Gain Tumblr Traffic Without Buying a Bot

I've read through all the Tumblr posts about how to gain followers with bots & proxies, but I wasn't ready to spend money on this yet so I have another method that's completely free.

1. Create a Tumblr account & verify your email address.
2. Design your page to go with the site you're trying to attract people to. (I made my Tumblr page look like my Ecommerce store & added a fixed HelloBar at the top to collect email addresses)
3. Find relevant hashtags people are using in your niche
4. Go to iFTTT & create an account.
5. Select the recipe for Instagram to Tumblr posts.
6. Configure the recipe so every time a photo is posted to Instagram with your selected hashtag the image is then posted to your Tumblr Page.
7. Add html to the "photo caption" area of the recipe that will link people to your site.
8. Select 'Start' & just wait.

There are a few catches with this method:

1. You will have to manually go back to your posts on Tumblr & add a click-through link for the image. You can only set the click-through as a caption currently with IFTTT
2. Tumblr will only let you post 100 photos a day on an account.

But if you do this right you can start to get real traffic to your site & quickly build up an audience. I've had this running for about two weeks now & I'm up to 600+ Tumblr Followers, 50+ uniques a day, & plenty of likes & reblogs on Tumblr itself.

Let me know if anyone else out there has tried this or has ways to improve it.

im gonna try this and il you know how it turns out. thanks

No problem. It's not going to be as quick as the bot methods, but it's working well for me. I'd definitely like to hear how yours turns out.

How many pics are you uploading a day to instagram? There is a free tumblr queue bot floating around here that works very well. It will allow you to set the click through url for the images and best of all it is free. I use IFTTT to syndicate my tumblr queued posts to my facebook fanpage and also my twitter account. I then use a bot to follow and like posts but I am only getting around 20 followers per day. That is with only doing 2 posts per day. I'm thinking I should update more often to get more followers.

What bot will set the clickthrough images for you? I'd like to check that out.

I'm not posting my own instagrams to tumblr. I'm pulling in everyone else's photos that were posted with a certain hashtag instead. This way I don't have to worry about the content. I just let it take care of itself.

Indeed you could set the clickthroughs with the tumblr queue poster. Is there a tool to scrape IG pictures now that xgram is barely working? Perhaps through statigram.

I'm still having good luck with IG so far. Why has everyone been complaining about it lately?

Can you please go in to more detail about step 7. I'm having issues figuring that part out.

great
but bots are faster fcours

You could also do this method using pinterest boards and posting other people's Pinterest boards pictures to tumblr using IFTTT so you don't even have to waste time posting pictures yourself.

Just find a board on Pinterest that's posts loads of photos about your niche, then grab the feed and setup in IFTTT for the recipe Pinterest to Tumblr.

To get a specific board feed on Pinterest you would change.

Great idea! I'll definitely do that as well.

When you set up the recipie it has a 'photo caption' area where the code below is a placeholder.


If you instead replace it with html to your site it will automatically be added each time your trigger is triggered.

I just made one and it works great so far! 20 followers in a few hours. Unfortunately, someone out there already is posting the pics of the niche I wanted, so I might need to choose something different. Is there a way to make it only start doing this later in the day, so that it'll scrape photos after the other blog has reached 100 and stops posting? What happens when it reaches 100 pictures, will it enter pics into the queue? Or should I set up another recipe to just have everything enter the queue?

nalgenerunner said:

I just made one and it works great so far! 20 followers in a few hours. Unfortunately, someone out there already is posting the pics of the niche I wanted, so I might need to choose something different. Is there a way to make it only start doing this later in the day, so that it'll scrape photos after the other blog has reached 100 and stops posting? What happens when it reaches 100 pictures, will it enter pics into the queue? Or should I set up another recipe to just have everything enter the queue?

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What is your niche?

Are you just feeding in from Instagram?

The problem I've been having is Too many pictures coming into Tumblr from Instagram. I had to reevaluate the tags I was using in my recipes in order to keep a steady stream incoming and not reaching my daily limit.

i looking in to using a Pinterest feed over Instagram, but finding boards that are regularly updated for the niche I want is difficult.

I'm feeding in steampunk pictures from Instagram. Most of them are good, but a few don't have to do with steampunk.

Does anyone know if there's a way to make things post on a secondary Tumblr account? I have another niche blog on the same Tumblr account that I would like to use this for.

this is cool info OP. i'm going to try this out later and see what happens.

You are unable to post to more than one tumblr blog at a time. I think that sucks, but its how their system works. Just create a new tumblr account.

I just made one and it works great so far! 20 followers in a few hours. Unfortunately, someone out there already is posting the pics of the niche I wanted, so I might need to choose something different. Is there a way to make it only start doing this later in the day, so that it'll scrape photos after the other blog has reached 100 and stops posting? What happens when it reaches 100 pictures, will it enter pics into the queue? Or should I set up another recipe to just have everything enter the queue?​

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Thanks for giving it a shot. I don't think this method will work with the que or a timed posting. If you want something like that you might have to resort to a bot.

HereComesTheDrop said:

this is cool info OP. i'm going to try this out later and see what happens.

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Let me know how it goes for you.

deciple87 said:

You are unable to post to more than one tumblr blog at a time. I think that sucks, but its how their system works. Just create a new tumblr account.

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Yeah I had to do that since I'm trying to grow a couple accounts. I'm up to 1,000 followers on Tumblr now & I don't do anything at all on it. So it's still going strong for me.