Few online tools are as useful and simple to learn as Canva. Its intuitive interface is very quickly learned. Images can be uploaded, resized, repositioned, angled and recoloured very easily.
I won’t go through the signup and process account stages, they really are as simple as can be.
More important are some facts and features that are important to making pins that are going to catch the attention of your audience.
Once you have a pin idea, I suggest you upload all the pictures you will need, to Canva, all in one go. To stay organised I create a sub folder in my website’s main folder named to reflect the project. For this series of pins about Canva, I created “Canva” folder within my images folder for this website my-computer-tuition.co.uk.
Pin Text
It is vitally important that you create the text overlay that has the SEO search term in it, and preferably near the beginning of the title. One of the main checks that Pinterest does to determine how it ranks your pin is the matching of text overlay and the Title of the Pin.
Next Pinterest checks the Board Name -is your pin relevant on this board? Make sure it is, if not create another board with Board Title and Description nearer to your pin.
Colour
Its an overused generalisation, but ” dark pins don’t rank” is true to some extent. Choosing the colours of the text, background and picture so that they match or ‘harmonise’ is SO IMPORTANT.
True you should design the pin to grab the attention of the user, but tests generally show that the most clicked on pins have a ‘harmonious’ colour range.
How can I choose the right colours to use on the pin? I would suggest you read and explore the Photocopa palette tool on the Colourlovers website this completely free tool can quickly give you the main colours from a photo, enabling you to choose suitable text and background colours that will enhance your PIN
Branding
When you start pinning, you probably won’t be thinking too much about this. Long term Branding is very important and if your pins are recognised, it can help users check out your new pins more easily in the feed. This can be a LOGO, a signature of some sort or a colour scheme. I go into Branding in more detail in a separate article, suffice to say here, just have another look at a Pinterest feed and you will see examples of branding everywhere and I’m sure you will see the massive advantage over the long term
