When you start working on Pinterest marketing, it becomes a habit to create a Pinterest optimized image for every post. You finish the blog post and share the image on Pinterest. But there’s one more step you need to add to your job list – let’s look at how and why to add a Pinterest image to a blog post.
Why add your pins to posts?
Adding a pin to your blog post isn’t compulsory but it can make good sense. The reason for that is that people might want to share your post on Pinterest to save it for later – and an optimized image had a greater chance of being reshared in the algorithm.
By making it easy for people to pin the image, you can even prompt them to do it. Something as simple as a ‘Pin for later’ call to action under the pin image can make people remember to save that image. This may bring them back to your post later and also helps reinforce your blog as a source of good stuff for Pinterest.
How to add a Pinterest pin to your post
The simplest way to add a pin to your post is just the same as you would normally add any other image. Make the pin in your favorite graphic design tool, download it and upload it to the post. You can test putting it in different places but sometimes, at the end of the post works best.
Now one thing people notice is that sometimes the Pinterest image looks a bit big and awkward. There’s a couple of ways to handle this. If you are using WordPress, you can show it at 50% or 75% of the original image. Then it retains the dimensions but isn’t so big on your page.
Another idea is to force the image to be smaller by adding it to the middle block of a set of three columns. With the Gutenberg Blocks editor, this is easy to do and you can either make them as three even columns or even make the middle one bigger so the image is a little larger.
Using a plugin
Another way to handle the Pinterest image is to add it with a plugin. There are a few out there, mostly paid but generally not too expensive. They work by hiding the Pinterest image until someone either uses the Pinterest save button, a social share option, or something like Tailwind.
Then the image will appear among the images available to pin. Another benefit of these plugins is that you can also add your Pinterest description. That way, when the image is pinned, it takes the description you have created with it. Otherwise, it will often default to either your meta description or a repeat of the post title.
Some plugins even let you add more than one image. That’s a great way to test to see what people like – a bit of an A/B test! You can monitor your analytics and see which pins are showing up the most often as being pinned by other people.
If you do use a plugin, you might still want to add the image to the post as well. Then you can have that CTA to prompt people to share.
Extra Pinterest SEO juice
Having people pin your pins from your website can help give your account a bit more SEO juice or credibility. It tells Pinterest that you have good stuff and that people visiting your site want to pin it.
Using social sharing buttons and the Pinterest save button are easy to add to most types of websites and are another visual prompt for people to share and save your content. And we can never get too much social proof for our blog posts.