As a busy mom who’s running a family and a blog, you know how important it is to make the best use of your time. There’s always so much to do, it seems virtually impossible to get it all done.

So when it comes to using social media for getting traffic to your blog, being ruthlessly efficient is a must (we’ve all been down that Facebook and Pinterest black hole where entire hours disappear in seconds)!

I am still learning the ins and outs of using social media to help me grow my blog, but have had huge success with using Tailwind Tribes to get blog traffic from Pinterest.

I thought I would share my Epic Guid on how to use Tailwind Tribes to help you get started and find your way around the inside of the Tribes dashboard so you can get your own surge of blog traffic!

If you’ve been wanting to jump on Pinterest to help you grow your blog, you’re definitely in the right place. I am going to walk you through step-by-step on how to get started.

While I don’t have any secret Pinterest traffic secrets to share, I can say that this guide will help you understand how to get started using the Tailwind Tribes.

I know what you’re thinking: another tool that’s going to cost me money.

But if you’re serious about turning your blog into a business, then you know that it’s impossible to do everything for free.

The great thing is that you can use the power of Pinterest and Tailwind Tribes to help you grow your blog, and once you have your blog profit plan in place, the boatloads of traffic are going to pay you back 10 times over.

How To Use Tailwind Tribes to Grow Your Blog

So ask yourself, do you want to make your life easier? If you understand that all business owners have to spend on their business, then you’re in the right place. I am going to show you how I use Pinterest to grow my blog.

Now if you’re new to Pinterest, you may not know what Tailwind is. It’s nothing more than an automated scheduler. It costs $10 per month or you can save by paying for the annual subscription. I went ahead and purchased the annual subscription because I love saving money.

YOU CAN TRY TAILWIND FOR FREE >>> (but you’ll probably want to go “all in” after reading the rest of this post!)

Tailwind has helped hundreds of bloggers make better use of Pinterest, without having to spend hours online. As bloggers who don’t have a lot of free time, it’s important for us to know which tools will actually help us grow our blogs without needlessly wasting hours on something that can be done in minutes.

As bloggers, it’s important to be able to get traffic to our blogs. Without traffic, no one is going to sign up for your email list, buy your products and services or click on your affiliate links.

Your Own Personal Virtual Assistant

Most successful bloggers hire virtual assistants for all those repetitive tasks. They no longer have to worry about wasting times on tasks such as; finding pins to share, creating pins, responding to emails, creating book covers and etc… You know those repetitive tasks that take time away from our money making tasks.

Unfortunately, as a new blogger, when you start your blog, you’ll have to do everything yourself. Most of us don’t have the money to hire our own virtual assistants. This is where Tailwind comes in handy. While you may not be able to hire a human virtual assistant, this tool will help you automate your Pinterest efforts.

I couldn’t imagine trying to do everything it does manually. I don’t have enough time in the day to do it all by myself.

How to Make the Most From Tailwind

Tailwind offers a 30-day free trial and you’ll be tempted to start with that. However, I recommend signing up for their annual subscription. They will give you a discount for doing so and you’ll be able to start pinning as many pins as you want.

Once you sign up, head on over to your dashboard. I recommend taking some time to watch the Tailwind training videos. You’ll find it inside of your dashboard.

Once you’ve watched the videos, it’s time to start finding the pins to schedule. I recommend scheduling at least 30-60 pins per day.

Of course, everyone’s opinion will vary on this, the best thing you can do is test things out to see what number of pins is your sweet spot.

Join Tailwind Tribes

One of the reasons that I love using Tailwind and decided to keep using it even when I started with Board Booster is because of the Tribes feature. If you don’t know about Tailwind tribes, read this. I recommend taking the time to join as many tribes as possible. Find tribes that your blog will fit into, here’s a list of 10 tribes you can join right now.

Editor’s Note: Some were reporting difficulty joining the Tribes via the original links in this post. I have contacted Tailwind support and identified the problem, so all of the links should now be working properly. Thanks so much for your patience and understanding 🙂

1. Striving Bloggers
2. Blogging Friends Pins
3. Pinterest Friends
4. Milspouse Bloggers
5. Bloggers Chalkboard
6. Blogging Tips
7. Small Business
8. Christian Bloggers-Faith
9. Home Design & DIY
10. Practical Mommy Lifestyle

These are just a few of the Pinterest tribe groups you can join. There are literally hundreds of Tribes available.

To find even more Tribes: Google is your friend! A simple search for “Tailwind Tribes for bloggers” will uncover boatloads of Tribes in every niche. Join as many as possible!

Before You Add Your Pins to the Tribes

I know you’re going to be extremely excited about getting started using the awesome Tribes feature in Pinterest. However, every Tribe is different. They all have their own rules, so you want to make sure that you take the time to read their rules.

Most Tribes will require that you pin at least 1 pin for each pin you submit to the group. This means that before you start submitting your own pins, you need to take the time to share the other member’s pins. I recommend taking the time to share other people’s pins before adding your own pins.

The last thing you want to do is break the rules and get kicked out. Plus, it’s not hard to share other people’s pins.

Adding Your Pins to The Tribes

Once you’ve shared some of the tribe member’s pins and have a reserve of shares built up, it’s time to start adding your own pins. After all, you want people to share your pins too.

Head on over to your Tailwind dashboard again and click on published pins. This is where you’re going to find the pins from your own blog. I submit all my published pins from my own blog to all the tribes.

Adding Your Pins to the Tribes from Tailwind

Once you’re inside of your published pins on Tailwind, you’ll see all the pins from your own blog. I start from the top and work my way down to add them to the group.

On the far right, you’ll see a button 3 buttons, click on the “add to tribes button.” This will bring up all the tribes that you are a member of.

A box will popup that lists all the Tribes you are a member of. You’ll notice that a little red caution icon appears next to the Tribes that your pin has already been added to. You never want to add duplicate pins to any Tribe. Once you’ve added the pin to the tribe you’ll notice that Tailwind will inform you that the pin has been added successfully.

You can add as many pins as you want to, as long as you’ve met the sharing ratio guidelines. Most tribes have a certain limit of pins you can share on a daily basis. They set a limit so you won’t flood their members with a bunch of new pins. If there’s a limit, you can always keep sharing on a daily basis, until you submit all your pins.

Adding Your Pins to the Tribes from Pinterest

You may want to add your pins to the Tribes from inside of your Pinterest account. It’s really easy to do, just follow along. Log into your Pinterest account and find the pin your want to add.

Click on the schedule button, instead of clicking on the red save button.

Once you do that you’ll be taken to the Tailwind scheduler. On this screen, you can add the pin to any of the Tribes.

Click on “add to tribes” and find the tribe you want to submit your pin to.

This will add your pins to the Tribes board. You can also use this method if you want to add pins directly from your blog to the tribes. If you want people to share your pins on Pinterest, you may want to read which social sharing plugin makes it easy to get more shares.

How to Find Your Pins In Your Dashboard

I personally found it a little confusing at first to find my pins inside the Tribe dashboard. It’s NOT hard and once you get a quick tour of where to find your pins, you’ll be a Pinterest Tribe champion.

When you’re inside of your Tribe dashboard, you’ll see these tabs.

Let’s run through all these tabs so you’ll have a better understanding of what each one means.

1. All: These are all the pins inside of the tribe. In this tab, you’ll find all the pins of every member in the Tribe.
2. New: These are the new pins that have been added recently.
3. Yours: These are your pins that you’ve added and people are sharing.
4. Shared: In this tab, you’ll see all the pins that you’ve shared from that tribe.
5. Skipped: This tab contains pins that you’ve skipped. For instance, if you are constantly seeing pins that you know you’ll never share because the pins won’t fit on any of your boards, you can stick those pins in the skipped tab.

The Tribe Members

You’ll also be able to see all the Tribe members inside of the dashboard. Pinterest will also give you some stats about your pins.

Let me run through what each of these mean so you have a better understanding of it.

1. Re-shares: This is the number of times that your tribe mates have shared your pins. If you’re not getting any shares, it may be because your pins are not high quality.
2. Re-pins: These numbers indicate how many people are re-sharing your content.
3. Reach: This number represents the number of potential impressions from all the re-shares.

If you’d like a more in-depth explanation of what these tabs mean, read this.

It’s important to create awesome looking images people want to share. Learn how to create captivating images for Pinterest.

Why Are My Pins Showing Up As Drafts

When you add pins to your Tailwind Tribes and aren’t scheduling on one of your own boards, you may notice that your pin will show up as a draft. I had this happen to some of my pins and freaked out. People were still sharing the pins, but they said draft.

The easiest thing to do to remove the draft label is to head on over to your drafts inside of Tailwind and delete the draft that was created. Tailwind automatically creates a draft of your pins, if you don’t add them to any of your boards when adding them to tribes.

Leaving Tribes

The main purpose of joining tribes is for the traffic benefit. We want other people to share our pins because we are sharing their pins. It’s kind of like you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back.

However, if you’re not getting enough shares or don’t feel like the Tribe is worth your time, you may want to consider leaving. When I first got started with Tailwind Tribes, I was scared to join a Tribe. I thought what if I join and I decide that I don’t want to stay.

I finally figured out how to do it and the best part is that it’s extremely easy to do. So don’t be afraid to join tribes to see if they will work out. If they don’t you can always leave.

Let me walk you through the process, don’t feel like you have to stay in a Tribe if it’s not meeting your standards. It’s extremely easy to leave and you won’t feel bad.

Log into Tailwind and head on over to the tribe that you want to leave. Scroll down to all the members section of the group.

Find your personal member info.

Once you find yourself on the members dashboard, place your cursor on it. You will see two options, chat and leave the tribe. Click leave tribe.

You’ll see a toolbox that pops up and asks you if you are sure you want to leave the tribe. You’ll also be notified that any content you’ve added to the tribe will be removed.

Click on the leave tribe button once you’re positive you want to leave. Now you’re no longer a member of that tribe.

Final Take Away

I suggest setting aside some time this weekend to get started with Tailwind. Join some of the Tailwind Tribes from above or find some other ones online.

Start sharing other people’s content and don’t forget to add your own content into the tribes so they’ll share your pins. Start learning as much as you can about Tailwind to get the best bang for your buck.

Once you start making use of Tailwind and the tribes, you’ll realize how much free time you have for other productive tasks like guest posting on Candis’s blog to help you grow your blog.

A Word of Warning

You’re going to realize that after a couple months your Pinterest traffic is going to start growing. You might even be tempted to ditch all your other traffic generating methods.

However, you never want to put all your eggs in one basket. While Pinterest is fun and can definitely be a huge game-changer it’s important to find other traffic methods as well.

Susan Velez is helping people start, grow and monetize their passions through blogging. She loves helping people with the techie side of blogging sign up for her FREE 7 day WordPress Course at susanvelez.com

You’ve seen them, you’ve taken them, you’ve loved them and loathed them.

It’s that BuzzFeed style quiz that has taken over your Facebook newsfeed and promises to tell you what kind of Disney Princess you are if you’ll just answer a few short questions about your coffee preferences.

They reel you in with the carrot of revealing something about your personality or intelligence, and before you know it you’ve not only taken the quiz in its entirety but are also now sharing your results on social media.

It’s viral marketing at it’s best, and companies, entrepreneurs, and bloggers are using this strategy to grow their email lists like crazy.

Take the one I created to see how it works: “What Type of Mom Blogger Are You, Actually?”

This article on Forbes explains why online quizzes are so effective:

“If you want a lot of people to share something online, there has to be something personal, interesting, or fun about it… Most people love reading and hearing about themselves.

 

A quiz can offer that same satisfaction of speaking to something about who the reader is, but it does it in a way that offers instant gratification. A person on Facebook can do a 10-question quiz and see a result within a couple of minutes. At that point, they’re excited and it’s easy to coax them into sharing the link to see what kinds of results their friends get.”

You’ve heard you need to build your email list with freebies and checklists and resource files. And those can work great!

But if you’re looking to try something a bit more fun and “out-of-the-box” that will both delight your audience and grow your email list at the same time, then I think you’re going to love creating an online quiz for your blog.

I created my first quiz last month and it was so much fun! Well, not fun like having crazy dance parties with your kids, but wayyy more fun than creating ebooks.

How To Create an Online Quiz that Grows Your Blog Email Subscribers

When I first heard about using online quizzes as a marketing strategy and list building tactic I was intrigued and excited to try it but, having a bazillion things on my blogging to-do list already, filed it away on my “someday” list of things to try.

Then I came across this super-easy online quiz builder so I had to give it a go. All in all, it took me a few hours to brainstorm, create and publish my quiz. Here’s how I did it:

Step #1: Create Quiz Title, Questions & Answers

When you’re thinking about what type of online quiz to create, try to keep these three things in mind:

1. It should be enticing and fun for your ideal readers

Make sure you create a “clickable” title and cover image that piques your ideal reader’s interest and makes them want to click. Here’s a screenshot of my quiz, and the simple addition of the word “actually” to make it pop a bit more.

If you miss the mark on the title then your quiz is DOA (as is also the case with your blog post titles!), so spend time brainstorming and coming up with one that’s great.

2. It should give your readers a sense of what your blog is about and why they should care

The questions and answers inside your quiz are the heart of the quiz. They should be related to your blog topic and also lead the reader to take the ideal next step (sign up to your email list).

The Interact quiz builder I used makes it really easy to set up questions and answers. Their quiz builder guides you through adding questions and multiple choice answers. You can also add pictures to spice things up (they have a bunch you can choose from for free).

3. It should get them to sign up to your email list

At this point, you’ve had fun creating a quiz that will delight your readers, but don’t forget about your ultimate objective of getting email subscribers! You can set it up so that people will have to give you their email address in order to see their results.

Pro Tip: Add a “freebie” offer at the end of the quiz to increase conversions. When I did this, it increased my email sign ups dramatically! The first week I promoted the quiz I got 36 new subscribers, which I was happy with. But after adding the freebie incentive, my promotion efforts after the second week increased 72%!

The quiz builder integrates with most major email service providers (like MailChimp, ConvertKit, Aweber and many more), so connecting this with your email list is a breeze.

Step #2: Create Results

This is the part I was most skeptical about because a lot of the quizzes I’ve taken online seem to have such random answers. Like the one I recently took on BuzzFeed titled, “Build A Starbucks Frappuccino And We’ll Tell You How Many Kids You’ll Have”… it said I had one. Ummmm, not even close.

And even though I’d set up my questions and answers with specific results in mind, I was curious as to how the quiz builder would make it all work. Thankfully, it was really easy! They have a little tool that lets you easily correlate the answers with your desired result.

Step #3: Publish & Promote!

As I mentioned above, the entire setup – from brainstorming to creating all of the content – took me a few hours to complete. But I wasn’t done yet! Just like writing blog posts or any other type of content, you need to promote it to get the word out and readers in.

The quiz builder I used has a “viral” share feature built in so people are automatically prompted to share their results once they’ve completed the quiz. This was a HUGE help! But to get the ball rolling, I also:

• Posted in Facebook blogging groups on promo days
• Created a Pin image and pinned to relevant group boards on Pinterest
• Emailed my list (Note: Even though these readers are already on my list, thanks to the “viral” aspect of the quiz, if they share their results on social media then that means more free traffic to my quiz!)

Here are a few things I plan to try going forward:

• Facebook ads
• Add a link to the quiz in my main menu
• Add the quiz to relevant blog posts

Important Note: Don’t forget to welcome your new email subscribers with a strategic welcome email sequence. This will help ensure that your readers not only become subscribers, but also true fans that want to hear from you again and again.

Trying to build your blog email list can sometimes feel like a chore. Somewhere between daunting downloads and overdone ebooks, we’ve lost some of the FUN in growing our blogs! If you’re feeling stuck – either from boredom or lack of results – I think you’re going to love creating an online quiz for your blog.

It’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time, and if you keep these three tips in mind (from Step #1 above) then you’ll have set the foundation for a winning quiz that both delights your audience and grows your email list like whoa 🙂

 If you enjoyed this post, will you please share it on social media? That 5-second gesture goes a long way to support my blog. Thank you! 

Free Resource Guide: 8 Steps to a Money-Making Mom Blog in Just 2 Hours a Day

Everything you need to know, and in what order, to start and grow your own money-making blog in just 2 hours a day.

Ever tried to DIY your blog logo? How’d that turn out?

Unless you have the happy coincidence of being a blogging babe and a graphically gifted, I’m guessing not too great. Even attempting to create a basic text-based logo can take hours of your time and still come out looking home-grown… and not in a good way.

It’s sooo easy to get sucked into the design of your blog in the beginning. Forever tweaking your layout, colors, fonts and yes, your logo.

But when you’re just starting out, there are WAY MORE IMPORTANT things that you need to be spending your time on.

Things like creating awesome content, getting traffic, growing your email list and creating a profit plan for your blog. And tweaking your blog logo a gazillion times doesn’t contribute one bit to any of those important things you should be focusing on to grow your blog.

Some marketers will even tell you that ugly websites perform better than fancy ones.

The key here is not that “ugly” or “pretty” is better, but that you don’t have to dump a bunch of money into your logo or branding in order to have a successful blog. Especially in the beginning, it’s important to set a strong foundation and spend your time on tasks that will directly contribute to the growth of your blog.

That said, you don’t want your logo looking like a hot mess that your Kindergartner put together in his free time. A homemade logo that looks homemade can lead to a decrease in credibility in the eyes of your readers.

So if you could get a professionally designed logo for your blog in about 5 minutes – for FREE – would you want it? Stick with me, it’s coming 🙂

But first, let me just tell you that you’re not alone if you’ve already dumped a bunch of time and effort into your blog logo. I’m embarrassed at how much time I spent in the early days of this blog tweaking my logo. And completely changing it 100%. And then tweaking it again.

Here are a few of my early concepts (2 of which were actually on the blog for a time):

Attempt #1:

Attempt #2:

Attemp #I-lost-count:

The current logo I have isn’t perfect, but I’M NOT TOUCHING IT for a good long time! I’ve already wasted way too much time, and the thing that pains me the most is that I SO didn’t have to.

There’s a much faster, easier and smarter way to getting a designer logo for free. If you’re graphically challenged (or just a perfectionist who spends waayyyy too much time on your blog logo design), then this video is for you.

In it, I show you how to create your own free designer logo for your blog… fast.

Here’s a quick recap of what’s in the video in case you didn’t watch:

1. Log in to Canva.com (it’s free and takes seconds to sign up if you don’t already have an account)Click

2. Click on “More” (looks like a plus sign inside a square)

3. Click on one of the templates that best resembles the basic shape/orientation you want your logo to be (ignore the pictures and graphics on them… you’ll customize this in the next step). This will open a blank canvas in the shape/template you chose.

4. Once you have your blank canvas open, click on the T-Text tab in the left sidebar. Then scroll down and choose the designer logo template you like.

5. Now just customize it with your blog name and colors. Aaaand, done!

The logo templates are pre-designed by real designers who actually know what they’re doing, so you know it’s going to look legit when you place it on your blog. Of course, design is subjective, but pretty much everyone can spot a DIY logo that was done by a not-graphic-designer.

So save yourself the time and trouble, create a fast, free designer logo for your blog and call it a day!

Then move on to the truly important tasks when it comes to growing your blog, like you know, getting traffic, growing and nurturing your email list, and making money.

If you enjoyed this post, will you please share it on social media? That 5-second gesture goes a long way to support my blog. Thank you! 😚

Free Resource Guide: 8 Steps to a Money-Making Mom Blog in Just 2 Hours a Day

Everything you need to know, and in what order, to start and grow your own money-making blog in just 2 hours a day.