How to Use Tailwind for Free

Every time I look up how to drive traffic to my blog, every article recommends Pinterest, and specifically Tailwind to grow Pinterest. I got a bit discouraged that Tailwind was everyone’s solution. I’m not making enough money to justify paying for a monthly subscription. You can keep using Tailwind for free, even after your free trial ends. So why spend the money right now?

When you pay for a subscription to Tailwind you schedule however many pins a day, and it posts them for you at whatever time you selected. You still schedule pins the same way after your subscription ends, you just have to manually hit “pin now” instead of it posting for you. Read on for the tricks on how to use Tailwind for free.

If you still have to manually pin, why bother messing with Tailwind?

In one word: organization.

Sure you could come up with a spreadsheet. It would be a bear to manage, keep updated, and scroll through. And you couldn’t pin from it in one click.

Tailwind has a “drafts” tab and a “scheduled” tab. Those are where I spend most of my time. Every time I make a batch of Pinterest images (using Canva), I dump them into the drafts. Then once a week or so I schedule pins to fill up my weekly schedule. You can also schedule out further, which is really helpful for seasonal content you only pin a few months out of the year. That Pumpkin Cheesecake post from last year? You bet I’m scheduling that for this fall.

For me, the organization and ease of scheduling pins was worth figuring out how to use Tailwind for free.

But what about Tailwind Tribes?

With the Tailwind free trial you get access to 5 tribes of your choosing. Perhaps its the tribes I picked, but I’ve seen more growth from pinning my own content than having others pin my stuff from a tribe. Maybe I need to experiment with new tribes? I still add stuff to tribes, and occasionally pin a few from others, but I mostly stick to scheduling my own content.

In case you aren’t familiar with Tailwind tribes: It’s a place you can put pins in Tailwind for other people in that tribe to find and pin. Kind of like a group board, but hosted on Tailwind. Most are niche specific and have specific rules of the ratio of pins you can leave to how many you pin.

So have you actually seen growth?

Yes! Even without publishing as much new content as normal, views on my blog have increased by over 1000% this year, especially the last 3 months. More than 80% of that traffic is from Pinterest.

Blog views in 2020 (taken August 3rd). Notice 3 days in August have more views than the whole month of February.

After listening to Episode 65 of the Simple Pin Podcast on creating Pinterest images last fall, I picked out a few fonts that mixed well together and mostly stick to those for my images. This helps me be more efficient, and keeps my images clean and clear. At the same time I started getting more serious about Tailwind scheduling, but didn’t get super consistent with it until after the first of the year. Around March my Pinterest really picked up and has been growing since.

Link clicks from Pinterest have trended upward overall with a spike in April.

Alright so how to use Tailwind for free?

If you’re brand new to Tailwind, they do a pretty good job of helping you set up when you make an account. This link is a referral link, I’ll get a $15 credit. Regardless if you use my link or not you get a free trial.

Sign up for a new Tailwind Account.

As I mentioned before, I mostly stick to the “drafts” and “scheduled pins” sections of the publisher tab. Currently I’m scheduling 4-5 pins a day of predominately my own content. In the future I will probably up how many pins, but I’ve seen a decent amount of growth with just a few a day.

Drafts

After filling in the title, pin description, link, and what board I want to pin to, I use the “use interval” button to schedule pins. Pick a start data, and then how long you want Tailwind to wait before pinning the same pin to a different board. The start date is especially helpful for seasonal content, or scheduling pins for draft posts that aren’t published yet. Before I hit schedule, I do try to remember to “add to tribes”. Like I mentioned before, I don’t see a lot of repins from my tribes. I add them anyway, why not?

I try to pin old posts that I haven’t pinned in awhile. Sometimes I make a new image or two for those older posts. I also try to make new images for pins that did really well the previous month.

Scheduled Pins

Once you schedule some pins, you can hop over to “scheduled pins”. At first Tailwind will publish these pins at whatever time you chose, until it has published 100 pins. That’s where you’re free trial ends.

You can still utilize Tailwind’s scheduler though. Just hit “pin now” beside each pin. I do this daily, usually in the evening while watching TV because it takes less than 30 seconds. It does mean all of my pins get posted as a group, rather than spread out. Since I’m not pinning large volumes, it works for me. If you have a large volume of pins, pin some in the morning and a few in the evening.

IF YOU FORGET ABOUT YOUR SCHEDULED PINS AND YOUR PAGE REFRESHES, PINS THAT HAVE PASSED THEIR SCHEDULED PUBLISH TIME DISAPPEAR. POOF! GONE.

Now that I’ve shouted at you through the screen, lets talk how you can work around that.

Hit “pin now” before pins pass their publish time. I’ve set the time slots in my schedule to be later than 9 pm, because I’m more likely to catch them before 9 pm than before 4 pm or 6pm, etc.

Always navigate back to your “scheduled pins” tab and leave it open when you are done on Tailwind. As long as your page doesn’t refresh, your pins will be there waiting for you, even if they’re past their publish time. If you leave Tailwind open on your drafts or tribes page, and navigate to your scheduled pins, any pins that passed their publish time will disappear. Same goes if you close out Tailwind completely, and open it a day or 2 later.

The pins listed here were scheduled for a Sunday. I’m hitting “pin now” on a Monday.

I have gotten behind hitting “pin now” over the weekend and taken a few days to catch back up. As long as the page doesn’t refresh, you can catch up just fine. Most of the time I’m good to go because I’m in a pretty good habit of leaving Tailwind open to my scheduled pins. I have forgotten to do this and lost some pins here and there though. It’s annoying, but overall I’ve seen a lot of growth to make up for it.

I hope you found this post helpful! Share your Tailwind, tips, tricks, & successes with me!