Pinterest is a great way to drive an insane amount of traffic to your website, but the key is making images on your website “pin-worthy”. While there’s no shame in pinning your own images, the real cherry on the top will be having your visitors pin the images onto their own boards.
Before you add the Pinterest button next to the Facebook and Twitter buttons, there are a few things you should consider to make your website’s images more pinnable.
1. Find An Eye-Catching Background Image
There are a few ways to find good images, including taking your own or using images with a Creative Commons license. I run a parenting blog, and if I want to write a post about a recipe I can easily take a few pictures of the meal as it’s being prepared. If you don’t have the luxury of providing your own pictures, there are plenty of websites that have images you can use. Here are a few of my favorites:You should also consider the dimensions of the photo when you’re selecting one to use. I tend to notice vertical images on the Pinterest home page over square or horizontal images, and the maximum horizontal width that Pinterest will show is 554 pixels. Anything wider will be automatically re-sized. Data from Dan Zarrella reveals that taller images are actually more repinnable. I found the photo below on Wikimedia Commons, and will show you the steps that I take to edit in the following steps.
2. Edit The Image
Once you have your background image, use a photo editor to give it some pizzazz. PicMonkey.com is a free editing tool, and there are various filters and effects you can give your photos. If you weren’t able to find a narrow image, you can simply crop the photo to the dimensions you want.You can also add text to the image, like the title of the blog post, the name of the product, or something clever that will draw some clicks.
3. Add The Image To Your Content
If you’re working with a blog post, you’ll want to scatter these pinnable images throughout the content. Ideally you should have the main title card, or the image with the title of the post, at the beginning of the article, and a few smaller images spread out between the paragraphs. Since every website is a different case, see which method works best for you: aligning the content around the images, or placing the images in the empty spaces around the text.
Since your goal is to drive traffic to your website, don’t give it all away in your image. Give people a reason to click!Think of your image as the front of your home. It it looks warm and inviting, they’re more likely to come in and have a cup of tea. With pin-worthy images on your website, existing visitors will have another opportunity to engage with your brand, and new visitors will hopefully discover a reason to come back.
Picture credit: Jeancaffou