How To Schedule One Week of Pins in Five Minutes with Tailwind

This post contains affiliate links.

This post is going off in territory I don’t typically cover, but when I was explaining this process to a group of blogger friends, one of them suggested I turn it into a blog post. So, here we are! If you’re not a blogger, you may not be aware of just how much goes on behind the scenes of a blog to ensure that the posts that you work so hard to write actually get seen by more than just your mom (hi mom!). There’s managing your social media outlets from Facebook to Instagram, and sharing your content on platforms like StumbleUpon and Pinterest. Then there’s Twitter, and that’s just a whole can of worms I still don’t really understand. It’s Pinterest that I want to focus on with this post. Pinterest has been my number one source of blog traffic since the beginning of 2016. I made a few changes to the way I do my pinnable images, and signed up for “rich pins”, and it greatly increased my traffic from Pinterest. I also started to pin with pin35 and pin70 groups, and that is what gave me a significant boost to my Pinterest sourced traffic. I’m going to explain what pin35 or pin70 groups are, and then I’m going to explain how to participate in those groups effectively and efficiently with something called Tailwind. 

What is a pin35 or pin70 group?

A pin35 or pin70 group is a group of bloggers that get together to pin each other’s content on Pinterest. Everyone who signs up gets needs to have one Pinterest board that contains only content from their own blog (ie. no repins from other sources). The group gets sorted into smaller groups of four or five bloggers each who will repin pins from one person’s dedicated blog Pinterest board for one full week before moving on to the next person in their group for the following week, and so on. The number in the pin35 or pin70 refers to the total number of repins from each blogger you will do over the course of each week. With pin35, you’re repinning five pins per day for seven days, and with pin70, you’re repinning ten pins per day for seven days. Let me just outline a quick example so you can see how this works:

Example:
Blogger A
Blogger B
Blogger C
Blogger D

Each blogger pins the person directly beneath them for the first week. So A pins B, B pins C, C pins D, and D pins A. For the second week everyone moves down one person, so A pins C, B pins D, C pins A, and D pins B. You keep moving down the list each week until you have pinned 35 or 70 pins from each person on the list. Does that make sense? I hope so.

Why would I want to be in a pin35 or pin70 group?

The whole point of participating in these groups is to increase the amount of people that will see your pins on Pinterest thereby generating more traffic for your blog. If your pins are being repinned, Pinterest will be more likely to show your pins to more people. There’s a whole bunch of algorithm stuff that goes into this, but I don’t understand it completely and I really don’t want to try to get into that here. The point is to repin 5 or 10 pins PER DAY from a fellow blogger while a fellow blogger does the same for your pins. These groups really only work if everyone actually pins throughout the week. If you repin all 35 or 70 pins of your fellow blogger on day one (or day seven) of the week, then their pins won’t be continuously shared over the course of the week and there won’t be nearly the same boost in traffic from Pinterest as there would be if it was spread out over the week. The whole point is to have your blog’s content shared evenly throughout the weeks that the group is active.

Doesn’t this take up a lot of time?

Yes. Why yes it does. Or rather, it did. I used to pin “live” when I first started doing these groups. That means that I’d have to actually remember to go onto Pinterest at some point every single day to pin the five or ten pins from my fellow blogger, and I’d have to remember to do that all week, and then for the subsequent weeks while the pin35 or pin70 groups were active. And you know what? Sometimes I forgot until I was tucking myself into bed or until I woke up the next morning and realized I’d forgotten to do it. Then I would sit down and manually repin pins hoping I wasn’t repeating the same pins from the days before.

It’s not that pin35 or pin70 aren’t worth the time because they are so worth the time, but we’ve all got other stuff to be doing. You know, like spending time with our kids or actually writing posts for our blogs. There has to be a better more efficient way to participate in these pin35 or pin70 groups. Well, rejoice dear friends because there is a more efficient way AND it’s also more effective that “live” pinning! Meet Tailwind. Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing product that allows you to schedule pins and repins. Yes, schedule them. Not only can you schedule your repins for pin35 or pin70 in advance, but it also provides you with optimized time slots based on when the demographic of Pinterest users that are most interested in your type of content are actually on Pinterest. Brilliant. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of Tailwind here, but instead I’m going to show you how to save time and energy with Tailwind so you can schedule an entire week of pin35 or pin70 in just five minutes. Never forget to repin your fellow blogger ever again! It’s that good!

First, you need to set up your schedule. For the example I’m using below, I’m participating in a pin70 group. That means I have to pin ten pins from my fellow blogger every day from Monday through Sunday. Let’s start by looking at where you set up the number of time slots you need in your Tailwind schedule. In the Tailwind Publisher, you can add (or remove) time slots from your schedule to accommodate the number of pins you need for each day of your pin70 group. If you’re only in a pin35 group, you’d set up just five optimized time slots for each day. Click “+ Add Timeslot” to add more slots (note that the optimized times you can add will have a dashed green line around them). To remove time slots you’ll click on the time slot and then click on the garbage can icon that comes up.

Once you’re set up the number of optimized time slots that you need, you can click over to your Tailwind schedule. On the right, you’ll see all the time slots for the week sitting there empty. That’s what you want.

Then you’ll go to the pin board of the person you’re re-pinning (on Pinterest). You want to click on the little Tailwind icon on each individual pin. Do not use the Tailwind icon in your web browser beside the URL bar. This pulls up a selection of the pins from that board in a new tab or window, and it won’t pull up enough pins for the entire week you need to schedule. Because it also doesn’t pull the pins up in order, it becomes too complicated when you need to pin more than what’s displayed.

Every time you hit the Tailwind icon on the individual pin, a new window or tab will open with that pin and the scheduling options. Ignore that window, ‘X’ it out once it’s loaded, or click Save for Later. Stay on the Pinterest board and keep hitting the Tailwind icon on the pins you want to pin. If you’re doing one pin70 group, you’ll just click that icon on the number of pins you need to complete the week (that would be 70). I have no trouble just counting them in my head, but if you lose count you can always check how many you’ve done by looking at your drafts on Tailwind.

Now you need to open Tailwind in a new tab or a new window. On the left side, you can click on your drafts. When you do that, it will say “70 drafts” at the top (or 35 if you’re doing a pin35 group). On the right you’ll see your schedule. The time slot for each repin will be set out there greyed out/transparent because they are not yet scheduled. This is just a preview. If you scroll through your preview you should see 10 time slots for each day (Monday – Sunday), and they should each slot should have a pin in it with no pins overflowing into the following Monday.

If you’re repinning all the pins onto the same board (I have a “Blogs I Follow” board for everything that’s not a recipe), then you type that board in at the top right above the pins and it automatically sets that board for all of the repins at once. I quickly go through and change any recipe pins to repin onto my Recipes board. Just note that each pin should be set to go into one board only. You can put every pin into a different board, but every individual pin needs to be scheduled for just one board each. You may get a notification on some of the pins telling you that you’ve already saved that particular pin into the board that you’ve selected. If this happens you can just leave it if you want, or you can select a different board to pin it to. If you have a relevant group board, you can pin it there if you want. If you do opt to change the board it’s being pinned to, remember to remove the board with the yellow outline (you want only one board per pin).

Take a quick look to make sure all the pins have a board to go into. Check to make sure the preview on the right is showing the correct number of pins for each day with no gaps and no overflow. Then you hit the Schedule All Drafts button.

Just like that your entire week of pin70 is scheduled and ready to go! Your schedule on the right will now show all the pins in full colour, so you know they are all set. And you’re done. I promise that this will only take five minutes (or less) once you’ve got it down pat.

Now if you’re really keen, you can go and schedule your repins for week two of your pin70 group, and once that week is scheduled, you can set up week three, and so on. So in theory, you could schedule all four or five weeks of your pin70 group in about 20 to 25 minutes WEEKS in advance. How awesome is that?

Seems simple enough, right? But what happens if you’re in a pin70 group AND a pin35 group AT THE SAME TIME. Fear not, my friends! You can still use Tailwind to schedule both groups simultaneously without breaking a sweat. First, since you’ll need ten time slots for pin70 and five time slots for pin35 each day, you’ll want to go back to the Tailwind publisher and add more optimized time slots. Now you’ll need fifteen time slots each day (or twenty if you’re in two pin70s or more if you’re in more than two groups at one time). Once you’ve set up fifteen optimized time slots for each day, you’re going to open your pin70 person’s Pinterest board in one tab and your pin35 person’s Pinterest board in a second tab. You’re still going to use the Tailwind icon on each individual pin, but instead of selecting 70 pins from your pin70 person at all once, you’re going to select just 10 pins at a time. In order to ensure that you actually pin 10 from one and 5 from the other each day, you need to set it up one day at a time. It doesn’t actually take that much more time to do this either. Select 10 pins from your pin70 person in their tab and then go right to your pin35 person’s tab and select five pins. Now you go to Tailwind and look at your drafts. It will show that you have 15 drafts. Choose the Pinterest board you want to pin them to, and click “Schedule All Drafts”. You’ll see that it fills just one day of your schedule on the right. Go back to the pin70 person’s tab and select ten more pins, back to the pin35 person’s tab and select five more pins, back to Tailwind drafts, set the Pinterest board(s), and schedule. Repeat until you’ve done the whole week.

Is Tailwind free?

You can get a free trial of Tailwind just to see if it’s something you’ll find useful. The free trial has no time limit on it, but is good for up to 100 pins. If you love Tailwind, and I think you will, you can purchase it either on a month to month basis or pay for a full year up front. If you sign up monthly, you can schedule up to 400 pins per month. If you sign up for the whole year in advance, you can schedule an unlimited number of pins each month. I went for the whole year because when I’m in a pin70 group and a pin35 group at the same time (which happens often for me), I’m repinning more than 400 pins each month and that doesn’t even count scheduling my own pins from my own content. If you’d like to sign up for Tailwind, you will receive $15 off a one year subscription if you use my affiliate link (I do receive a small bonus if you sign up): SIGN UP FOR TAILWIND.