33. How (and Why) to Shake Up Your Pin Templates

Stephanie 0:00

Are you sick of using the same tired templates when it's time to make pins? Let's chat about what makes a great pin so you can update those templates and see more results.

Stephanie 0:11

Hey there, teacher business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:22

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm really excited for our episodes this month. Since we're in the Valentine season, I thought it would be a great time for us to talk about how to fall in love with Pinterest again. Because, let's face it, I would say most teacher business owners have had a pretty rocky relationship with Pinterest over the years. The algorithm giveth and the algorithm taketh away. And when you're on this roller coaster of emotions, it can be hard to find the motivation to keep trying to make Pinterest work for your business. Unfortunately, we can't change the algorithm, but we can control our workflow so it's more pleasant to pin for our business. So for this episode, we're going to start at the beginning of the pinning workflow, and that is your pin design.

Stephanie 1:08

There are a lot of elements that make up what one would consider a good pin, and you're probably following most of those best practices already. So instead of rehashing all of those, I'm going to share three changes you can make to freshen up your templates for 2025. Sometimes just a little variety is all we need to shake things up and get more excited about making pins again.

Stephanie 1:34

So the first thing that you could think about switching up is your pin size, or at least use more of a variety of pin sizes. So most people use the recommended dimension of 1000 pixels by 1500 pixels, or some sort of similar two to three ratio. If you tell Canva you want to create a pin design, this is the ratio that's loaded up for you to use. However, as of the date I'm recording this episode, Pinterest still allows longer pins. Now they don't like the ones that we used to call giraffe pins back in the day, you probably remember those infographics that would just go on and on and on down the feed. They don't let you do those anymore, but you can still use longer pins that are 750 pixels wide by 1500 pixels long. There are a couple of reasons why making those longer pins can help you fall in love with making pins again. The first reason is that I would say most of the photography you have on hand is, you know, square photography. And you probably noticed that when you're making pins, the cropping can get kind of tricky. With those square images, they just might not be big enough to fill up the space in one direction, and so then you're cropping important things out of the picture going the other direction. Anyway, it can just get kind of frustrating to try to use your square pins for a different aspect ratio. But when you're using a longer pin, you can actually create it so that you have two square spots for product images, and then, you know, some text in the middle, you just have different options for using your square product photography in your pins, which just makes a more pleasant pin making experience. The other reason why longer pins are still helpful is that you'll probably love the results you see from longer pins. I was recently on a mastermind call, and the host of that call was counting up her top performing pins for the past month, and the majority of those pins were the longer pin design. And I think one of the reasons for this is that they just take up more real estate in the feed and they grab more attention. I mean, I think that's why the giraffe pins were so popular back in the day, is because they were able to really grab people's attention in the feed. And so I think you will love the results you see from, you know, sprinkling in some longer pins here and there.

Stephanie 4:09

The next best practice that you're probably familiar with, but you might want to switch up a little bit, are the fonts and colors that you use on your pins. Because we want the fonts to be clear, we want the colors to be attention grabbing. You know all of this, and most likely, your brand kit has already some fonts and colors that work well on pins. But in this effort to switch things up, to bring more variety into your life, and to maybe see more results from your pins, you might want to consider switching up your fonts and colors. And this might be a little bit unsettling, especially if you have, you know, a very recognizable brand, but there's a reason I make this recommendation. Your brand kit could be amazing and carefully curated, and you have awesome color combinations that really work well for your business. But there might be something in that same branding kit that isn't helping you stand out from the crowd in the Pinterest feed. And so try to be willing to branch out and to experiment with other fonts and colors. Just as an example, if you're making a pin for a certain keyword, go ahead and search for that keyword on Pinterest and see what colors are being used in the top ranking pins. And then you can choose a color that's going to stand out from the crowd, and it might not be from your brand kit, and that's okay. Because heavily branded pins can also cause what I like to call brand blindness, and that's when your pins look too similar to each other, and over time, Pinterest users will just scroll past even a new pin that you've just created, because it looks like something that they see from you all the time, and they will just assume that they've already seen that pin before. So while straying from your branding might be a little bit uncomfortable, I think you will love the results you see from doing that, and it can help you fall in love with Pinterest again.

Stephanie 6:07

Now as a service provider, I do stick a little bit more closely to pre approved colors and fonts, because if I didn't, we would be in a very time consuming cycle of pre approval when I'm trying to make a lot of pins for my clients each month, so I have to find other ways to help their pins stand out, and one of those ways is by focusing on the words that I include on the pins. Because we all know through best practices that it's important to use a targeted keyword on a pin graphic. But there are other ways that you can adjust the wording of your pins to add some variety and to get noticed in the feed. I've noticed that pins with a subtitle do much better than pins with only one large keyword phrase as the title. The large phrase slows the scroll, but a subtitle is more likely to pause the scroll, and so if you're not sure what I mean by a subtitle, let's say that I created a pin for a keyword like second grade morning work. I would have that in large font on the pin graphic as the title, and then I would add a rectangle or some other little highlight element underneath the title with some additional text like that takes no time to prep, or that students actually like. And so that subtitle, it's just a way to get people to slow down, because when we make our titles too legible, they become very skimmable and so adding that little bit of extra text can go a long way. Then you can also experiment with pins that have no words on them at all. And this is great when you have a very visual product that you want to showcase, especially if it has like an in progress image, like a craft of some kind, because it sparks curiosity and makes it more likely that people will click or save that pin. Now you might be thinking that this is a waste of a keyword opportunity because you're not including your targeted keyword on the pin graphic. Just keep in mind that Pinterest also has a place for you to type in the title and the description, and it'll be a story for another time, but I know that Pinterest uses that much more than they use the text on your pin, and so it's definitely okay to create pins that have no text on them at all. I wouldn't base an entire Pinterest strategy on that, but when we're looking for variety so we can just get out of the rut of those stale templates, it's definitely something fun that you can try. I hope that this episode has given you a permission slip to switch up some of those best practices that can begin to feel a little bit like drudgery. In fact, adding some variety to your pin size, font, color ,and wording can help your pins perform better on the platform, because they will stand out.

Stephanie 9:05

I have good news for you. If you're a student of bring your own traffic, I go into a lot more detail about pin design, including some time saving tips in lessons 4.1 and 4.3 of the course. So again, if you're already enrolled, you have access to that right now. If you are not a BYOT student yet, you can get started at stephanieroyer.podia.com That's stephanieroyer.podia.com and I'll also include the link in the show notes.

Stephanie 9:37

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources, now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.