Is Tailwind Really Skyrocketing Your Traffic?
Learn if Tailwind is really going to double, even triple your traffic!! Find out if Tailwind is really skyrocketing your traffic!
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more information.
As you can tell my blog is not that old. At the moment I’m writing this it’s not even a month since I started marketing my posts. I did start publishing a lot of my post a month an a half ago, but if you’re in the blogging world you know that you’ll have no traffic without marketing your content.
If you’re planning to start your own blog or if you have a new one, more than likely you know that Pinterest has to be your best friend. In case you don’t already know that, I’m telling you now. Pinterest is extremely important in driving blog traffic.
There’s no blogger on the world wide web that doesn’t recommend Pinterest for marketing your blog. I actually opened my Pinterest account half a year or so ago, when I decided to start this blog.
If you are wondering why I have a 7 months old Pinterest account and I only launched my blog it’s because I am the kind of person that does a lot of research and learning (and a bit of procrastination) before starting any project.
While Pinterest has to be your best friend, will also eat a lot of your time. After months of manual pinning and lots of time spent on Pinterest, I realized that it’s going to get harder and harder to keep up. So I decided to research some tools to help me cut down on the time I spend on Pinterest.
What I found was that most bloggers recommended two tools, Tailwind and Boardbooster. To help me figure out if these tools are worth investing in, I researched all the bloggers from which I read articles about these tools.
After reading their post I would go to their Pinterest profile and see how many followers they have, how many monthly views and most importantly how many Group Boards they’re on.
While reading all the blog post that were promising these tools will skyrocket your Pinterest an Blog traffic through the roof I always wondered if it’s really the tool or it’s because of all the group boards that they’re part of. Or probably the 10’s of thousands of followers they have.
I decided to test one of the tools myself before having my own content out there and before I pinned to any group boards.
I chose to use Tailwind because of all the reviews and because it was an approved Pinterest partner. As I’m writing this, Pinterest adviced all Boardbooster users to stop using the tool. Also, Boardbooster announced that they are going down. Now you won’t have too many problems to decide which one to use.
This is not going to be a post on what Pinterest and Tailwind are or how to use Tailwind. That is a post for another day. I suspect that if your reading this post you already know what they are. This is going to be a post to help you decide if Tailwind is really skyrocketing your traffic and if it’s worth your money or not.
While it’s not going to be a huge loss for me if I lose the money I invested in Tailwind, I know there are a lot of people out there that have extremely tight budgets for investing in their blogs.
Is Tailwind really skyrocketing your traffic or not?
I just want to specify that I didn’t use the free version of Tailwind, I went from manual pinning to using the paid version. I was manually pinning more than 150 pins a day so I had to use the paid version to actually see any results.
In the picture below you’ll see my stats before I started using Tailwind. At the beginning of March, I hit the 400K monthly users on Pinterest and started going down and down no matter how much I tried to keep it going up. Average monthly engagement also went down. I started the month of March with 12K people engaging with my pins and went down to 9800 mid-May. This is probably because of Pinterest changes and the start of summer.
Mid May I got down to 270K monthly viewers. At this point, I started posting on my blog but I didn’t start marketing the content.
I didn’t even have my site verified on Pinterest.
Mid May was when I decided to start testing Tailwind and to be honest, I had no expectations. I thought it’s going to take a month or two to actually see results, but I had a huge surprise only a few days later.
Next day after starting to use Tailwind my monthly views went up after 2 months of continuously dropping. My views went from 273K to 284K the next day. The first day I had fewer pins scheduled through Tailwind than what I used to manually pin because I didn’t have time to properly set it up. The results were not spectacular but were still a win. I was using Tailwind for less than 24 hours and my views went up after 2 months.
The second day I upped my Tailwind game and I got closer to what I used to manually pin and my views went up to 358K. My third day I hit the 500K mark and my sixth day I passed the 1 million threshold.
A month later I was at 2.1 million viewers and what’s even more important is that my engagement went from 9800 per day to 63k per day. Your engagement is way more important than the monthly views, but without monthly views, you won’t have any engagement.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, up to this point I had no pins of my own nor was I pinning to group boards.
All this time I was also manually pinning a few times a day, but I only spend on Pinterest 10% of the time I used to, before using Tailwind. It’s important to be present and active on Pinterest.
If you’re not convinced yet if Tailwind is really skyrocketing your traffic, I’ll give you the insights on my blog page views. These page views are for 2 weeks after launching my blog. I hit the 2000 page views in just 15 days and got to 3000 views 2 days later.
I got these pageviews with Tailwind’s help. In all honesty, I can tell you that I didn’t use any specific strategy up to this point and I didn’t even market all my content.
Tailwind pricing and plans
Free Trial
Tailwind offers a free trial that includes 100 scheduled pins without a time limit to use them, meaning you can use them in a day or a year. Also, there is no credit card required for the free trial. After you’ve published 100 pins you’ll be prompted to upgrade.
Pricing and Plans
Tailwind offers a few different plans. They offer the Plus account for bloggers and small businesses and they have 2 other plans for large brands and agencies.
I have the Plus account which is $15 per month or $9.99 if you pay for the whole year at once ($120/year). If you pay monthly you’ll get 400 pins per month and unlimited pins per month if you pay annually. You also get 4 months free when you pay annually.
Conclusion
Is Tailwind really skyrocketing your traffic? Is it worth the money?
The short answer is YES to both. To me anyway. I don’t have to spend as much time on Pinterest, and it gives me more time to work on other important blogging tasks. My blogging time is quite limited. I’m doing it in between my full-time job and taking care of my two little ones.
It makes it way easier to manage my account and to put in place a solid marketing strategy.
If you are serious about your Pinterest marketing strategies than Tailwind should be the main tool your using.
6 Comments
Cristina
Grainne,
It all depends on how old and popular your Pinterest account is. For the new accounts the more you pin the better. As we speak I reached over 4 mill views on my Pinterest account pining around 100 pins per day through Tailwind and I also pin up to 30 times manually. I lowered the number of times I pin through Tailwind for a couple of days and my views went down. As soon as I got back to 100 a day the views went up again.
Larger accounts with tons of followers get a lot of traffic even when they post 30 times a day.
Grainne Foley
Christina,
Are you still posting 100 times per day? I thought I heard it was better to post between 10 – 30 times per day?
Rose Barnett | Life Management for Moms
Y’know one of the things that my site is about is giving moms -the steps-. I am glad for you but could you give us details about what your pinned, how much, times and which boards? Your own boards, group boards, your own pins, others? This is the details that I struggle with.
Cristina
I understand your struggle, I was the same. That’s why I did this test. Before I started using Tailwind I was manually pinning more than 100 times a day. After I started using Tailwind I scheduled 100 pins per day. For this I used the smart schedule feature that Tailwind has. You tell Tailwind how many times you want to schedule per day and it gives you the best times to pin. While I tested Tailwind I had no content of my own. I pinned only others pins and only to my own boards. As I mentioned in my post I didn’t even had my site verified on Pinterest. I hope this helps. If you have any other questions let me know.
Vox
I am still not sure if knowing more about how to use Pinterest is helping me do better on Pinterest. It did at first, but now it seems like the more boosting tactics I try, the more my views fluctuate. This makes me reluctant to pay to increase this number. Your post was incredibly informative though.
Cristina
Pinterest is still a mystery to me, and as you said the traffic always fluctuates. Even so, for me Tailwind is a awesome, because it frees up a lot of my time. I have a full time job and 2 little kids and my time for blogging is limited. Now I spend less time pinning manually and I can focus on other tasks.