If you weren’t already aware, Pinterest is an incredible tool for bloggers. Since Pinterest is basically a visual search engine, it can drive hundreds, even thousands of new visits to your site each month — especially when a pin goes viral!

If you think you don’t have enough followers on Pinterest to make a difference, you’re wrong.

Getting traffic to your blog from Pinterest doesn’t solely rely on how many followers you have, but instead on how many repins your pins that link back to your blog are getting. Sounds good in theory, but how exactly do we get more repins so that our pins go viral?

The best way? Make Pinterest graphics.

You’ve probably heard this before, but if you haven’t done it yet, I urge you to try it today! Graphic pins are far more likely to get repinned and go viral than a single image alone. These pins are longer and take up more visual space, so Pinners are less likely to overlook them. The text provides short and straight-forward descriptions which let Pinners know exactly what they’re getting!

I know, I know, they do require a little bit more time to create, but they’re totally worth it!

Remember — the more repins you get, the more traffic you could potentially be bringing to your site each month and who doesn’t want that?!

Here’s a perfect example….

This pin is just a single image from a blog post on yoga poses for strong abs and it did well — 28 repins is great!

I also made a graphic for this post that included the title and multiple images and this pin was repinned 19.4K times. So much better than the single image pin! The best part is that this pin still brings me a new traffic every month, even though the post is almost a year old!

Convinced you should make Pinterest graphics? I sure hope so!

If don’t have any design experience, this can seem like a daunting task that you quickly give up on, but, don’t give up just yet! I promise, there’s a much easier way to create graphics — even if you’re not a designer or don’t have design software — the answer?

BeFunky.

This online platform allows you to easily make gorgeous Pinterest graphics for your own blog that can give your traffic a major boost! Follow along below to find out just how easy it is!

1. PICK A TEMPLATE

Hit ‘Collage Maker’ at the top of BeFunky’s website. On the next page click on the icon that looks like 4 small squares to select a template. There’s a whole bunch of them to pick from!

You can easily remove cells and pull the bottom to make it longer or shorter to fit your needs. I deleted a few cells and then made it a bit taller to accommodate my vertical images.

2. ADD PHOTOS & TEXT

To add images, click on a cell and then select the ‘Add Image’ button. You can drag and drop images to move them around the template too. Add text by hitting the ‘A’ icon and then click the ‘Add Text’ button.

You can change the styling of the text too. Change the font size, font family, color, border and alignment from the text panel. The background will look light blue, but on export it will appear white!

3. SAVE YOUR WORK

Once you’re all finished, go to the top of the page and click the ‘Save’ button. From the dropdown, select ‘Computer’ and select your settings.

PNG files are typically better for text, but I actually found that the file was too big for Pinterest, so I exported it as a JPEG and the size was perfect! Play around with it and see what works for you.

4. UPLOAD TO PINTEREST

There’s two ways to add your Pin to Pinterest. You can add the image to the blog post and pin it directly from that post page. It will automatically be linked back to the page, so if you do this, then you won’t have to do any of the other steps below.

But, sometimes I like to make a graphic and not include it in the actual post, so if you want to do that, head over to Pinterest and in the top right hand corner, you’ll notice a circle icon with a ‘+’ in the middle of it.

Click it and then select the option, ‘Upload from Computer’ to upload your pin. If you get an error message that your pin is too big, try making it a JPEG file, that worked for me!

Once it uploads, add a description and then select the board that you want to pin it to and hit ‘Pin it’!

A box with an upload confirmation will pop up. Select the option to ‘See it now’. This will take you to the pin so that you can manually edit the details.

5. EDIT PIN DETAILS

Since we manually uploaded this image, it doesn’t have a link yet, so hit ‘Edit’ to change that.

Copy the link to the post page (including the ‘http://’ part) and drop it into the box titled ‘Website’ and then hit ‘Save’.

You can then navigate to that board and see your final pin, pretty cool, right?!

What’s great about this technique is that you can go back to some of your most popular posts and make new graphics for them that will encourage more repins and send you more traffic! Hop over to Blogging For Keeps to see today’s post on how to create an eye-catching Facebook cover photo!

What other Pinterest tips do you have?

BTW, how to launch a blog in 5 minutes, and is blogging dead?

*This post was sponsored by BeFunky, as always, all opinions are my own! Thanks for supporting the brands that keep The Fox & She up & running!

I don’t know about you, but I love Pinterest. It’s my second favorite social media platform to browse, probably because I’m such a visual person, but it also does wonders for my blog traffic. It’s my number one source of referral traffic, but a long shot too, so every month, I make growing my audience on this platform a priority.

But actually getting those numbers to grow is harder. I think it’s the way that the platform is set up, but I don’t find it that easy to discover new pinners. It’s very easy to discover relevant pins, but the people that are pinning highly curated, beautiful boards? Not so easy.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using Ahalogy, a free, invite-only platform that allows you to schedule pins to go live at optimal times. That definitely helped with growth, but more recently I noticed it was tapering off and then a friend told me about another Pinterest scheduling tool, Tailwind.

It’s a paid service, but I definitely recommend it! Tailwind makes it so much easier to schedule pins and schedule them in bulk. It’s especially helpful if you have a busy schedule or a full-time job. You can sit down one Sunday and pin everything you need for a whole week or month! I pin all the images from my posts every day in less than 5 minutes and I can pin to multiple boards at once! It’s so fast! It also tells you if you’ve pinned the same thing to the same board already which is helpful.

My favorite feature is most definitely the shuffle queue feature! I like to have a variety of pins going live each day and this tool makes it super easy to mix them all up. You can always lock specific pins into certain days and times and still move the other ones around randomly to keep things fresh!

Board Booster is another one that I’ve heard good things about, but I haven’t actually tried this one yet. I think it offers some of the same things as Tailwind, but also some different features too.

Since I started using it last month, I’ve gotten more than 700 new followers. Before that I was getting about 200-300 a month, so to say I’m happy with the results is an understatement!

What Pinterest scheduling tools do you like to use? I’d love to hear your experience with any of these or other ones I haven’t heard of yet!

P.S. I realize this post sounds like an ad, but it’s not, I seriously just LOVE this tool!!

Is it just me, or has Instagram changed lately? I first noticed it a few weeks ago when I started getting far less engagement and new followers than I had been the past few months. My content hadn’t changed, nor had my frequency of posts so I started wondering if something had changed on Instagram. Honestly, I was kinda bummed for a few days, thinking people just simply weren’t into my content, but after talking to other bloggers, I learned it wasn’t just me.

You might remember that Facebook bought Instagram back in 2012, so it was really only a matter of time before their algorithms got tested on Instagram, right? So, the answer is yes. Instagram has changed their algorithm, but I’m not really sure what that means for us. It seems to have changed again since I noticed that initial drop off in followers and engagement, so who knows what it will be like in a few weeks.

Of course as a content creator, I prefer the original version were there weren’t smart feeds and algorithms. It allowed everyone who was following me the opportunity to see what I had posted, but now it seems that content gets hidden after a few minutes depending on the level of engagement. As someone who simply loves browsing Instagram, I still wish the feed was normal. I follow people for a reason — I want to see what they post and I don’t need Instagram to tell me what I should view. I hate that I miss some really great photos because of it, so I’m crossing my fingers that things go back that way.

My best guess is that they’re testing different things, trying to find a sweet spot. The good news is that people still love Instagram! It’s one of the fastest growing social media platforms and a great way to reach your audience. As it changes, don’t get discouraged! Everyone feels the effects, not just you. That being said, make sure you’re open to change and willing tweaking your strategy to fit the platform as it changes and grows.

Have you noticed the changes in Instagram lately? What’s been working for you?

P.S. Here’s how much to charge for an Instagram post and how to get more engagement on Instagram and the easiest way to grow your Instagram following!

A few months ago, some of my friends who are amazing at Facebook (cough cough, Maya and Emily), showed me some sneaky tricks on how to successfully schedule Facebook posts. It might seem like a no-brainer, but they showed me some tricks that make Facebook’s algorithm like your post more, which makes it more likely that more people will see it.

Now I only schedule posts this way and the good news is that it’s super easy! Also, I love that there is a scheduling tool. It allows me to pre-schedule everything in the morning and focus on creating content and getting work done during the day instead of worrying about when to post on Facebook.

So, here’s how to schedule Facebook posts!

STEP ONE

First thing’s first, open up Facebook and type in what you want to say in your post. Drop in your post link too. Facebook should automatically pull in the title, a featured image and excerpt of the post. Looks good, right?! But don’t hit Publish just yet.

STEP TWO

Horizontal images look best here, so if your featured image pulled in as vertical, go ahead and upload a horizontal one. A lot of times my post doesn’t have a horizontal image, so you can easily make one by taking a screenshot and cropping it horizontally. The quickest way is to hit ‘Command + Shift + 4’ and then select the area that you want as your screenshot. Delete your link in the text box, it won’t make the link box disappear.

STEP THREE

Now you have two images as featured images, make sure to unselect the vertical one, so the horizontal one shows alone.

STEP FOUR

Click on the arrow next to the ‘Publish’ button and select ‘Schedule’. A new box should open on the screen.

STEP FIVE

From here, select the day of the week and the time of the day when you want your post to go live. Hit Schedule! You’re done!

STEP SIX

If you want to go back and see what you have scheduled or to edit any of your scheduled posts, you can click on the link that says ‘See Posts’ to do so.

Make sure to sign up for the Blog Better email newsletter to dive deeper on this subject. Emails go out the following Tuesday! You can sign up here!

If you have a quick second, I swear it won’t take more than 5 minutes, I’d be so thankful if you could fill out this survey. I’m always trying to make The Fox & She a better place that you find interesting and exciting! The insight I get from surveys like this are invaluable to me! So, thank you in advance for helping me out!

Happy Wednesday my blogger friends! Today’s we’re talking about Pinterest — my second favorite social platform behind Instagram. For fashion, food and lifestyle bloggers Pinterest can become an incredible discovery tool, especially if you have beautiful images.

Go ahead and open your Google Analytics dashboard and scroll down to the tab on the left hand side that says ‘Acquisition’ and navigate to ‘All Traffic’ > ‘Referrals’. This tab is one that I frequently look at because it shows you the top traffic referrals are coming from. For me, Pinterest is number one. By a long shot.

The key to making Pinterest work for you is to create pinnable images. If one of your pins gains traction and gets repinned hundreds or thousands of times it can continue to bring a steady flow of traffic to your site, so taking the time to create pinnable images is totally worth it. So let’s get down to it then! What is it that makes an image highly pinnable?

1. VERTICAL VS. HORIZONTAL

Images with a vertical orientation are far more likely to get pinned and repinned. Why? In Pinterest all images are the same width, so horizontal images get sized down quite a bit and aren’t nearly as eye-catching. For the most part, almost all of the shots for my blog are oriented vertically to get more exposure on Pinterest.

2. MULTI-IMAGE IMAGES

A pin with multiple images that represent the post as well as a bit of text explaining what the post is can be really beneficial. They’re typically longer than a regular vertical photo which gives them more real estate on the page and they’re more likely to get seen and repinned. I see food bloggers doing this a lot and think it works really well. Here’s a great example.

If you decide to do something like this, make sure you use the same format each time (same fonts, colors, sizing) and make sure your branding is on there. This will help reinforce and grow your brand recognition.

3. INCORPORATING TEXT

I’ve used this method a lot for DIY posts and also Blog Better and have seen tremendous success! This pin of a story I wrote for Wandeleur and this pin on how to grow your Instagram following.

The text gives context to the image and makes it far more likely to get saved than the image would on its own.

4. STEP BY STEP

This is sort of the same as a multi-image pin because it will have multiple images, but also numbering and short simple directions to follow. This works well for short recipes and easy DIYs. The only downside I see here is that if you give away all the steps on Pinterest, there’s no reason for anyone to click through, so think about that!

5. PHOTO QUALITY

Lastly, but probably one of the most important things is the quality of image that you’re posting. Pretty, well-lit, colorful images get noticed first and are more likely to get repinned, so invest some time into photography and learn how to take beautiful images.

If you’re wanting to create a multi-image pin or pin with text and don’t have design programs, make sure to try out BeFunky! It’s so simple and will make you look super professional! Do you have any more tips for making images highly pinnable? I’d love to hear what works for you!