Manual Pinning Strategy

If you’re looking for a manual pinning strategy because you don’t want to pay for Tailwind or you just want to ditch Tailwind… then you need to check out this tutorial.

There’s not a clear answer from Pinterest just yet on whether or not manual vs scheduled pinning is better. They claim they don’t care either way. I have used Tailwind for years and only use manual pinning for a few of our clients.

Our manual pinning strategy using ClickUp works for our team and our clients. This video is going to show you part 1 of our strategy and part 2 will be released soon.

In this video I’m showing you how to use ClickUp to setup a manual pinning strategy including board lists like what you would get inside of Tailwind.

This post contains affiliate links. I will make a small commission if you click a link and make a purchase. Read more here.

What is manual pinning?

Manual pinning is uploading a new pin or saving a new pin from your website straight to a board. For all of our clients we usually manually pin the first version to Pinterest then pull that pin into Tailwind or save the pin URL for later.

What is scheduled pinning?

Scheduled pinning is putting your pins into a scheduler like Tailwind once and allowing them to go out as scheduled to your boards. I personally use this method for my sites because I don’t have trust in myself to pin daily to my boards.

Is manual pinning a good alternative to Tailwind?

I have been testing manual pinning for clients for a while and in some cases I have found it to be a great alternative to scheduled pins. Pinterest has said they don’t mind one way or the other but the results have spoken for themselves.

I’m not saying this is a great alternative for everyone but if you are considering testing manual pinning then start small.

For one of our clients we started by using our manual pinning strategy with 7 new pins for the first week. During week 2 we pulled those pins into Tailwind and scheduled them to our remaining boards.

You can use Tailwind and still not use it for scheduling.

Scheduling your pins vs saving from board to board

You can manually pin in a couple of different ways. You can upload a new pin straight to Pinterest and optimize, schedule or pin it or you can share a pin from your sharing buttons.

How to Schedule Your Pins on Pinterest for Free

You can use the native Pinterest scheduler to schedule your pins for free and this to me is considered a manual pinning strategy.

Focus on fresh pins

My biggest piece of advice is to focus your efforts on a solid keyword strategy with fresh pins. Each week we create new pins and upload them to Pinterest. We keep a close eye on our analytics to ensure the pins we are creating are getting clicks to the site which is our ultimate goal.

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Setting Up a Manual Pinning Strategy Using Clickup

If you’re wanting to use a manual pinning strategy then you will need to use some sort of tracking. Whether you use a spreadsheet or a tool like ClickUp.

Since I build these strategies for our clients we control them in ClickUp so nothing gets messed up.

Start off with recreating your board lists inside of ClickUp and save them as a templated checklist.

To template your checklist you will click the 3 dots next to the checklist and click “save as template” then give your checklist a name and save it on the screen that pops up.

Once my checklists are templated I create a card for each bucket of content. For this client who is a food blogger we broke them down into each type of meal she cooks.

Then we create a task for each type of content and inside of that task we add a subtask for each piece of content.

Each day when it’s time to create a new pin or pin our current pin to a new board we simply go into each subtask and check off each board.

Inside each of the subtasks I use the comments to house our descriptions, URL to the post, and any other notes between our assistants and myself.

Choosing a Pinterest strategy should always include testing and data to back up your efforts. While this strategy might work well for some accounts it may not work for yours. My main goal in everything I do is not to sugar coat anything and give it to you straight so you can make decisions for your business. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… you will never get fast traffic strategies or promises of rainbows and butterflies here.

With that being said setting up a simple manual pinning strategy like this inside of your ClickUp blogging workflow could be really beneficial even if you only manually pin the first couple of pins. If you don’t have ClickUp you can try it out for free. They do have a free forever plan and if you don’t use it extensively like I do then you don’t even need to pay for it.

Head over and read about using How to Use Tailwind for Pinterest & Automate Your Pins in One Hour Per Week if you are wanting a scheduling option.

If you don’t want to use Tailwind there are plenty of other options now. Check out I Tested Pinterest Approved Schedulers So You Don’t Have To to learn about the other approved schedulers.

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