If you need to Boost Your Blog Traffic then you’re in the right place with these Tools for Pinterest. In this post we share 5 tools that have helped to grow the Easil blog by 15x over 18 months. Now you can use these tools to boost your blog traffic too.
The best part about these Tools for Pinterest is that they are affordable (and some of them are free to get started!).
Why use Tools for Pinterest?
Growing your blog can be challenging. Writing content is hard enough but getting your content seen and shared can seem like an overwhelming task.
But tools can help. At Easil we have grown our blog steadily over the past 2 years. We’ve seen growth of 15x in blog traffic over that period. A huge part of the traffic and growth has been due to a few key tools for Pinterest that our team uses daily. In this post we share those tools (and tips for how to use them).
Bear in mind that the following list is not exhaustive and we appreciate that there are many tools that you can choose to help with your Pinterest marketing.
However, the following 5 tools are those that we have used over the past couple of years to get traction with our Pinterest traffic and generate results. So much so that our traffic from Pinterest now routinely beats Facebook by 5x-10x on a monthly basis.
That’s not a small number, by any means. Got your attention?
The best part is that most of that traffic from Pinterest is the end result of other people saving our images to Pinterest, not just from our team saving them. In short, Pinterest gives us the biggest traffic from any social platform to our website, for the least amount of effort.
So with that in mind, let’s jump into our list of tools for Pinterest and how you can use them.
5 Tools for Pinterest that will Grow Your Blog Traffic
1. Tailwind
Tailwind is our must-have tool on this list of tools for Pinterest. It has a number of functions that allow us to share (and track) visual content to Pinterest as well as content that other Pinterest users share to Pinterest.
One of the key features of Tailwind is that it allows us to schedule multiple pins at once. For example, we can schedule multiple pins to multiple boards using Tailwind’s pre-set “Smart Schedule”. We can do this in just a few clicks, so that our visual content is shared out over time:
Here are a few ways that Tailwind lets us schedule visual content to Pinterest on a consistent, daily basis:
Tailwind Features we love:
- Easy scheduling tools – to allow us to schedule dozens of Pins at the same time (at the best times to share them, according to Tailwind).
- Tailwind’s Smart Schedule – Tailwind suggests a pinning schedule, based on the times that our content or Pins perform the best on Pinterest. This allows us to easily add or delete time slots as we grow our Pinterest shares.
- Create lists for scheduling – allowing us to schedule to a number of Pinterest Boards or Pinterest Group Boards at once.
- Handy tools for saving Pins – including a Google Chrome Plugin. This allows us to save visual content to Pinterest from anywhere on the web.
- Detailed Analytics –so we can see what content is being saved to Pinterest, what is the most popular and how it is being saved. You can get stats for individual pins, boards and more!
The results speak for themselves. Almost 1 million monthly viewers are seeing our visual content on a consistent basis on Pinterest. And because of that, more traffic is also visiting our website on a consistent basis.
If you’re serious about Pinterest marketing, there is really no easy way to do it without using Tailwind. It’s one of our favorite Tools for Pinterest.
Of course, you can do your Pinterest marketing manually – but you will save hours and get much better results when you have Tailwind in your back pocket. Or on your smart phone. So really, it IS in your back pocket.
Get started with a Tailwind account here.
2. Tailwind Communities
Tailwind Communities is a secret weapon from Tailwind that has become a tool that we can’t do without at Easil. It’s a “group” tool that allows Tribe members with a common interest (around a particular topic or theme) to help each other grow their Pinterest traffic. They do this by contributing and sharing content as a group.
It’s all based on reciprocity and helping other Tailwind Communities members.
Not only can we discover new content to share with our audience, but our own content gets shared by other Community members. This is way more than if we were just saving and scheduling from Tailwind alone). Or directly pinning from Pinterest, for that matter.
It works so well because every Community member has to share content in order to contribute. Community members are more likely to get shares of your content this way. This is the key difference to Pinterest Group Boards, as there is a way to track who shares content as well as who contributes content.
Tailwind Communities also help us to find new content to share, that we might not otherwise have found if we were not using this tool.
Tips for Tailwind Communities
- It’s easy to find Communities to join. Search for “Find a Community” and then search for topics or categories you might be interested in.
- There are Communities for everything from Travel to Business to Cooking.
- Get started with Communities on Tailwind’s Free plan. This lets you join up to 5 Communities. Start out with just 2-3, to get familiar with Communities and build up from there. You will want to ensure that you have enough time to invest in sharing content for each Community in order to pin to it, so grow your Communities slowly.
- You can use a Tailwind Google Chrome Extension to easily share content into your Communities.
- Anyone can start their own community around a topic of interest. That Community is immediately available for people to find via the “Find a Community” search function.
Remember that you won’t just be sharing your own content into the Tribe. You’ll be sharing content from other Tailwind Community members so it’s helpful if they are posting quality content for you to share. Because of this, we recommend that you:
- Join Communities based on the quality of the members (perhaps you might know them from Pinterest. If not, then click on their profile to see the content they share).
- Assess the activity of the Community. Is it active?
- Check the preview of the content in the Community. This will show you if the content being shared is a good fit for you.
Overall we are loving Tailwind Communities. It’s free to get started, which is why we believe that it’s a great way to grow your Pinterest traffic. It’s been a huge contributor to our success with Pinterest marketing.
3. Tasty Pins
Tasty Pins has been a recent addition to our arsenal of Tools for Pinterest. We wish we had been able to use it earlier, but we are so glad we found it. Watch this video to see Tasty Pins in action:
Tasty Pins Feature Tour from Food Blogger Pro on Vimeo.
In a nutshell, Tasty Pins is a WordPress Plugin that helps you to optimize your visual content or Pins for sharing to Pinterest, SEO, and for screen readers too. With Tasty Pins, we can:
- Set Pinterest Descriptions – this allows you to optimize your Pinterest descriptions on images so that they perform well in Pinterest search. This includes hashtags and keywords to help them be discovered on Pinterest.
- Optimize Alt-Text – this helps with SEO and accessibility of your content. You should be using separate alt text (different to your Pinterest description). This describes what the image is – which helps Google to “read” your images.
- Hide Pinterest Images – Tasty Pins lets us add a Pinterest specific website image without showing it on the article or page.
- Disable Pinning on certain images – not every image is ideal for Pinning. This plugin enables you to disable “Pinning” on those images that you don’t want shared or saved to Pinterest.
- Add Hover Images – Tasty Pins lets you add a hover button to all images. This reminds readers that they should save or pin the images.
- Force-Pinning of Images – with Tasty Pins you can control which image from your article will be Pinne. This essentially “forces” that image to be the image that is pinned when someone shares your content.
Tasty Pins is super fast, plays “nice” with other plugins and has great support. Tasty Pins is currently $29 paid annually and we believe that this is a great investment in your blog success!
4. Easil
Having great visual content to share on your website is a major key to Pinterest traffic. So, we simply had to include Easil on this list of Tools for Pinterest.
At Easil, we pride ourselves on having some of the best looking templates out there for DIY Design. And we truly believe that many Pinterest users will gravitate towards stunning images over poorly created images, when searching for content to share. This is why we are so focused on helping non-designers create stunning visuals for their content marketing.
Here are a few examples of some of the “Pinterest-ready” templates you’ll find in Easil:
1. 1000 x 1500 “Pinterest Short” Templates.
This is the perfect size image for sharing to Pinterest. Pinterest themselves say that 1000 x 1500px is the current optimal size for images to be shared to Pinterest right now. This is likely going to be the size that you will use on all of your blog posts and some of your web pages.
Note: We use Tasty Pins to ensure that all of our 1000 x 1500 images are up-front-and-centre on our blog posts to encourage our readers to share our content. They can do this directly from our blog or via tools like Tailwind Tribes. And we share our Blog Posts with our Tailwind Tribes too, of course!
2. 735 x 1500 “Pinterest Mid” Templates
Our “Pinterest Mid” image template is perfect for creating slightly longer pins for catching attention. Think of it as a longer pin or a shorter infographi. If you need a little more length, this is a great option.
3. 735 x 3000 “Infographic” Templates
Our “Infographic” templates are a big hit with non-designers. Most non-designers will steer clear of infographics. They are too complicated to create (even when using many of the infographic tools). They can also be costly to outsource. We’ve tried to change that with our easy-to-edit templates that can be customised in minutes:
Our Easil Infographics:
- Are very drag-and-drop for easy editing.
- Have plenty of places to switch out text, colors and images.
- Are image-based, so it’s super easy for you to keep the same style, yet switch out photos or headings to create a complete ‘custom’ look.
- Are not “super-long” so that they are more likely to be viewed and shared on Pinterest.
Note: Pinterest has indicated that they may start to reduce the reach on extra “tall” or “giraffe” pins. But, so far we are still seeing good traffic results on posts with infographics. Our Tribe members love to share them too! We will continue to design infographics and include them in blog posts while they are still being shared. As with anything, watch your Pinterest and Tailwind analytics to see what’s working and do more of that!
Oh, and there’s more… way more inside Easil to help you create stunning images both individually or as a team of any size. Check out our recent Easil+ update to see all the wonderful features we have added to Easil. They’re game-changing for DIY Design, just sayin’.
And if course it goes without saying that if you have any questions about Easil, reach out to our team in the app. We are always happy to hear template requests and feature feedback. You can get started with a free account here.
5. Pinterest (and their Resources)
It would be remiss of us to not mention Pinterest itself. Yes, we rely a lot on Tailwind to do the grunt work of Pinterest scheduling (via Pinterest). But there are a few key features of Pinterest that have been contributed greatly to growing our account and our Pinterest traffic.
These include:
1. The Pinterest Business Blog
Pinterest has an awesome blog that is easy to read and packed with advice. We recommend that you subscribe to it and check in on it regularly to check the latest advice from Pinterest including:
- Tips and Tools for getting more reach and engagement on Pinterest. Their team literally tells you what is working and not working right now on Pinterest and any directions they will be taking. They definitely reveal more than other social media platforms.
- What’s new from Pinterest – trends across different industries and across Pinterest itself for business users. They highlight success stories too!
- Industry stats and infographics about visual content, just like this one
Bookmark the Pinterest blog and add it to your reading list!
2. Pinterest Group Boards
We have joined a few key Pinterest Group Boards where we can share and contribute content. Just note that it’s not the same as Tailwind Tribes in terms of members being required to share as well as save content. However, there are definitely quality Group Boards out there that have great engagement and shares.
We recommend that you use Pinterest Group Boards in conjunction with your Tailwind Account to track which boards have the best engagement. You’ll get this data from your Tailwind analytics. As we showed above, you can also use Tailwind to share multiple pins to boards with ease. This can happen over ‘intervals’, so that you are spacing out the saves and not repeating content too often.
Try joining one or two Group Boards and then grow your boards from there. Remember to check in on them regularly and share content from others too.
3. Other Pinterest Tools
Even though we use Tailwind, you should keep abreast of Pinterest tools and new developments. Pinterest has a whole swag of tools that you can use for your blog or website (from Pinning tools to analytics), and they are adding new features all the time.
We recommend that you get started with a Business account here and check out the Pinterest for Business section of their blog. This includes all of the tools and functionality that you can tap into as a business user.
Are You Excited about these Tools for Pinterest?
These are all tools that have helped us grow Easil’s blog. We will continue to focus on Pinterest as a key social media platform for traffic and shares. Besides, we love the community of bloggers and readers who hang out on Pinterest, so it’s kinda fun!
Over to You!
Are you using Pinterest? What tools are you using to grow your account and traffic? Let us know in the comments below and come and check out our content on our Pinterest account.
