins and use their pins to fit in available slots on your schedule.

The best part about tribes is they are much easier to join then Pinterest group boards and you can see the analytics of how effective they are.

By using manual pinning and using Tailwind, I was able to see a huge increase in traffic. You can sign up here and start your free trial of Tailwind.

Happy Pinning!

Related Posts:

January Blogging Report

A Year of Blogging: Key Takeaways