Beginner Tailwind Tips

Pinterest is my favorite social media platform. I would hang out there and collect ideas, even if I wasn’t blogging. For years I have heard successful bloggers recommend Tailwind for increasing Pinterest traffic. But I kept putting it off until I had the time to learn how to use Tailwind and set it up. Well, I decided that it’s finally time to MAKE the time to work with Tailwind!

So I signed up.

If you haven’t signed up yet you can use my link to sign up for Tailwind and get a free month! (And I will get a free month too, so thank you very much.) You can also use Tailwind for Instagram, so if you’re active there it’s even more of a bargain!

It does take awhile to set up Tailwind for Pinterest. Here are 11 tips that I stumbled across or thought of as I started working with Tailwind. Most of these are tips that I thought of as I was setting up my Tailwind account – at least I think I did! What is the saying? There’s nothing new under the sun? Others are tips that you aren’t likely to see unless you research things to death. (I spend wayyyy too much time researching. Guilty as charged!)

What does this mean? My goal is for you to find different tips from what you’ve seen other places. It means that you will cover the basic Tailwind tips like you find in most tutorials, like setting up your account, installing the browser extension, or shuffling your cue, by watching the Tailwind tutorials on the Tailwind site. Then, the tips that I cover in more detail are tips I discovered as I worked with Tailwind, explored the Tailwind dashboard, and did further research.

I hope you find these Tailwind tips useful!

Tips for how to use Tailwind for Pinterest as a Beginner

1. Tailwind for Pinterest Tutorials

I had a hard time finding the basic Tailwind tutorials on their site. I don’t know if it’s just me, or because I tried the free plan a couple of years ago so Tailwind thought I’d done it already and hid it. But to get started:

1. Under the Question Mark in the upper right hand corner select > Tailwind Video Guides. Or –
2. Just use this link to the Tailwind Video Guides.
3. Watch Mastering Tailwind for Pinterest, The Smart Schedule, Spreading Out Content with Interval Pinning, Saving Time with Board Lists, Finding Your Best Pins with Pin Inspector, and What’s New in Publisher 2.0.

2. Connect Tailwind to Google Analytics

Connect your Tailwind account to Google analytics to get Referral Traffic data.

1. >Monitor your domain >Referral Traffic. Follow the prompts to connect to your Google account. If you have more than one website, be sure to select the website that is connected to your Tailwind account.

3. Turn on email notifications for Tailwind Pinterest statistics

You will see everywhere that one reason to get Tailwind is for you Pinterest stats. BUT! If you purchase their Plus plan (their best value), you only get statistics for the last 7 days. Turn on summary stats emails to get daily, weekly, and/or monthly summary emails to help you keep track of your Tailwind and Pinterest stats. I think daily stats would confuse me and drive me crazy. (I might also be prone to over-reacting and wasting tons of time on every little uptick or down-tick. Ahem.) I signed up for both weekly and monthly summary emails.

1. Go to > settings (gear in upper right hand corner), > email preferences
2. Turn on the profile summaries you would like
3. > update preferences

4. Set up Tailwind Board Lists

Be sure to set up Board Lists so you can schedule your own pins to multiple boards easily. You can see how I organized my Pinterest boards and boardlists [post to come].

1. Go to > Publish > Boardlists
2. I put the names of my Tailwind boards IN ALL CAPS to make them easier to spot when I’m scheduling using the Tailwind extension. In fact,  just to help avoid mistakes, I decided to use capitalization to indicate the type of board as well. In Tailwind you can’t see which boards are secret when you start typing to choose from your list of boards. To keep it straight, I made all my public boards lower case, secret boards are capitalized, and board list titles are in all caps.

5. Make sure the reference URL gets pulled when saving drafts or adding pins to your Tailwind cue.

Whenever you schedule a pin or save it for later to Tailwind (especially from Pinterest for some reason), always double check and make sure the URL has been pulled before you click that last button. Sometimes the URL is missing even if you are repinning from a Pinterest closeup! There is nothing worse than thinking you have a bunch of drafts saved to fill your cue quickly, and finding that a bunch of URLs are missing and you can’t use them.

6. Watch your source URLs when adding a lot of drafts all at once!

If you have the feed or a search up from Pinterest, you can use your browser Tailwind extension to add a lot of drafts from Pinterest all at once. But when you do, make sure each of the pins has a source URL. If they don’t, this tip from Tailwind on how to get Pinterest to quit hiding the source URL worked for me.

7. Trick for scheduling drafts for Tailwind from Pinterest Secret Boards

Having trouble scheduling your pins in Tailwind from secret boards? When you try to schedule pins from secret boards does it tell you that you need to add a source url even though you know it’s there? In a private group I was in, some people though you couldn’t schedule from Pinterest Secret Boards so maybe they ran into this same problem. This tip from Tailwind on how to get Pinterest to quit hiding the source URL worked for me for this issue as well.

8. Tip for scheduling drafts to your cue in Tailwind

When you’re scheduling pins from drafts in in the  Tailwind Publisher dashboard, sometimes you have to click > Save Changes at the bottom of the page to get the drafts you’ve selected to go onto your schedule. So click the Save Changes bottom periodically as you schedule drafts so your feed will update. If you try to leave the page, Tailwind will remind you.

9. How to optimize your Tailwind pinning schedule times.

After you’ve used Tailwind a week or two, it will have collected some data. Have Tailwind generate a new smart schedule, customized for your best time to pin, from scratch. I’m going to do this every two weeks for awhile, until I get better established.

1.  > Generate Smart Schedule
2. Enter the number of times you want to post per day.
3. > Generate New Schedule

10. Let Tailwind help share your content!

Submit your website to Tailwind so that it will show up for other Tailwind users as suggested pins. I found out about it as a suggestion in my weekly Tailwind Summary email. I hadn’t seen it anywhere else! But you can also find the directions in the Tailwind help article How do I apply for Suggested Pins?

11. Help Tailwind help you get your Pinterest account in shape.

Once you’ve signed up for Tailwind suggested pins, it might make sense that Tailwind would be more likely to recommend your pins if the think your account is “complete.” I honestly don’t know. But it couldn’t hurt. In the very least I’m sure they’re trying to guide you in ways they think will help you on Pinterest.

1. Go to your dashboard.
2. In the upper right hand corner.
3. Under “Complete your account” either do what they suggest first, or go to > “See all suggestions.”

I hope these Tailwind tips help you to rock Pinterest! Happy pinning! (I know. I know. It’s called saving now. That sounds so boring. Pinning forever!)