That’s right. In less than six months, my Pinterest viewers grew from 2,859 on May 31 to 14,782 on June 30, to 29,000 on July 31. The growth continued, but less dramatic. I reached 100,000 viewers in November and stopped tweaking.  

The graph above shows the growth but also shows the lower line of steady daily activity, which is promising for future trends using my strategy. In short, what I did was easy…

Organized my Pinterest Boards

Updated my profile on Pinterest

Became an active Pinterest user with Tailwind handling the heavy lifting

Improved my pins and pin content

The Tailwind Jump Start in January

Let’s go back to January so I can teach you how I did it. In January and February, I spent a few hours each month using Tailwind and pinning relevant content to a few tribes that I found in Facebook groups for bloggers.

If you are not familiar with Tailwind, it is an online auto-scheduler for Pinterest pins (and Instagram, too).  It is easy to use and delivers hours back into my week that I can spend adding content to my blog.

At the end of December, I was using the free introductory version of Tailwind and was convinced that this tool would help me build my Pinterest presence as a viable blog tool. My goal was to attract new readers to my site and find communities of crochet bloggers and travel writers. On January 5, 2017, I registered for the premium version and never looked back.  Pinterest and Tailwind are long-term game changers for my online business.

So, I mentioned tribes above. A “tribe” in Tailwind is a group of bloggers or individuals with a common interest. Within a tribe group, you will find highly relevant content for that niche.

Think of it as “best of the best” right at your fingertips.  I found three Tailwind tribes through Facebook. I usually look for tribes in Pinterest (as shown below) but the current Tailwind product offers tribe search inside the program.

Here’s how I search on Pinterest:

Go to Pinterest. Type the words “Tailwind Tribes to Join” in the search bar. There will be dozens of posts available, some with massive lists of tribes.

Learning and Doing

At this point, three tribes were all I could handle. If you are new to Tailwind, start slow with some daily activity and monitor your results. I was still learning about Pinterest and still learning about Tailwind.

Tribes were just another layer of learning, and my brain was filling to the breakpoint. Fortunately, there are training tools available for both programs and my skills increased daily with the video training guidance in ten to fifteen-minute intervals each evening. I also used my weekly hour of study time to take some longer video courses and some YouTube sessions on Pinterest.

In February and March, I worked on pinning through Tailwind for 15-20 minutes each week. I was mostly putting re-pins into the tribes and getting to know the content of each tribe. As I was pinning consistently, I realized that my blog images were weak compared to some of the other that were showing up steadily in the tribes. I needed to establish branding for my website and at the same time improve my images to be consistent with the brand.

Better Pins with Canva

I started using the free tools on Canva.com in March 2017. I watched Canva’s videos about design concepts and studied how to create Pinterest-ready images. In April, I decided to invest in the Canva subscription program.

I changed all of the images in my Crochet Getaway blog into Pinterest style images with vibrant colors to match my brand. I studied popular pins and crafted snappy headlines with larger, bolder fonts. It was not an easy task, but I immediately saw more activity on my Pinterest boards.

Tip: With Canva’s “magic resize” option, I had all social media images for each existing blog post, in a few minutes.

In May, I decided to focus on my Pinterest profile and presence.  I added keywords and descriptions to my Pinterest Profile and uploaded a current photo.  I positioned my business-related boards to the top of my board displays (just drag them to where you want them).

I filled in descriptions for each board and used a more consistent naming convention to make it easier for me to find my boards when pinning. Finally, I deleted some boards that were not relevant to my current interests. It was spring cleaning and felt aaaaamazing.

Using Pinterest as a Search Engine

At this time, I had less than 3,000 average viewers.  But, I was spending more time on Pinterest. I started using Pinterest as a visual search engine for travel ideas and crafting instructions. The search results were spot on to what I needed.

When using Pinterest as a search engine, I noticed that I was pinning directly on Pinterest for those types of search results.  This was generally not additional computer activity, just a change to use Pinterest for searching more often than using Google or Bing, especially for crafting ideas and projects.

I was also working more consistently on posting relevant content into my Tailwind tribes. If I discovered unique content, I was consistent about adding the blog posts to a tribe group.  With the Google Chrome toolbar extension, it was so easy to toggle into Tailwind whenever I discovered great content to share with the tribe groups.

Resource Recommendations

Pinterest Business Account

Tailwind – Free trial available (along with a free version of basic functionality)

Canva.com