I love to read blogs, a lot of blogs, and you know what makes me saddest when I read a blog?
When that blog has great content and they don’t have a great image to pin.
I want to help you make pinterest work for your blog. I do not come to you as an expert, not in the least, I’m coming to you as someone who is still learning and has a lot more to learn, but who wants to help you up to the next level.
Here’s what I’m working on:
I’m working on pinnable images because my vary wildly in how they do.
I like collages, and I tend to make them more than I should for my “pinnable image,” and that’s not the best plan. I was looking at two posts I wrote recently, they both have great content (I may be biased), but one of them got pinned a bunch, and the other didn’t, and they were similar topics released in a similar time frame, so what is the difference?
Why did this image work on pinterest? And how does it make pinterest work for my blog?
- It’s simple
- It’s taller than it is wide
- it’s a subject lots of homeschoolers and many public school teacher teach on
- it’s bright
- it doesn’t have a face (which doesn’t work as well on pinterest)
- Because of this image I got a lot of visitors, and this image was shared multiple times there
- G+ also seems to like tall photos, again because it takes up more real estate space
Why didn’t this image work on pinterest? But it does work for my blog
- It feels busy for pinterest
- It’s dark, I shouldn’t have done this reddish color and black
- It’s square- tall pins are repinned more often
- There’s no pull in factor
- It works for my blog because it’s square, and both blog hops and facebook like square (I don’t know why)
So, one thing I’m trying to remember, no matter how much I like images like this, don’t do it, they don’t get pinned as much.
If you don’t have a good image you are throwing away page views you could easily get with your great content.
Why am I bringing this up?
Because iBlog Pro {affiliate link} came out today, and I’ve been reading it (I got an advance copy as one of the authors, check out my chapter on G+). I’m learning a lot just in the few pages I’ve read in the last couple of days.
There’s a lot of free material out there, and I’ll tell you right now you could probably find everything written about in here for free somewhere on the internet. But, it will take you hours to find it all, and I don’t know about you, I don’t have that time. I’d rather pay $8 and get the information already put together for me.
If you haven’t read the original iBlog {also affiliate linke} yet, I highly recommend reading that for a starting point (I’m planning on buying a copy for my brother to read, we’ve been discussing blogging recently).
Interesting. I pinned both of them. I don’t think I pay as much attention as most people to those details.
I have to admit I hadn’t been paying as much attention until recently, and this just amazed me to find it out. It makes sense because simple things will stand out in a busy field of images.
Like you said, you pinned them both, and I probably would have too because I pin stuff I really like no matter the image, but the random person might not. The statistics nerd in me finds this interesting, what works and what doesn’t.
Very interesting!! It’s so interesting to see what is statistically more likely!
I’m a big fan of basic images – and there is definitely some truth to height. I am a big fan of Pinterest for getting new visitors to my blog!
Funny you mentioned that. I always thought pinning your content that you could do better on imagery. That said, I could do much better as well. Ironically, I am just writing a post on 5 blogging mistakes I made for my 5th bloggiversary, and bad images is certainly on the list 🙂 I will link to this post in mine!
Ha ha ha ha ha! I always recognize it in hind sight, but at the time the pictures seem great. Sigh.
I think that about your posts too, but a lot of your more recent posts have had great images.