2020 Update:
Note of Caution: I recently read a big blogger was called a spammer for using ViralTag.
If you had to guess, what would be bloggers’ most common reason for not promoting their articles more than they already do?
If you guessed time limitations, I would agree with you.
My guest author Adrian Gentilcore from Adrian’s Crazy Life has a solution. She explains how to save time while promoting on Pinterest.
Guest post from Adrian of Adrian’s Crazy Life for Mostly Blogging
Adrian is our guest blogger today from Adrian’s Crazy Life. She’s been blogging for seven years and her tagline is: “I am passionate about helping women become better moms, manage their finances, and organize their clutter.” Stop by http://adrianscrazylife.com to pick up some new ideas.
Note: In her guest post Adrian reviews Viral Tag, a pin scheduler. While it is not free, Adrian explains how to make it affordable in her post.
Adrian, take it away:
Out of all the social media sites in the world (and they are multiplying like rabbits these days!), I have one clear and undisputed favorite – Pinterest. It is my biggest traffic source, my most useful search engine, and my favorite toy. Ever since I first discovered it, I just totally fell in love with it, and it seems to love me right back by sending me lots of traffic, giving me new followers, and becoming an Aladdin’s cave of fabulous pictures and resources just waiting for me to explore.
Since it is my favorite child in the online world, I don’t mind lavishing a bit of money on it to make it work even better. Not a lot – compared to my real children, it’s actually pretty cheap. You see, I have a terrific online tool that I use to turbo-charge my Pinterest activities. There are several of them available, but Viral Tag is the one I prefer. It’s easy to use and gets me a lot of bang for my buck.
I’ve been using Viral Tag for about 18 months now and in that time, I’ve taken my Pinterest account from about 6,000 pins to 22,000 pins! It’s also more than doubled my followers from about 3,000 to almost 7,500! And I had a pretty fun time doing it.
I mostly use Viral Tag in three very critical ways:
1st way – Keep my own blog boards up to date
Here’s a screen shot of my profile.
One of the ways I use Viral Tag is to keep a regular flow of pins from my blog to these four boards. Notice that these are at the very top of my profile with clear descriptions and great photos.
The first board is where I keep ALL my blog posts, then I break them down onto the smaller boards by topic. Notice the one in turquoise is about how to teach kids to clean their rooms, so I posted it under my Adrian’s Crazy Life board, my Adrian’s Organized Life board and my Adrian’s Parenting Posts. I use Viral tag to do this and it only takes me about 5 or 10 minutes a week to pin all my posts from the week to these boards.
2nd way – Spread my posts around to MANY group boards
The second way I use Viral Tag is very similar and I do it in the same step. About half my boards are high-traffic group boards on various topics. Six of them are my own group boards for parenting, finance, organizing, recipes, bullying, and general blog posts (which are open to other bloggers by the way – just follow me at http://www.Pinterest.com/AdriansCrazyLif and send me a message) and the rest of them are other people’s group boards. At the same time as I pin my content to my own blog boards, I will post it to 8 or 10 different group boards as well. Here is a screen shot of how I use Viral Tag to do this.
There’s quite a bit going on here, so I’ve added some highlights to show you what is going on. First, I go to my site and pick the post I want to pin – in this case a recent post about Debt Snowballs. I get the post up my browser and I click the Viral Tag icon on my tool bar to start up the app. Then it brings up this screen. I start with the pin in the top left corner. You can see all the pin details – where it is coming from, the description (which came directly from my blog photo because I put my preferred pin description in the Alt Text field of every photo).
You can’t see it because you have to be hovering over it, but there would normally be a “Clone” button right there above the photo. When I’m sure I have my pin set exactly the way I want it, I hit that Clone button a bunch of times and it creates all these duplicates. Then I use the drop down menu to choose the boards I want to add each pin to, like I said, usually 10-12 of them, depending on the topic.
Then I will set my schedule. See the highlights at the top of the image? I can choose the date and time I want these to start pinning – even days or weeks later if I want, but usually I start them on a Saturday morning. Then I need to choose the amount of time between pins. I usually use about 90 minutes, so a different group of my followers is seeing each instance of my pin. If I didn’t set a good interval, then my followers would see the exact same pin going by a dozen different times in their feed – annoying!
3rd Way – “Vacuum” boards to quickly add many pins to my boards
The third way I use my Viral Tag app is to “vacuum” a board. Let’s say I find a really awesome board that has several hundred new pins about organizing. I like them and I want to add them to one of my organizing boards so it will be awesome too. I like for my boards to be nice, juicy resources that will earn me a lot of followers. Using a traditional method, that could take ages. Using Viral Tag, it takes me about 3 minutes to add several hundred pins to my board. That’s why I call it “vacuuming” a board.
All I do is go to whatever board I especially like. I page down a couple of times to get a good number of pins into Viral Tag’s memory, then I click the icon on my tool bar. It brings up the group of pins I want to capture and I click Select All. It brings me to this same Viral Tag screen again, but I’m going to use it differently this time.
See in the very top left, there is a drop down box. There is where I am going to choose the appropriate board for all of these pins. I can have them all go to the same board – “Keep Clean and Organized Tips” in this case, or I can choose a different board for each pin, as each one has an individual drop down. I can also fix up any pin descriptions I don’t like. See that one that just says “Its’ time to rest”. I’d probably make that one more descriptive, or just delete the pin. See down in the bottom right. Someone put a pin about pregnancy. Well, that doesn’t have anything much to do with organizing, so I would probably just delete it (the delete button is hidden because I’m not hovering over it) or I would put it on a parenting board instead.
Then again, I can choose my scheduling. If I’m just trying to build up a board, I would probably just click upload and it will add them immediately about a minute or two apart, but usually I click schedule and space them out by about 30 to 90 minutes. It keeps a steady stream of pins going for your Followers to see (and repin) without clogging up their feed with several hundred pins they might not be interested in.
So, as you can see, this is a pretty handy little tool for me and it has greatly enhanced my darling Pinterest profile and brought me a lot of new traffic. So, you’re probably wondering how much it costs – actually not all that much. I’m one of the lucky few who was able to get in on one of the original shared accounts. When they first started and they were called Pinnerly or something like that, they offered a shared plan where up to 5 users could split a single account. They no longer offer it anymore, but they grandfathered all the existing accounts, so if you ask around in various blogging groups, you can usually find someone with a spot in their shared account. This way, it costs each of us just $5.30 per month.
Otherwise, you’ll have to set up your own individual account. They have a variety of different pricing plans, but the best one seems to be the individual blogger account for $12 per month – http://try.viraltag.com/bloggers Just for MostlyBlogging.com readers, they have given me a special discount code. If you put in the code of AdrianVT – they will give you a 10% discount when you sign up.
They all come with a 14 day free trial, and apparently the newer accounts also have the ability to auto post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms as well, which makes them ridiculously valuable. Since we are a grandfathered account, I’m not sure if we are eligible for this upgrade or if we just haven’t chosen to do it yet, since we would be affecting 5 different users. You can find more information on the site – http://www.ViralTag.com.
There you have it! Thank you so much to Adrian for coming today to share her knowledge about Viral Tag and for getting Mostly Blogging readers a discount.
Just a reminder, followers of MostlyBlogging.com will get access to pin to our exclusive group Pinterest board. If you have not already done so, send your Pinterest Email to janicegreenfield123@gmail.com, and I will send you an invitation to pin to the board.
Would you also like to guest author for Mostly Blogging? Send your idea for a blogging-related article to janicegreenfield123@gmail.com.
What do you think? Do you have any questions for Adrian about Viral Tag? Does it sound like something you might try?
Before you go make your Viral Tag accounts, please share, so others can get the discount Adrian arranged for us and find out about this site.
