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How I doubled my passive income $$ with Pinterest & Tailwind

How I escalated both my passive income and website traffic thanks to Tailwind and Pinterest, a case study. Today I am going to share the strategies for growing my site traffic, sales in my shops and passive income thanks to Pinterest by automating my pinning using the Tailwind app.

It doesn't matter the kind of work you do, or if you are doing to full time or as a side hustle, finding time during the day to do every little task (like constant pinning) is HARD!

And don't even get me started on trying to find balance with family and being a solopreneur! All the hats we have to wear make our task list seem like something impossible to conquer.

Nearly IMPOSSIBLE!

That's where the beauty of automation comes to the rescue!

I am just starting to implement automation in my business and in just a few months, there has been such a huge change!

I feel like I'm getting more done and actually gaining back control in so many areas. That is why I needed to share this post with all of you guys!

TRAFFIC IS EVERYTHING

We all know that traffic is everything, no matter if you are selling physical products, digital products, have a blog or just trying affiliate marketing on social media for the first time.

The only way to make money is if you can reach the right people (so they can purchase what you promote, of course)

So getting traffic, and what's more important, reaching your target audience aka the people that are searching for what you offer is fundamental.

Pinterest has always been a big factor for the traffic in my blog and shops, but it was only a few months ago that I started taking it seriously. I knew that if I was going to step my game I needed help, so I invested in a little gem that opened my eyes to what having a Pinterest strategy really is.

And that is the Billionaire Blogger Pinterest Manual, I actually invested in the Billionaire Blogger membership because it includes this manual and all the courses created by Paul Scrivens (aka Scrivs). His System will soon change names and platform, so I will share once it's revealed, but all I can say is that his community and the courses have been fundamental in understanding this blogging thing again.

But back to the manual,  since I knew what my weaknesses were and that I needed to work on my Pinterest strategy, I headed straight to read the manual and GOSH!

I was both a little shocked about how awful I was really performing on Pinterest and excited to give all these strategies a try, because if you are starting or down in numbers, the only way is UP!

 SCHEDULE PINS

The very first thing I did after reading a few pages of the BB Pinterest Manual was to set up a trial for Tailwind.

If you are not familiar with Tailwind, it’s a Pinterest approved scheduling app.

I don't know about you, but I tried to be more consistent with manual pinning, but honestly, with 1,008,374 things I have to do for my business and family.

Pinterest was just not high in the priorities, so it often was neglected and maybe I would pin something only if I ran into something pin-worthy and I had some time to spear (spoiler alert – it happened about once a month)

That’s when Tailwind came to my rescue, setting everything up ahead of time not only helped me stay on top of the best times to pin but also allowed me to curate my Pinterest feed to be more intentional with not only the kinds of pins I am creating but also the different parts of my business that I am sharing and what order.

With Tailwind, now I can preview the order of my pins and if something looks too similar to the previous or following one, I can drag and drop to change it.

PINNING WITH INTENTION

One of the things that I learned I was not doing correctly, was pinning with intention.

I joined Pinterest when it was first starting before they officially launched. When you would need to get an invitation from another designer or show your “style” to receive an invitation, they wanted you to pin high-quality & beautiful images. Mostly about design and decoration.

Pinterest has grown and it’s a whole different beast now, pinning pretty pictures doesn't cut it anymore and I am so glad I realized this, so I can fix it!

The first thing you should do if you plan to monetize your feed or bring traffic to your site or shop, it is to create (or switch) to a business account. The benefits of having a business account are:

  1. Analytics
  2. Rich pins
  3. Promoted pins
  4. Buyable pins

Pinterest has over 200 million active users and with such a huge audience is expected that there’s going to be many people trying to get attention for their products or services. So it can get pretty loud pretty fast.

You have to have a plan of attack or your pins will get lost in the noise, one of them is the pinning time. Thanks to Tailwind, you can set that up, they can suggest to you how many times a day and the best time during the day to pin depending on your audience’s behavior. Or you can select to add your own time slots.

PINTEREST IS A SEARCH ENGINE

The main difference between other social media platforms and Pinterest is that people normally log in to search for the solution to a problem. In essence, Pinterest is more of a search engine than a social platform.

People are looking for things in specific, and they use pins as ways to get to the solution, whether that will be how to make memory bear or the best classes to learn hand-lettering. Readers are looking for an answer to their problem.

And in order to rank better, we need to use SEO basics to get our content found.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s applied to search engines like Google. Pinterest follows the same principles. It basically reads all of the information provided by you and determines how relevant it is to people looking for your same information.

The information you are giving Pinterest to make this decision is:

  • Pin title
  • Pin description
  • Use of keywords
  • Boards the pin has been saved to
  • Size of image (it has to be pin friendly)

Word also says that the name of your image file and the number of saves/likes is also a factor on the way Pinterest ranks your pin.

The easiest way to have your content found is by using high-quality long-tail keywords in not only your pin description but also the board description, your pin title and hopefully your profile description as well. In combination with eye-catching images and a pin schedule to not only your boards but also group boards.

long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase that contains at least three words, they are used to target niche demographics rather than mass audiences. In other words, they're more specific and often less competitive than generic keyword terms. Because of that, they provide both short-term and long-term benefits.

Since they're very specific, they allow you to rank highly in search results for popular topics relatively quickly while still gaining ground on head terms. Plus, they tend to attract highly qualified traffic that's more likely to convert to leads and customers. – From hubspot.com

BASIC STEPS TO LEVEL UP ON PINTEREST

In order to take advantage of all the spaces, Pinterest lets you customize the information, you should (if you haven't already) do the following:

  1. Set up your account as a business profile: As I mentioned before you want to set up your account as a business, you will have access to so many more tools, like analytics and buyable pins. Set up your account here.
  2. Fill out your bio and board information: Not just add cute names for your board and the name of your business, use keywords relevant to your niche, this information (especially your board description) is crucial to get found. Oh and also, write sentences with keywords, (don’t do keyword stuffing) you need to write for your audience first, the bots second.
  3. Claim your URL: The steps are easy to follow and it allows you to set up rich pins for your store or blog. Claim your URL here.
  4. Enable rich pins: Once your URL is claimed, you should enable rich pins so that all the images pinned from your website, display all of your information and logo. Enable them here.
  5. Create Pin friendly images: The size for Pinterest friendly images is always changing, but as of this year, they no longer allow super long images, and the suggested ratio is 2:3.

HOW I DOUBLED MY PASSIVE INCOME?

The answer is easy, by studying the basics of how Pinterest works and using automation to implement the strategies learned.

And the tool to do that my friends is the Tailwind app.

Thanks to Tailwind, I can:

  • Schedule pins that are popular in my blog to different boards (grouped together) using the “USE INTERVAL” option.
  • Schedule one item from each of my shops every other day and also set it to go to multiple boards with the interval option.
  • Share content from other people that have high-quality & beautiful pictures to fill up my feed.

And I don't take giving the credit for the growth to Tailwind lightly.

I am 100% sure that I would not have had the growth in both my passive income and my blog traffic without Tailwind, and the reason I know this is because I recorded the major events and thins that happened since I first signed up and it directly correlates to my traffic:

  1. This was when I first started scheduling pins with Tailwind after reading the BB Pinterest manual. I was doing 3 pins a day.
  2. But then while we were on vacation, I ran out of pins on my Tailwind schedule so for about a 10 days, I didn't post anything.
  3. I came back to pinning and also added 3 extra pins to my top 5 posts in my blog and added items from my Etsy SVG shop as well as my physical products shop and studio. I was pinning 5 times a day.
  4. I lowered the number of pins per day back to 3 per day.
  5. Changed it back to 5 pins per day BUT
  6. I ran out of pins again, for about a week
  7. I filled up my feed again and learned about the interval function on Tailwind

Ever since I started using Tailwind with the interval function to fill up my feed, my growth has been steady and my repins, and followers have grown too.

And the best part is that I am only scratching the surface the strategies on the BB Pinterest manual.

Now that I have a better idea of what is working, I created a diverse pin campaign, for both my blog, my studio and Esty shops.

One of my Etsy shops (HowJoyful Files) is where I sell my hand-lettered SVG files, this shop was my first attempt at passive income and in just one year I’ve had over 7,200 sales. Granted, they are files valued from $2.99 to $5.99 so it’s not a profit margin like what I get when I sell one of my baby blankets, BUT for the most part, it is passive income.

In my first month of this shop, I sold 27 files, by my second month I had reached 200 sales, without promoting too much.

So after I reached 2,000 sales I decided that I was going to also offer the files in other venues, and I developed and launched my own studio website. So now, the Esty sales in that shop are about 60% of the total I receive each month from all the places I sell my SVG files.

I know that showing REAL NUMBERS is always controversial because some people can't help but compare journeys. But the fact is that we are all in different paths and my journey might not look anything like yours.

Since I am just starting with passive income, I wanted to share real numbers, so you can see that growing it and getting extra side income is possible.

I still have my main shop and dedicate about 80% of my time to my physical products, BUT I am working and trying to make the switch, so I can have more time to spend with my little boys.

Because passive income equals FREEDOM!

The only thing that I don't want is for any of you to think that I am bragging about my journey.

I wanted to share real numbers and my progress because I want to be transparent with all of you and also so you can realize that if I can do this, YOU CAN DO IT TOO!

I want this numbers to INSPIRE YOU  to start your own passive income stream and also to learn to promote and bring traffic to your shop/website.

I want YOU to have the freedom you need to spend your time doing what you love <3

As a disclaimer, I do want to let you guys know that this is MY personal experience using the app and it might not be a typical result, but Tailwind also publishes the Typical Results of Tailwind for Pinterest Members every year, so you can see exactly what the average growth rate looks like for their members.

RELATED: Passive income for Artist, how to make money while you sleep

EXTRA STEPS I TOOK WITH MY BLOG

I added 2 plugins with Pinterest in mind:

  • Social Warfare: I love how you can not only add the social share buttons you see on my blog. But also, you can add pictures to your post and pages that are especially for Pinterest and other social media platforms, you can customize the description of the pin and Twitter / Facebook cards. With the Pro version, you can customize the look of the buttons and add extra features as well. Check out the plugin here.
  • Tasty pins: I also added this plugging because I notice that a ton of my images didn't have descriptions, so you would see them with a random file name as the description. In order to add a description to your image you can easily hard-code if you are knowledgeable enough, BUT I also liked the fact that you can add hidden images to your post (I don't like to add more than one image with bold text to my blog post) so this makes more images available to anyone using the pin button. Both of those features convinced me to try them and I never looked back. Check out the plugin here.
  • Pin design: I made sure to have easy to read eye-catching pins for my top 20 popular posts (This is still a work in progress) If you do not have Photoshop or other software to create pins, Canva is a great alternative, and this Canva templates for Pinterest by Bluchic are awesome!
  • Images: I also made sure to optimize my images after I resize. This way the post with a lot of images loads faster. On top of using “save for web” on photoshop, I also use this image compressor website. AND I installed the WP Smush Pro plugin. This extra steps significantly lowers the size of my images and I've gone from an average of 300kb per image to about 60-90kb. (PS. I normally have tons of images per post, so it was my biggest loading issue)

TAILWIND COMMUNITIES & GROUP BOARDS

One thing that is recommended in the Billionaire Blog Pinterest Manual is to join group boards, and I need to work on this, I’m only a member of 2 and I just created 2 boards myself that I am making group boards (This one for SVG files and this one for fonts, and if you would like to join just email me).

So I've definitely not taken full advantage of the group boards at all.

I also created this lettering tailwind community and joined a couple of other communities, I have to admit that I need to work on all this though, BUT if I am having this results without the groups and communities, I am super excited to see the growth possibilities!

» JOIN MY TAILWIND COMMUNITY « 

So if you are ready to give Tailwind a try, check them out here or by clicking on the image below.

I also found this very helpful video on how to get started, so if you sign up they can walk you on the first steps to get you set up.

I hope you guys find this post helpful! I can't wait to keep sharing my journey as I implement more strategies and increase the number of products I have to produce passive income.

If there's anything, in particular, you would like me to cover in a future post?

Just let me know in the comments!

Happy pinning!

Luna

Friday 8th of January 2021

hi Joy! thank you for the post! i have question. what do you do for that pinterest did not suspended your account? because i send messages to the admins group boards for join, and pinterest suspended my accaunt(

Joy Kelley

Sunday 10th of January 2021

Hi Luna!

Pinterest seems to always be updating their best practices. And I have always been a little paranoid about following them as close as possible, so I only joined about 5-6 group boards and make sure to never pin in a spammy way. So, never the same pin in the same day, mixing up the boards, also pinning content from others's not just mine and keeping a healthy pinning ratio. If they think that either your communication or your pinning seems spammy, they will suspend your account. They also make mistakes with their automated processes but are very good about restoring accounts that have been suspended by mistake. I've seen that a lot in blogging groups over Facebook, so if you need more information about that I would recommend joining some groups and searching there. I know I have read about it in the Mediavine publisher group =]

I hope that helps and that you get your account restored <3 Joy -

Tia

Saturday 5th of January 2019

Fantastic post! I'm super excited to see what will happen when I use Tailwind and optimize Pinterest for my Blog, store and YouTube channel.

Joy

Tuesday 15th of January 2019

I am so happy it will hopefully help you get more views to your blog and channel =] Happy Pinning!

Monica

Friday 5th of October 2018

Hi! I hate to nitpick but you have a typo in the heading of your post. Happy blogging and thanks for the info!

Joy

Friday 5th of October 2018

Thank you so much for lettering me know Monica! I really appreciate it!

Renata Marengo

Tuesday 7th of August 2018

Hi Joy, I love your post and I already downloaded this app and I started uasr this instant !! Thank you! I accompany your work here from the south of Brazil since when you did not have any baby <3 <3 <3

Joy

Wednesday 15th of August 2018

I am so happy that you started using it! It definitely changed the way I look at Pinterest =] And thank you so much for following from such a long time ago!! It seems like it was yesterday that we had no kiddos and now we have 3!

<3 Thank you so much for supporting my blog!

Comments are closed.