Putting your own content on Pinterest is the exciting part for a blogger. It’s what brings visitors to your blog, builds loyal readerships, grows your email subscriber list, etc etc. It’s awesome.

But it’s … complicated. It's not as easy as clicking "pin it" and sharing any image on any post to Pinterest.

For starters, you don’t want to just share any old content from your site onto Pinterest. Pinterest is a search engine, but it’s a VISUAL search engine. So, the content that works best on Pinterest is visually appealing and enticing. It’s inspiring, motivating, and informative. And it’s vertical.

Yes, vertical.

Vertical content works best on Pinterest. It’s rare that a horizontal photo takes off, goes viral, and/or drives traffic to your site. Frankly, I don’t bother pinning any horizontal images from my blog at all. If I have a good vertical image in a blog post, I definitely will share that to Pinterest, and generally it gets lots of shares – but not necessarily clicks.

Why? Because people are saving it to look at, not to click on. They’re saving it for inspiration, not clicking through for information.

I know what you’re thinking: but I want them to go to my blog and read stuff! I want them to be informed and entertained! There’s so much more where that ONE vertical photo came from that they’re totally missing out on!

Well, that’s where Pinterest templates come in. A Pinterest template helps you create a a Pinterest-optimized graphic, meant to communicate the content of your blog visually to Pinterest users, that links to your site. 

It’s like having a Twitter header, or a feature photo, or a title image just for Facebook – except for Pinterest. It’s a combination of images and text, and the text is key: that’s where the visual search engine bit comes in.

The text on a Pinterest optimized image (henceforth, I’m going to refer to it as a Pin, because it’s less of a mouthful) is like visual SEO. It needs to catch the eye of a Pinterest user as they’re scrolling through their feed, and then quickly & clearly communicate the content of your post in a way that makes them want to click on it to go straight to your site.

By the end of this section, you'll know ...

• What content works best on Pinterest
• What content isn't likely to succeed on Pinterest
• What to do before sharing your content to Pinterest
• The elements of a well-designed pin
• The best free tool to use for creating pins & how to use it
• Best practices for placing your pin in your blog post
• How to write a Pinterest-optimized Pin description
• What to do BEFORE sharing your content from your blog to Pinterest