Tools Guide

It is amazing how visually driven blogs have become over the past few years. Pinterest has been such a huge part of this. 

If your blog has many beautiful images illustrating your content, chances are that you have seen a lot of traffic from Pinterest. It can be a great audience builder. But just because you have images in your posts, doesn't mean they will get re-pinned a lot.

There is a RIGHT and a WRONG way to format your images, which determines how "pin worthy" your blog is.

By pin worthy, I am referring to how appealing your images will be to people on Pinterest who see your content in their feed, and how many of them will WANT to re-pin it.

Pinterest is all about "beautiful images" 

The problem is is that you can have a "beautiful image" without it showing up in all it's glory on Pinterest.

I recently became aware of this when I experimented with one of my most popular posts on making Chocolate Butterflies using an open book. 

The first image was one that I had had up for several months (6+) 

It looked great when it is on my blog. But since it is a horizontal image, it doesn't show up as nicely as a vertical image. Instead, it ends up squished, and will most likely be ignored by most browsers.  

I was wondering why I wasn't getting more traffic from this post on Pinterest. My content was cool. My concept was creative. I knew people would love it. But from the 6 or so months I had had it up, I really only had like 500 Pins from it. Then I decided to try to re-do my original collage and make it a VERTICAL image (as follows)

Within weeks of making this change, the Pins jumped from 500 to 20,000. 

Wow. It worked!

Above is an example of how the two images compare & compete in actual size on Pinterest. Do you see the difference? The vertical image stands out so nicely compared to the horizontal image which just gets squished and lost in the collage all the other pins on the page. 

It may be a little bit more of a "mouthful" image on your blog posts, but it is so worth because hey, what use is a blog post if no one reads it?

There is nothing wrong with re-working images on already existing posts. I've re-done several of mine & I have noticed a large increase of traffic in all of them. My most popular posts are always the vertical ones.

Even if you aren't going to make every picture in your posts "vertical" as a rule of thumb, try to make the first image (which should be the most "pin worthy" looking image) 1/3 as wide as it tall (in inches this would be like 7" wide, and 12" tall)

Avoid using square images. These are almost as unimpressive as extreme horizontal images on Pinterest. And when you do do collages, make them longer than wide.

You will find that this makes such a huge difference and most the time it will just be a cropping job!

Last, but not least, I like to try out my images before I post them by uploading them to one of my secret boards. It helps me see what they will see, thus helping me reach out to potential readers!

UPDATE: after only having made this change for 3 months, the post I used as an example jumped to 100,000 + Re-Pins!