7Tips for Designing Viral Pins To Explode Your Pinterest Traffic 1. The pin

 7Tips for Designing Viral Pins To Explode Your Pinterest Traffic

1. The pin should be vertical with a 2:3 ratio:

The simplest and yet often overlooked tip, it is so critical to adapt your pins to the format that performs best on all devices.

Personally I use 1000*1500 pixels as recommended by Pinterest, however, the standard Canva graphic size (735*1102) has also worked well for me.

You need to test this out and see what works best for your niche and audience but make sure to stick to a 2:3 ratio. This means the pin should always be taller than it should be wide.

Remember, most Pinterest users are mobile users, if your pin is too wide or too long it will get cut off and not be clearly legible.

2. The pin should have clear, legible title text

If your text is cramped, not visible on a mobile phone or doesn’t pop out against the background, you have lost half the battle, my friend.

You want to make sure you pair fonts that go well together, are easy to read and yet look and follow your brand’s signature style.

Here’s a useful guide for comparing fonts on Canva.

In my personal experience, the most important text in your pin should always be a “Sans Serif” font.

These are easy to read, modern-looking and make the user understand the focus of your pin right away.

Here’s a list of 60 free Sans Serif fonts that you can work with.

3. Include warm background colors with text layered on top

This tip actually took me a ton of time to figure out. I’ve probably tried 10 different combinations of text with a colored background and concluded that warm colors perform the best.

Colors such as red, orange, yellow in the background tend to do better than colors such as blue, purple or pink.

Here’s a comparison of two pins with the same topic but different background colors.

Version 1: Warm

Version 2: Cool

Both the pins were released roughly around the same time and if you look closely the red version got 6 times more impressions (and link clicks) compared to the blue.

6 times more impressions! That’s what you should be aiming for!

4. Use high-quality stock images.

I’m regularly surprised by how often people do not take this into consideration.

Pinterest is a VISUAL DISCOVERY platform.

Chances are if your images aren’t high quality, you will not get people to click on them, and if they don’t click on them, you don’t get traffic.

With a ton of free tools, you can easily find high-quality images for free. 

Some places you can look are:

• Unsplash
• Pixabay
• Canva        

5. Write keyword descriptions that are SEO-optimised.

When you search Pinterest for personal users you use it as a human would.

What would a person type in to find the pin or blog post you just wrote about?

When you think of keywords that way, they are much less scary and make for easy discovery.

You should focus on keywords that are popular in the niche but also make them natural looking.

Just like for google SEO, you don’t stuff keywords, do NOT stuff keywords in Pinterest either.

What’s the easiest way to find keywords for your pin?-> PINTEREST SEARCH

Just type in 2-3 different variations of your keywords and note down the suggestions Pinterest gives you. Be sure to use the MOST relevant ones as that gives Pinterest information on what type of content you share.

6. Add relevant hashtags based on user intent research

Before you hit publish, you also need to add a few relevant hashtags. This practice is not a must, but in my opinion, it should be. 

What would adding a few hashtags cost you? Nothing, and it helps new pins rank on Pinterest search that much faster.

You can start by using 5-10 HIGHLY RELEVANT hashtags.

Anything more than 10 makes your pin look a bit too stuffed and may be considered or flagged as spam.

The official statement from Pinterest is that you should NOT use over 20 hashtags.

Before you finish adding your pin, your description, your blog post URL you want to add 5-10 relevant hashtags to help new pins rank in Pinterest search.

7. Finish with a headline that shouts “CLICK ME!”

I know it sounds hard to not sound sales-y but yet be clickable. No one is asking you to lie about what your blog post is about.

You simply have to make it so clickable that anyone who sees it will be tempted to click.

Let’s face it, no matter how amazing and beautiful the design or text, if your headline falls flat, no one is going to click through.

Think about it like a new book you want to read, if the title shouts “boring”, unless you’re a loyal long-time fan of the author, you’re not going to buy it. The same thing goes for blog posts and the titles that you add to your pins.