Fabulous product photos are an important piece of running an online shop, whether it's an Etsy shop or one you host on your own domain. Most people are visual shoppers and want to see your gorgeous products showcased in fantastic photos.
But, most shops' photos get pinned to Pinterest as small, square pins. That's no fun! Square pins don't take up enough room in a Pinterest feed to get noticed, so they are less likely to get clicked. And people rarely take the time to read the description at the bottom of a pin unless they're already confident it's going to be what they want. That's why we use custom, vertical pins for our products. Let me show you how we create them!
There are several tools you can use to create vertical pins. Programs like Canva and PickMonkey are free and have a quick learning curve, whereas Photoshop is much more advanced and costly. I prefer PicMonkey for creating vertical pins.
Head on over to PicMonkey and select Collage (you don't even have to create an account). It will ask you to choose the photos you want to use, and then automatically send you to a square collage that's 2000 x 2000 pixels. Delete the 2 squares on the right by clicking the “x” that comes up in the corner. Then change the size at the bottom: use 800 pixels wide and as tall as you want, but somewhere around 1500 pixels for the best optimization on Pinterest.
In PicMonkey, it's simple to add photos and resize them–it's all drop and drag. I resize the photos until I like how they look, but I leave the top block blank. Once I am happy with every photo and my layout, I click Export to Editor.
The butterfly on the left is for overlays–choose it and then select the one you like. I want a plain rectangle to go with the blank block at the top, so I choose Geometric and then the rectangle.
Pins tend to look more professional and clean when the backgrounds are the same across all the photos on my collage pins; so I use the dropper tool to change the color of the overlay to the same color as the photo below it. Next, I use the text tool to add some text to the top that clearly tells what the pin is about.
I hit Save and that's it! I've got a gorgeous, tall pin that not only takes up more space in the feed but also has a headline that tells people what I am showing them.
And you can see the difference. The small pin is cute but the vertical pin takes up more space and advertises exactly what product it's displaying.
Remember, Pinterest is a place for potential customers to search visually. That means that the more space you take up in someone's feed, the more likely they are to see your pin and click on it. Plus, a tall pin with a headline lets people know up front what they will see if they click.
You should be using Pinterest to advertise your fabulous products from your Etsy shop or other online store. Make sure you use it to its fullest potential with custom, vertical pins that stand out and attract your future customers.
(Pssst! You might also love these posts on using Pinterest for your business!)
- How to Make Pinterest Board Covers in 2017 (and Why You Need Them!)
- Why You're Not Gaining New Pinterest Followers (and 3 Simple Steps to Fix that Now)
