The Death of BoardBooster – 5 million views in one month with Tailwind!

So, I don’t know about any of you other bloggers out there but when BoardBooster bit the dust at the end of June this year I literally lost days off my life in total panic. (Pinterest is a HUGE part of this blog’s world – I get over 50% of my traffic from Pinterest!) It all started with a great peak I had to over 2 million views a month on Pinterest back in April to a constant, ridiculous, steady decline that I could not stop no matter what I did.

Then Pinterest sent everybody an email letting us know that they were now basically demoting accounts that used BoardBooster and suddenly that long (horribly long) endless decline on my account made a lot of sense…

I went ahead and got a free account through Tailwind because, quite frankly, I had no other choice. Pinterest does not support any other pin scheduling apps.

(Only a couple of months before all of this happened I had actually DELETED my Tailwind account cause I rather hated it and BoardBooster was great so I saw no reason to keep it… *clears throat*)

I started making the big switch several days before BoardBooster finally announced their end.

So, here’s how I did it without totally losing my whole damn mind and please KEEP IN MIND THAT I AM STILL LEARNING.

But, first, I gotta show you guys what happened to my account after I switched to Tailwind.

Yup that is literally 2 million to 5.3 million views in one month!

Remember BoardBooster closed down at the end of June, you can see my account did a little OMG I’M DYING right before Tailwind picked me back up again.

Ok, for those of you who never used BoardBooster this is how it worked. It would make a secret board and what you pinned in there it would pin out of the secret board to a public board as often per day (or per week) as you wanted.

It was really awesome because it was so simple! You just pinned to your secret boards and BoardBooster did the rest.

So I was already used to pinning to secret boards so I continued that idea with Tailwind.

(This is gonna be a long post and its probably gonna be confusing and I’m sorry I’m not even gonna provide screen shots cause I’m pretty sure that would make it even worse.)

(Also, here’s a great tutorial on how to use Tailwind because if you are not familiar with Tailwind this post is going to be even more confusing.)

(Also, if you click on this Tailwind link you will get a $15 coupon toward your new Tailwind account and I’ll get one too!)

To start with I purchased the pro version of Tailwind which is either $9.99 a month or you can get a break if you purchase a full year. It is UNLIMITED pins with the plus plan which shocked me to realize that Tailwind would be saving me money compared to BoardBooster who I was paying $30 per month!

First I went into the scheduling portion of Tailwind and set it up to pin 50 pins a day. With that done I had to figure out how I was going to add pins to my schedule easily.

So I have my public boards which are: a few devoted to just my pins and a few devoted to other pins plus my own.

I already had secret boards set up for all of my public boards so I simply continued filling them up. When they had a good number of pins in them (at least 50) I would open the secret board and use the Tailwind app for Chrome to pin them all to their corresponding public board.

Then I deleted all of the pins out of the secret board.

Then I went into Tailwind and shuffled my queue.

It took me a bit to get used to it but it worked fine.

With my main scheduling done and set up I knew I was gonna be OK. My Pinterest account recovered so I moved on to figuring out how I was going to start pinning more of my own content and (eventually) incorporating group boards into this.

I’ve known for a long time now that I’ve never taken full advantage of my Pinterest account for Grandma’s House DIY. Yes, I was already getting over 50% of my traffic from Pinterest but of 50 pins a day I was only pinning maybe 3 or 4 of my own.

I did some searches on Google and almost laughed – apparently I’m NOT normal. Apparently most folks don’t pin a lot of other people’s content.

So, honestly, this is probably why I’m up to over 5 million views a month, of all of my pinning the majority of them are not my own pins.

A few months ago (when my Pinterest account was in its downward spiral of death because of BoardBooster) I removed myself from over fifty group boards. I left the boards that A: were not relevant/in my genre of DIY, decorating etc., B: They were basically dead or C: So huge there was no point in being a part of them.

(Remember, anything pinned to those group boards reflects on your Pinterest account so if the content wasn’t what I would normally pin, I left the board.)

I stayed a part of 21 group boards based on several factors. They had to be followed by AT LEAST 8,000 accounts and they couldn’t have a ton of people pinning to them. The board had to have pins that I myself might have pinned and they had to be up and running: I wanted to see at least twenty new pins in there a day.

(I’ll post another post here in a few weeks about my new strategy to get into my remaining group boards using Tailwind and how it worked out – this one is gonna be long enough as it is lol)

So I tackled trying to figure out how to publish more of my own pins. What I almost never did was repin my own pins which is just stupid… I would have a post go live, I would pin all of its good pics and then never pin it again.

So I made some more secret boards on Pinterest with all of my good pins just from Grandma’s House DIY that I would consider my evergreen content. Unlike all my other secret boards I would not be deleting the pins in these boards after pinning them.

Instead I now had all of my best pins sorted and ready to go either to public group boards or my own public boards.

Here’s how I look at my boards on my Pinterest account: I don’t pin to any of my Grandma’s House DIY boards unless I have new pins for them. That’s it.

My other public boards are the boards I’m pinning dozens of pins to daily, their pins are constantly being moved down the line and they are directly responsible for the popularity of my pinterest account.

Those public boards I had only been pinning my own pins to when I had new content – not smart. I was treating them the same way I was treating my Grandma’s House DIY boards.

With so many pins moving in those boards I had a great opportunity to start repeating my own pins in them.

So that’s what I started doing with my evergreen secret boards. Once every couple of weeks I pin all of my evergreen pins from Grandma’s House DIY into them. So all of my followers have the opportunity to see every single pin from Grandma’s House DIY at least once a month.

This pushed my pinning into more of a 40/60 (my pins being 40% of my Pinterest publishing) and had absolutely no effect on my Pinterest stats at all. But I got more clicks over to my website so it actually worked out great! PHEW!

Tailwind literally skyrocketed my Pinterest account to the moon. I can’t believe how much my account not only recovered but did SO much better with Tailwind.

Do I pin a TON of pins? Yes I do! And, back in the day when my account was spiraling down, I actually attempted pinning less to see if maybe I was simply pinning too many. THAT DIDN’T WORK. In fact the minute I reduced the amount I was pinning my account took a hard hit.

Around 50 pins a day spread out across 12 main public boards is what has really worked best for me.

(That does not include my Grandma’s House DIY boards because they only get pinned to when I have new content from my blog which is certainly not daily!)

So this is what I miss SO much about BoardBooster. You could adjust exactly how many pins go in each board per day. Right now with Tailwind its just a crap shoot of constant adjusting.

I’ll look at my Tailwind schedule and see a pile of specific pins for one board which means I either A: have to delete them or B: go find a bunch of other pins to go into other boards to even it out!

I just wish there was a way you could go into Tailwind, pull up your boards and there be a little setting to adjust how many can be pinned there per day.

That’s it!

That’s all I need!

So this is how I keep it all straight because I have over 30 secret boards and stuff can get real hard to look at and figure out real quick. BoardBooster added a ” – ” (a dash) in front of the title of each secret board so they were easy to find and would group together when you went to pin.

This helped a great deal but I needed more than that.

After the dash I added a 1 to those secret boards I wanted at the top alphabetically and then a 2 to the next set of secret boards and then a 3 to the last set.

I have my main secret boards I pin mostly to (those got the 1) and then I have my main Grandma’s House DIY secret boards (those got the 2) and then I have my evergreen secret boards for Grandma’s House DIY (those got the 3). The title after the dash and number are just really cut down versions of the public board I want them to eventually get pinned to.

How do I find my pins?

I hit all of my group boards hard when it comes to finding pins to pin, I also try and get to as many bloggers and pin their content directly from their blogs as often as possible (many times via link parties that I’m participating in including my own) and then, after that, I just use my feed.

(My feed is filled with a bunch of other amazing bloggers that I’m following that also pin my niche.)

One thing I really love about Tailwind is that it requires every pin have a source URL and a description. This is a big deal and makes sure us pinners are going for quality and integrity.

Unfortunately Tailwind (or the Tailwind app for Chrome) doesn’t always perform correctly and, about 20% of the time, when you try to schedule to Tailwind is doesn’t include the source URL rendering the pin unpinnable and useless.

Hopefully tailwind will fix this problem shortly cause its really annoying!

And that’s it! I still have a lot to learn with Tailwind – I have not even really looked into tribes at all.

Next post on this topic I’ll get into how I’ve started trying to pin to group boards again and how I’m working on also pinning affiliate pins!