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If you haven’t heard me say it before, you’re hearing it now: Pinterest is an INCREDIBLE tool for online business. It’s absolutely my favorite marketing tool because I am not one (and never have been) to spend all my time on social media.

So when it came to marketing my business, I was on the struggle bus for real. For a long time. Way too long.

About the middle of last year I started focusing on SEO for my website and blog. And with that naturally came Pinterest.

Why do I say it came naturally? Well, because as I started learning more and more about getting my content in front of people without being on social media, the more I wanted it!

So to me, SEO and Pinterest go together like peas and carrots! (You had Forrest Gump flashbacks, didn’t you?)

And that brings me to the topic of this post!

How I grew my Pinterest account over 300% in 2 months

Pictures don’t lie, right?

Now, I know, those numbers may not be huge to some. And that’s okay. But in early November of last year I barely had 15k monthly viewers. And with just 2 months of consistent work on my account, as of writing this, I have 113k monthly views.

So I thought maybe I should share a bit of what I do so YOU can have these results too!

I’ll tell you what, a lot of it comes down to one thing…

First things first: Optimize your Pinterest profile

When I first started with Pinterest, I was all over the place. Pin a little here, pin a little there. My boards didn’t make a lick of sense and none of them had descriptions.

I used it to scroll, save outfits for Stitch Fix, and look up random Disney pictures. That’s. It.

So when I started putting a method to the madness, I had to start from the very beginning. Optimizing my profile before I put any strategy behind my pinning was key.

Pinterest (and more importantly), your audience, needs to know what your profile is about. If they land on your pin because it’s gorgeous so they go to your profile where your picture is of your dog and your bio has zero info about who you are or what you do, you can bet they’ll bounce.

So check out how to optimize your profile here and tick that box first!

My Favorite Pinterest Tool

Now on to the good stuff. Without this tool, I wouldn’t have been able to grow my Pinterest as much as I have. No doubt. You’ve probably heard of it. Maybe you’ve looked at it and thought WTF and never touched it again.

Well I’m here to tell you once you implement the strategies I’m going to cover below, you’ll love this tool too.

My favorite Pinterest tool is… Tailwind.

You’re not surprised are you? I didn’t think so. They really are the industry leader when it comes to managing Pinterest. And once we get into it, you’ll see why!

This amazing tool schedules pins for you, tells you which boards need descriptions (or better descriptions), connects you with other like minded pinners so you can share each others content (which equals more eyes on yours)…

And it can all be managed in just an hour or so a week! (Or as much time as you want to spend on it but come on, we’re looking for time away from the computer here!)

My Tailwind Strategy

When I first started using Tailwind, it was a hot mess. I was literally throwing spaghetti at the wall with no plan or clue what to do.

I used to manually schedule all my own pins every few days… effectively spamming everyone! Woops!

Now, I’ve got my account set up in such a way that I only add my own pins once, schedule other curated content maybe once a week, and let the magic happen. My account views, impressions, and clicks have grown steadily since.

So let’s get down to it!

Create Your Schedule

When you log into Tailwind, in the menu on the left, you’ll see Publisher. Under that is Your Schedule. This is where you choose how many times a day you want to pin. One pin equals one share of one pin to one board. So if you have one pin that you share to 5 boards, that’s the same as 5 pins in the time slots you see for your schedule.

Anywhere you do research, you’ll see various recommended number of pins per day. I don’t think there’s a “right” answer here. I have mine set to 40 pins per day with 22 of those being Smart Schedule (other people’s content) and 18 being from loops (my pins).

We’ll get into loops in a minute. They’re the cherry on top!

If you want, you can let Tailwind choose your schedule for you. Which is totally fine for getting started. You can always go back and tweak it.

Tailwind Loops - My Favorite Feature

Loops confused the hell out of me when I first tried to use them. So I quit. For a loooooong time. And every few days I would go to my Pinterest account and use the Tailwind Chrome extension to batch schedule a ton of my own pins. Annoying and a lot of extra work.

Then it clicked and they basically became the secret sauce.

I created a loop for each category I create content around. Remember, these are for your pins only, not other people’s.

So as you can see in the pic above, I’ve got a loop for the group boards I’m a part of, one for my quote pins, one for my Pinterest content, one for SEO content, and so on.

Each of those loops tells Tailwind which boards to pin to. For example, the SEO loop pins to a group board for SEO and Web design, and two of my own boards, one called seo tips and strategies, and one called website tips. Three boards total.

This means, each time I create a new pin to add to that loop, Tailwind automatically scheduled that pin to go to those 3 boards. The beautiful thing is it doesn’t send it to all 3 boards at the same time. It staggers them according to the schedule so it’s not all pushed out at once.

And then, once the new pin has gone to all 3 boards, it goes to the bottom of the loop, so to speak, to be scheduled again later on after some time has passed. So it stays fresh and keeps circulating on Pinterest.

And I don’t have to touch it again!

What My Process Looks Like

So when I’ve written a new post and have the pins ready for it, I head over to Tailwind. I make a 4 pins for each blog post. This gives me variety, you variety, and Pinterest variety. I highly recommend you make at least 2-3 pins for each blog post.

In Tailwind, I upload all 4 images as drafts, add the link to the blog post, and save everything.

Now, I’ll write descriptions for 2 of the new pins and add the pins to the appropriate loops and tribes. We’ll talk about tribes in another post, but bear with me here.

I only do 2 to start because if I add the pins to multiple loops, for example, this post about Tailwind and Pinterest will go into the Group Boards, Pinterest, Social Media, and My Branded Pins loops, I don’t want it to fill up all of the next time slots for those loops with this one post. I want everything to stay staggered.

So I add 2 to the loops and leave 2 as drafts.

The next time I check Tailwind to make sure there’s enough content, if I see a hole in my schedule for a Pinterest pin, for example, I’ll write up a description for one of the drafts and add it to the loops.

This way I always have some pins with content ready to go if I need to beef up the schedule a bit. At any given time I have a handful of draft pins ready to be added to the loops when needed.

Really helps keep me out of panic mode!

Other People’s Content

Then, to fill in the gaps, I’ll either go to my Tailwind Tribes and bulk schedule a bunch of pins from there. Or I’ll go directly to Pinterest and use the Tailwind Chrome extension to bulk schedule from there.

And Tailwind automatically fills in the holes in the schedule with that content.

And that is basically it! It’s so simple it’s scary, right! But the key thing is that it’s let me be SUPER consistent on Pinterest without living in it. Which was super important to me since that was what I hated so much about marketing on social media. Feeling like I needed to be on there 24/7.

Pinterest is the exact opposite and I’m seeing more traffic and results from it than I ever saw posting 3-5x a day on Facebook.