How to Schedule your Pins on Pinterest

So you’ve heard the buzz about Pinterest, set up your account and optimized your Pinterest page. Congratulations! But what now? If you’re like most people you’ve probably jumped straight into Pinterest and quickly discovered that pinning can take up an enormous amount of time.

When I started using Pinterest to promote my business, at first I was happy to scour the Internet looking for cool photos as well as uploading images and blog posts from my own website. But within a few days, I realized that unless I managed my Pinterest activities, I could end up spending hours each day pinning away.

There is no doubt that Pinterest can be a phenomenal tool for both product and service-based businesses but you need to schedule your pinning effectively otherwise it can be a colossal time suck.

Just think about it. It takes time to source photos on the Internet, write effective keyword-rich descriptions for each of the images you upload, and optimize the pins in order to give the greatest value to your followers and ideally drive traffic back to your own site.

Pinterest can be Distracting

Not to mention the distraction that comes from gorging on all that stunning Pinterest eye candy. Before you know it, 2 hours or so have passed and you haven’t done a thing on your to-do list!

Up until recently your only option when embarking on your Pinterest journey was to go on a pinning rampage. I admit I’ve been guilty of this in the past but blasting 30 pins in one go is like gate-crashing someone’s party. It’s an absolute no-no. You’ll end up overwhelming your Pinterest feed, turn people off and most likely they’ll unfollow your boards or worse, report you as a spammer.

The ideal approach is to log into your Pinterest account several times a day and drip feed pins into your stream at each sitting. But who has the time to do that? We’re all busy people with businesses to run and even though Pinterest is an awesome marketing resource, you don’t want it to eat into your productivity.

A Cool Pinterest Tool

That’s why I decided a couple of months ago to test different Pinterest tools to find out if any of them allow you to schedule pins in advance. Some resources promise to do this but in actual fact they’re still in beta and this service is currently unavailable. Then I stumbled across Pingraphy and everything changed!

Pingraphy is a remarkable new tool that I’ve been using daily in my business and I can honestly say I’m a devotee. Besides being totally free, Pingraphy is also quite easy to use. But if you’ve never used it before, I’ll share a few key points that will take the guess work out of the equation for you!

8 Simple Steps to Schedule your Pins

Here are 8 quick steps to help you schedule your pins like a pro with Pingraphy.

1. Get an Account with Pingraphy

Be sure to first sign up for a free account at www.Pingraphy.com then once you’re logged in to Pingraphy, sign in to your Pinterest account in a separate tab because you’ll need this to be open at the same time.

2. Grab the Pingraphy Bookmarklet

The next thing you need to do is to go back to Pingraphy, click through to your dashboard, and grab the Pingraphy bookmarklet.

This bright pink button works in exactly the same way as the Pinterest Pin It Button that you’re probably already using to pin images that catch your attention from around the Web.

Just click the Pingraphy bookmarklet and drag it over to your browser area until it attaches itself to the tool bar.

The pingraphy bookmarklet lets you pin from any website, including your own site or blog. This is an extremely handy feature because it not only lets you schedule pins in advance but also lets you upload images in bulk.

This means that in just a few clicks you can instantly reduce your pinning time from one hour a day to one hour a WEEK! Can you imagine the time you would save?

Once you find a website with appealing content, just click the bookmarklet and it will pick up all the pinnable images from that page. In the examples below I’ve used posts from my blog, www.Epreneur.TV.

3. Select from the Pinnable Images

Choose the images you want and unselect the images you don’t want by unchecking the box in the top left hand corner. Then click the green Next button on the far right.

4. Optimize the Pin Captions

Then on the next page, add captions to each of the pins. If you are pinning your own content be sure to make the description keyword-rich for SEO purposes, add a call to action, a price tag if appropriate and the URL to your website to get the maximum benefit from your pin.

5. Add Links to the Caption Area and “URL” Box

Pinterest will actually hyperlink any URLs you add to the caption area so this is a great way to get more exposure for your brand or business.

Besides gaining a backlink from a high ranking authority website like Pinterest, putting a full link in this field will help you visually brand your website and make it easy for people to find you on the Internet so you can quickly build a strong community of loyal followers.

If you are the originator of the content, don’t forget to add a relevant URL link in the URL box too. This link can direct traffic to the homepage of your website or blog, or better still an internal page such as a specific blog post or your product page.

You can also link the pin to a squeeze page to build a list of subscribers, send visitors to an affiliate landing page to increase sales or even drive traffic to a recent press review for your product or service to boost your credibility.

Just remember when you are pinning other people’s content to link back to the original source URL to avoid copyright infringement.

6. Select the Appropriate Board

Next, you’ll need to select which board you want the images to be pinned to. In this case, I am pinning to my “EpreneurTV Blog” board.

Pingraphy actually gives you two options – you can click upload and pin the images immediately or you can schedule them using the orange button, which is the focus of this article.

7. Schedule your Pins

When you click schedule, the following window appears:

Pingraphy lets you choose the date, time and even time zone you want to post the pin. If you hover over the time box, a drop-down calendar appears where you can select any date you desire.

You can also specify precisely the hour and minute you want the pin to go out just by sliding the cursor towards the right along the scale on the relevant bar.

You can even choose which time zone you want to post to.

Research by Pinerly, the Pinterest analytics tool, suggests that the optimal time for pinning in order to get the most number of repins and highest amount of referral traffic to be Saturday mornings and late weekday evenings between 8pm – 1am EST. So it is a good idea to set your pins to go out during these peak periods.

Once you’ve done this you can return to the dashboard by clicking on the blue Dashboard link and view the pins that you have just scheduled.

Thanks to Pingraphy, you can schedule your pins wherever you are in the world at a time that suits you. You don’t even need to be in front of your computer in order to get the most out of Pinterest.

8. Rinse and Repeat

Now that you know how to schedule your pins to Pinterest, there’s no excuse not to pin consistently.

You could either upload 5-7 pins and pin them directly or bulk upload 30 or so pins once a week and schedule them to drip daily into your Pinterest feed throughout the week. This could also be an activity that you outsource to an external service or delegate to a team member.

Here, we’ve talked about scheduling images but remember Pinterest doesn’t just restrict you to flat 2D images. You can apply the same technique to videos from YouTube or Vimeo.

The thing I love most about Pingraphy is that it stops Pinterest from becoming a chore. It allows you to easily pin daily and provide fresh valuable content to your followers on a consistent basis. And as with any social media, consistency is key for engagement and the best way to get people to follow you.

How are you Managing your Pinterest Activity?

Is it working out? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Guest Author: Tehmina is an entrepreneur, Pinterest expert and host of the forthcoming Web TV show, Epreneur TV http://www.Epreneur.TV to inspire and empower entrepreneurs to launch and grow a successful online business. Tehmina also offers Pinterest marketing services to businesses.

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