Pin Like a Pro — BoardBooster Tutorial

Update: BoardBooster is no longer available to use for pinning. When it went off the market, I decided to try manual pinning like the good old days. And it has been awesome! I still receive the same amount of traffic that I used to receive in using BoardBooster and Tailwind. Try it for yourself and see if manual pinning is the answer you’ve been looking for in getting regular traffic to your blog. 

Learn how to Pin Like a Pro with this mini series. Here’s the first post in this series if you missed it.

Here’s where it gets fun! When I first began using Pinterest, I learned I needed to be pinning regularly along with pinning quality pins. I set up a schedule so every time I had a new blog post, I pinned it to my Best of Little Girl Designs board as well as group boards in my niche. I also made a schedule for the rest of my posts and pinned other people’s pins to my boards three times a day.

Yeah, you read that right. Morning, afternoon, and night.

I quickly realized this was not going to be sustainable. Pinterest, which had once been a lot of fun for me, was becoming a chore. At the time when I started, the Pinterest feed was still chronological so if I pinned a lot of pins at once, it would spam my followers. So I had that to contend with too.

Still, it was hard to ignore the facts. By pinning multiple times a day and by pinning quality pins, I was showing Pinterest that I was a serious pinner. My profile was being recommended more and more. And my account was growing without me having to do a lot of strange growth strategies.

Another problem was pinning to Pinterest is just a small part of running a blog business. I needed to be able to work smart since I’m a stay at home mom. I don’t have a lot of hours in my week to dedicate to the blog to begin with.

It was around this time, that I came across the idea of pin schedulers. There are several on the market (Tailwind, Viral Tag, etc.) but they were a bit too pricey for my budget. I searched for another option and came across BoardBooster. It was free for the first 100 pins and then $5.00 a month after that. Wo. I figured I might as well try it.

I’ll admit that learning the ins and outs of BoardBooster was a learning curve for me. (That’s why I created a video for you in this post—so you can jump right in and try it for yourself.)

I set up my account with BoardBooster and this is what happened to my blog when I started using this scheduler:

What?! As you can see it wasn’t all roses since there were definite dips among the peaks, but still, those dips didn’t even compare to where my blog had come from. Pretty amazing.

But the best part was after I did the initial set up, I got my life back. Pinterest became Pinterest again—a place where I could quickly go and pin a few things and then walk away. No more pinning morning, noon, and night.

BoardBooster Tips

Now, I’m going to be honest with you. BoardBooster (or any scheduler for that matter) is not a “set it and forget it” kind of thing. Yes, it does automate your pinning but you still need to check in periodically to see if it is working. It has a robust analytics section so you can tweak when you’re sending out your pins and where you’re sending them if you notice some boards are not getting any repins.

I also recommend to continue with your “live pinning” and to not automate everything. This means that even though you’re going to set up a schedule so your boards are getting new pins on a daily basis, you’ll still go onto Pinterest when you can and manually pin to your boards. I usually manually pin to my top-performing group boards on a daily basis (this only takes a couple of minutes) and then spend a couple more minutes filling up my secret boards with fresh pins for BoardBooster.

Hopefully this series is helping you to realize the potential behind Pinterest. Even with all the changes it has gone through in the past couple of years, it still is a great tool for my business. I hope it will be for you too!