Carole from My Kitchen Escapades here and I am pumped to share with you my favorite blogging tip of all time!

It has been 7 years since I began my food blog at My Kitchen Escapades and when I look back at some of my older photos, I can’t help but cringe! In fact, I have started a new Recipe Retake Series just so you can have a proper photo of some of my earlier recipes. You deserve it!

Over the years, the biggest lighting roadblock I’ve encountered are the long Minnesota winters because it gets dark at 5:00 pm. I love natural sunlight for shooting my photos, but that isn’t always available when I am pulling a recipe out the oven. Especially since most of the baking I do for our family of 8 is after my littles are fast asleep in their beds and it is pitch black outside.

So, let’s take a minute and take a look at different lighting options with the exact same photo….

For the above photo, it was dark outside, so I used the lights in my dining room. I played with the manual settings of my camera as best I could, but still ended up with a very orange colored photo. This orange color is a trademark of many of my after dark photos in the first few years of My Kitchen Escapades

This next photo, above, is the same set up again but using the flash on my Nikon D60 instead of the dining room lights. While the coloring is much better, the flash creates such overexposure in the foreground, while some very ugly shadows in the back. Better than orange, but not by much!

So how did I get the killer lighting in the final photo below?

Some time back, I invested a little bit of money into a tabletop Lowel Ego Artificial Light. It was $100 and, outside of my camera upgrade, hands-down the best investment I have made for my little blog. It comes with two Ego bulbs inside the fixture, a light diffuser built in, and the folded reflector (shown on the right of the above picture) and I find it perfect for taking indoor pictures. Some bloggers like to use two lights, one on each side, but I much prefer a single light source and a bit of shadow in my photos.

If you don’t want to slap down $100, you can buy Lowel Ego lightbulbs for any fixture you already own but be sure you use a diffuser of some type or the light will be too harsh. Depending on the photo set up, sometime I will also use white foam core board behind and under the food I am shooting all for a super bright and cheery photo in the end. But heaven knows, I love a killer, dark and sexy food photo as well….

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Let’s face it, there are only three ways to get your name and face on billboards or on any other type of high end outdoor advertising. 1)Fame – this has eluded me, I admit I have been infamous on a few occasions. This however is not the same as being famous. 2. Extreme wealth – while our family is blessed to have everything we need and then some, I would not classify ourselves as extremely wealthy. 3) Own a Fortune 500 company. It’s easy to see why outdoor advertising has eluded me, until now.

For the general public and small business owners, our best option to have our voice heard has been through social media i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or through blogging. Giovanni Wolfgang (CEO and inventor of Zeusvision) is changing the game of outdoor advertising.

Zeusvision levels the field of outdoor advertising by using 40ft buses built from the chassis up with 31ft digital screens on each side and a theatre quality QSC audio system that delivers some of the best sound money can buy. To experience Zeusvision in-person is to experience something amazing. Zeusvision buses run in top advertising cities such as Los Angeles, NYC, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Las Vegas and Miami. More cities will be added soon. Looking at this beautiful ad for the ellen show, it’s hard to believe that advertising spots start at just $99.

 Deb, Sherri and I have been invited by Giovanni to “test” Zeusvision  in a week long campaign for Made From Pinterest in LA starting today (October 27th).  Our brand name and photo will be seen by thousands of LA residents through out the day and into the evening. I’ll do a follow up post at the end of our campaign to share our POP (proof of purchase) video and results with you.

Giovanni’s vision is to allow anyone to have their message heard at reasonable prices,  he wants you to have the ability to congratulate a family member on a new job, wish a friend happy birthday, wish a loved one Happy Valentines day or advertise creatively for your small business.

If this sounds like something you would be interested in, simply visit the ad scheduler on your phone, tablet or computer to upload your content, and pick the day(s) and frequency you want your ad to run and pay with your credit card. Zeusvision allows you the freedom to schedule content hours before you want your message sent to go live or months in advance. Use Zeusvisions geo-locating to run your ad where and when you want it. Zeusvision will text you when the slated ad is five minutes away to make sure you can be perfectly synchronized with your display.

Their advanced technology includes eye tracking, which enables any ad to recognize a person looking at the bus within 30ft, it will then composite them into an ad or message on the bus in real time. Imagine the possibilities for a fashion brand that wants customers to see how they’d look in their clothes!

With all this advanced technology and advertising options at our fingertips I have to say….

Zeusvison totally Rocks!

Remember stay tuned for our follow-up post!

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A big thank you to Scotch Brand for their wonderful adhesive products that allowed us to decorate our hotel room door, their adhesives are uh-mazing! Our decorations remained adhered to our door all weekend. We were able to remove the decorations without any damage or paint lifting off our hotel door.

Take a look at our  Round 1 winners!

Free 1 year subscription to Tailwinds Pinterest Analytics Pro level  ($1,188) Winner – Mandy Beyeler from Sugar Bee Crafts

1 Photography bag by Kelly Moore  Winner – Melanie Artz from Artzty Creations

$150 Michael’s Gift Certificate  Winner – Jessica Anderson from Cutesy Craft

1 Autographed “The Creative Gal Cookbook” Winner – Melissa George from A Prudent Life

2 Pin4Ever 1 Year Premium ($49) memberships  Winners – Jessica Bailey from Pretty Providence and Cynthia Ann Jackson from Somebodylaughed.com

3 Darby Smart Wood Burning Craft Kits $19. Winners – Kendra Halterman from Me and My Insanity, Randi and Carol from FrugElegance and  Dee LeBrilla from Cupcake and Crowbars

Some of you may not know about Tailwind and how their analytics can help you increase your Pinterest following. We feel the best way to teach you about Tailwind is to show you some our of stats for the month of March and how we used Tailwind to get to these numbers.

I am going to walk you through our routine for using Tailwind. There is too much information to share in one blog post, so I’m going to highlight the tools and data we use the most.

I start by checking our profile page to find out find how many new followers, pins and repins we have had on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I have the ability to set any date range of my choice. The screen shot above shows our data for the month of March, but I usually choose the date range for the last 7 days.

A quick look at this page and I know that in the last month we have gained 5, 132 new followers, pinned 3,609 pins, had 68,645 repins and gained 6,693 likes. These are the kind of numbers I like to see!

The next data I look at is how our website is doing.

This is where I find that for the month of March we had  a total of 34,234 repins, 31,921 unique pinners. I can also see that the daily average number of pins that were pinned directly from our website to Pinterest was 1,141. I can also find our latest trending pins from our website. This is a great measurement tool that helps us know which of our posts are currently doing the well on Pinterest.

When I click on the Unique Pinners tab, it shows me how many unique pinners we have had for a specific time period, how many times they have pinned content directly from our site to Pinterest and how many followers they have. I can then go to their Pinterest account and interact with them by commenting on their pins and pinning their content to our boards.

I then do a quick check on the Your Boards section, I can find a wealth of information that helps us pin our content in a very targeted manner. I can sort our boards to find out how many pins, repins and followers per board we have gained for any given date range. I can also see the Virality and Engagement score for each of our boards. This helps us keep track of which boards are doing well and see the boards that are not doing as well which means we need to spend some time building them up.

The category heatmaps give me visual view of our Pinterest categories which can then be broken down into specific boards. When I click on the food and drink category it breaks the category down into each of our food and drink boards. From the heatmap below you can tell that we pin to food and drink more than any other category by the size of the square. The darker the boards, regardless of their size, are the boards with the most viral content. This is critical information for growing your Pinterest following. Without it, you are to some extent flying blind.

Here is what it looks like when I click on the food and drink category, any board in that category shows up. This helps me know how each board in any given category is doing. We were surprised to find that some of our boards were not as viral as we expected them to be. We were even more surprised when we found out which board is our most viral board.

Before learning how to use our heatmaps we decided to clean up our account by getting rid of some boards we no longer wanted. We had a hard time deciding wether or not to keep the board Font Geek, we finally decided to keep it even if it didn’t gain new followers. I’m one of those people who LOVES fonts. Imagine our surprise when we learned to use our heatmap and found out that our little Font Geek board happens to be our most viral board!  We began pinning new content to it consistently which resulted in a sizable consistent stream of new followers.

Pin Inspector is one of my favorite tools! I can choose any pin from our account and find out the source of the pin, the date it was pinned, how many times it was repinned and how many likes it received. One of the most important pieces of information I can find quickly and easily is if we have gotten any comments on our own content. Responding to these comments is a great opportunity to network with other pinners which can result in new page views and followers for our site.

Hang in there, we are almost done. The next piece of critical data is knowing when the best times are to pin content to our account. We had been pinning between the hours of 7am to 11pm since we started Pinterest. When I shared our pinning schedule with another blogger Dan Ashbach (he  has 1.6 million followers) here is what he told me: “Tracy the world wakes up at 1am”! We had been missing some of our best pinning opportunities because we only pinned content between 7am and 11pm.

On the diagram above the circles represent the amount of pins pinned in that hour. The larger the circle the more content was pinned in that time frame. The darker green color represents higher engagemnt and higher repins.

Hovering over any of the dots on the diagram brings up the box below which shows you how many pins and repins happened in that one hour time period.

We extended our pinning schedule to a 24 hour time period, changing the times we pinned based on how viral each time frame turned out to be. By pinning in the optimal time frames, we experienced another sizable  surge in new followers.  We had no idea that Sunday at 12am, Saturday at 5am and 11:30pm , Wednesday’s at 6am, and Friday nights at 7:30pm would be some of the best times to pin our content.

Tailwind has taken the guess work out of growing our Pinterest account. Using the information and tools above has given us the ability  to use a very specific and targeted pinning strategy. Our goal is not just gaining new followers, but gaining followers who are highly engaged by our content. These engaged followers are more likely to repin our content, visit our site and become loyal followers of our blog and Pinterest account.We currently have 50,315 followers, our next goal is to have 150,000 followers by the end of 2014. Increasing our followers to 150,000 the next 7 months may seem overly optimistic to some people. Based on the results we have had so far with Tailwind we feel our goal is high but attainable.

It’s easy to see why we think that Tailwinds Pinterest Analytics……

Totally Rock!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Make sure you enter to win a free 1 year Premium subscription to Pin4Ever at the bottom of this post!

What could possibly make Pinterest any better? How about a program that will back up your entire Pinterest account: “Pins, Likes, Followers and Following”  in case your account becomes hacked and deleted (yes this happens). Or heaven forbid, you accidentally delete a board on accident. Until now your only option would be starting a new board or new account at ground zero, a true Pinterest NIGHTMARE! A few months back I was on our Linkedin account and noticed there was a “Pinterest Networking Group” which I quickly requested an invitation to join. This  is where I found out about Pin4Ever and met Christina Mendoza, the founder behind Pin4Ever. I immediately contacted her with questions about Pin4Ever and its features. By the end of our conversation I very excited to give it a try. There are too many features to cover in detail in one blog post so I will share the features that I have used the most.

Once you have downloaded Pin4Ever this is how the tool bar will look in your browser window. My biggest attraction to Pin4Ever was that it can back up your entire Pinterest account.

I  have to say  I’m thrilled and relieved that our  Made From Pinterest on Pinterest account is now safely backed up. I did this by clicking on the “Run Backup” button in the top left hand corner of the toolbar.  The window below popped up giving me the options of what I could backup. I choose to back up everything except some of the larger group boards that we are contributors on.

Like most of you, Debbie, Sherri and I have spent countless hours over the last 2 years building our Pinterest account and following. We currently have 73 boards, 13,391 pins, 114 Likes, 40,976 Followers and are Following 2669. Thanks to Pin4Ever every single Pin, Like, Follower and Following is safely backed up on my external hard drive! If our Pinterest account is hacked or compromised in any way, the “Restore from Backup” feature can fix it. “Restore from Backup” brings up the console to allow you to batch  multiple pins from your backed up boards, if a whole board or your whole Pinterest account has been deleted. It will automatically recreate your missing boards and restore the pins to them.

The “Run Backup” and “Restore from Backup” features alone justify the $49.99 yearly fee at the Premium level for us. Fortunately Pin4Ever is packed with more great features that help make your Pinterest experience even better.

Let’s talk about organizing those pins of yours!

Funny thing about sisters, we think alike and many times have very similar tastes. The result is that sometimes we pin the same content without realizing it. We like to keep our feed and boards clean, which means going in and manually deleting each of the duplicate pins. If you have ever had to do this you know it can be a time consuming task. The Pin4Ever Delete button makes deleting duplicate pins a breeze! Below is a screen shot of our pins with some duplicates in it. First I clicked on the pink delete button in the tool bar and then clicked on each of the pins I wanted deleted. I then clicked on “Execute” in the tool bar and tada, four pins got deleted at once! If I had chosen 20 pins all of them would have been deleted at once when I clicked the Execute command.

At the beginning of each holiday or season we rearrange our homepage by moving relevant boards to the top of our account. Since it is Spring we have placed our Easter and Gardening boards at the top of our homepage. What if you could rearrange the pins within your boards the same way you can rearrange boards on your homepage? If you have a large recipe board you could move the recipes you use the most to the top to make finding them easier. Or  keep your most popular pins at the top of each board. Pin4Ever provides a “Rearrange” function that makes this possible. This button is found under “Organize Pins” which is the  4th button from the left.

This is a screen shot of our “This Pin Rocks!” board. We want to move our Easter and Spring/Garden pins to the top of our “This Pin Rocks!” board.

To do this I  clicked on the “Rearrange” button in the tool bar and then I clicked on the pins in the order I want them rearranged in.

Next I clicked the “Execute” command in the toolbar and tada, Pin4Ever rearranged 9 pins for me! With all of our Easter and Spring posts from our blog at the top of our “Pins That Rock Board!” you do not have to scroll through 290 pins to find our Easter or Spring content. Having seasonal or the most popular pins at the top of any of our boards helps drive more traffic to our site. This make us very, very happy bloggers!

Scroll to the bottom is another feature I love. It is found under Power tools, second row, second button from the left.

Because we have so many pins checking for spam regularly on all our boards is necessary and time consuming. Our Cupcake Cuteness board has 7,066 pins alone!  It takes along time to scroll down to the bottom on our bigger boards. With Pin4Ever I simply hit the “Scroll to the Bottom” button and  in seconds I’m at the end of a board and can quickly scroll my way up to the top while checking for spam. I check our Pinterest account every couple of days for spam, bare minimum once a week. The “Scroll to the Bottom” features has saved me hours of time.

One of the best ways to increase your Pinterest following is to listen to what your followers want and like. If you have a gardening board and your followers are repining birdhouses more than anything else…..pin more birdhouses to your garden board. Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out what your followers really like. Pin4Ever has a unique feature that makes this easy. Once you have completed backing up your account with Pin4Ever the first board you will see in your back us is “Top Pins”. This board contains your highest repinned pins from every board in your account. Spend a few minutes looking around this board and you will know exactly what your followers like!

Here is one last gem of a feature for you, wouldn’t you just love to see your home feed without the Related pins in it?  Easy peasy, just click on the “Clean Home Feed” button in the tool bar and all related pins will be removed from your feed, you will only see the pins from people you follow. Now if we could just get Christina to create a program that would do that for Facebook…….

Truth is, Pin4Ever Totally ROCKS!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

We are sharing this giveaway with : Tatertots And Jello, Just Us Four Blog, Be Different Act Normal, Will Cook For Smiles, Cheerios And Lattes, Inside BruCrew Life, The Recipe Critic, Hun What’s For Dinner , A Bowl Full Of Lemons  , Lady Behind The Curtain,

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We are excited to announce a new category on our blog “Pinterest Pointers”. This is where you can find the latest news about Pinterest, stay current on new tools, and learn how to use them as they are revealed. We are going to introduce you to the most amazing pinners, show you incredible boards you never knew existed and so much more! We are kicking off our new category off with a new guest poster, Dan Ashbach.

Dan has 1.6 Million followers and one of the largest, most beautiful gardening boards on Pinterest. Learn how he gained such a large following on Pinterest in his 3 part series!

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