How to Make Pinterest Pins in Canva that Viewers Can’t Resist

So you want to make Pinterest pins that stand out and get a ton of clicks? 

You’ve come to the right place! 

I have spent years making and testing different pin formats, fonts, colors, pictures, and more to figure out what works the best. I’ve done all of this with one goal: increase the traffic to my blog, and convert this traffic from a light reader to an excited customer. 

If you are overwhelmed by Pinterest or feel you aren’t as design-savvy as you’d like to be, then I have good news for you. 

Making pins is not as hard as it seems. And if you set yourself up right, you can put in a little work up front, and then have smooth sailing from here on out. 

And if you do this using Canva (like I’m going to teach you), then the process is even easier!

So let’s jump in and learn how to make Pinterest pins in Canva that viewers can’t resist!

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products that I personally would use or do currently use. Please read full disclosure for more information. 

1. Make Pinterest pins by using the right sized image

Pinterest really likes its pins to be a certain size: 1000 x 1500 pixels

The first step to making pins in Canva is to make sure you have the right size selected. You can do this one of two ways: 

You can either create an image with a custom size: 

3. Type the dimensions into the boxes, and make sure ‘px’ is selected to the right. 

If you notice, once you type in the dimensions, ‘Pinterest Pin’ is a suggested option. This leads us to our next option. 

From the home screen, type in ‘Pinterest Pin’ into the search box and click Enter.

This will bring up the option to create a blank Pinterest pin, or lets you choose from hundreds of templates of Pinterest pins.

There are a ton of amazing templates you can choose from (some free and some are only available for Canva Pro members). But for the purpose of this tutorial, let’s start with a blank one. 

2. Use high quality graphics in your pins

Pinterest pins are 100% visual. Pinterest users are casual scrollers, they aren’t on there to read every single pin and click through to every single landing page. 

They will scroll until something catches their eye. One big part of this is the image. 

There are a couple of things that you want to make sure of when picking an image. 

Images need to be:

Overly busy images can really take away from the text of the pin (which is extremely important and we will talk about in just a bit). 

Let me show you some examples. 

Say I was making a pin about creating a business plan. 

This is a good example of an image to use for a pin: 

This image has neutral colors, is good quality, and doesn’t have so much going on that it could be distracting for a viewer. 

Now here is a bad example of an image to use for a pin: 

This image has much brighter and more distracting (and hard to match) colors, and could easily be distracting to a viewer. It would also be really hard to get text to overlay it well because of the variations of color in the image. 

So with images for your pins, aim for easy to look at photos with neutral colors and minimal distractions. 

My favorite places to find images for pins are Pexels.com (which is actually a part of the Canva family), or directly from Canva’s photo library. 

So back to making our Pinterest pin: 

While images aren’t necessary for pins, I have found that a good image can do a better job of catching someone’s eye than a pin that only has text. 

My favorite method for this is adding photos as the background of the pin. 

To do this, click the ‘Photos’ tab on the left side of the Canva editor. 

Here, you can scroll through some options or use the search field to find photos that match your topic. 

Let’s create a pin which will link to a blog post titled ‘How to plant tomatoes in a raised garden bed’. 

In the Photos search, I might type in different keywords until I find a good photo. Here are a few I’d try: 

• Planting tomatoes
• Planting a garden
• Gardening
• Planting a raised garden
• Raised garden
• Tomato garden

You want to make sure whatever photo you pick is relevant to what your pin is about. I wouldn’t want to pick an image of someone planting carrots, or even someone planting tomatoes in a pot, because my post is about how to plant tomatoes in a raised garden bed. 

If I can’t find an image of exactly that (which is a likely scenario), then I can try to find an image that is vague, such as gardening tools or a bag of soil or just some tomatoes. 

Once you find the image you’re looking for, you will select it with your mouse, hold down on the mouse, and drag it over to your pin until the image shows up as the background of the pin. 

Now you have your background! 

From here, there are a few tweaks you might make, depending on how your image looks. 

For my image above, the image itself isn’t too distracting, but I like to have a softer looking background and this one is kind of bright with bold colors. 

So I’m going to soften it up a bit. I can do this one of two ways: 

How to adjust the transparency of an image:

While the image is selected, click on the Transparency option on the toolbar. 

Here is my image after adjusting the transparency to 45: 

How to add a colored layer over the image and adjust its transparency and color:

On the left hand side of the screen, click ‘Elements’ and select a square/rectangle. 

Drag the rectangle to completely cover your image (it’s okay if it hangs over the sides of the pin).

From here, you can change the color and transparency of the rectangle so that you can see the image below. 

For color, usually white or blank work best, depending on the image, but you can experiment with different colors to see what looks the best. 

As far as transparency, you want it to be transparent enough that you can see the image underneath it, but still dark enough that the image’s colors aren’t fully showing through. 

For my image, I changed the rectangle to the color white, and adjust the transparency to 41, and here’s how my image looked: 

Now, we have a really nice looking background that is a great base for our text. 

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3. Make your pins easy to read with simple bold text

The text of your pin is probably the most important part, for a couple of reasons. 

First of all, the text is your chance to provide a good hook that will potentially catch someone’s eye and make them want to click through and find out what lies behind the pin (your blog post, product, or whatever it may be). 

Secondly, this is a place to add in a little SEO to get Pinterest on your side 🙂 

Here are my tips for adding text to your pin: 

When figuring out what actually words to put on the pin, use phrases that people would search: 

How to ______
The best _______
5 ways to _______

This is going to make your pin perform much better on SEO, and makes it MUCH easier for people to find your pin (which is exactly what we want). 

With the text design, limit yourself to 2 fonts if possible, and make one of those fonts bold, big, and super easy to read. 

Use the bold font for the majority of the text, or at least the most important parts of your text. 

Example: If your pin is going to say ‘How to start a blog when you feel lost’, at the very least you should make ‘Start a blog’ bold, and might even make ‘when you feel lost’ bold as well. 

This is because if someone were skimming your pin, then the important part, which is ‘start a blog’ is going to stand out to them. If they are interested in starting a blog, they might be more inclined to click through. 

For your secondary text, you can use a thinner font, or even a cursive font, as long as it is readable. Many cursive fonts can be a struggle to read, so be careful with this one. 

Here are my favorite Canva fonts for pins: 

Alright, let’s add some text to our pin! 

You can either select ‘Text’ from the left-hand side of the page, or you can click out of the pin completely, and press ‘T’ on your keyboard. 

You have some options here- you can either add your entire sentence/phrase into one text box (this works well if you’re using just one font and keeping it roughly the same size) or you can add multiple text boxes for each line (I typically do it this way, because you have more flexibility over editing). 

Change the text to type in whatever you want it to say, and you can then edit the colors, fonts, size, and more!

All of these options are available in the toolbar across the top of the editor: 

The settings from left to right are: 

Font, font size, text color, bold/italicize/underline, sentence case, text alignment, line/letter spacing, special text effects.

Play around with these options and find what works best for your pin. 

Once you have fonts and colors you like for your text, you can make your text stand out even more but click ‘Effects’ and picking an option such as an outline, a background, shadows, etc. 

These are especially helpful if you have text that isn’t standing out enough against the background. 

Here is my pin after adding and editing some text: 

Here are a couple of things I did to this pin: 

• Added a shape behind the text so that the text would stick out more
• Added a smaller bit of text to provide more value (the complete guide)
• Added my website URL at the bottom (this isn’t really my website url, but one I made up for the purpose of this tutorial)

4. Save your Pinterest pins the right way

Making your pins successful is like a puzzle- there are a lot of pieces to put together. 

One way you can do this is by saving your pins with a good SEO title. And that’s easy- just make sure your title is a good match (or exact match) to the text on your pin or to the blog post it links to. 

You can either save the pin in Canva with this name, and export it like that, OR you can save it from Canva and rename it in your file folders. 

So for my pin above, I would save the pin with the name “How to plant tomatoes in a raised garden bed”. 

If you have multiple different pins you are saving with this same text, you can simply add a number at the end of the title!

P.S. Always save pins as PNGs!

5. Set yourself up for future success

Alright, now you know how to make Pinterest pins on Canva! Congratulations! This is going to change your business for the better, I promise. 

If you feel like this process took too long, then I have good news. 

Now that you have this pin designed and well made, you can save this as a template to use in the future. 

So next time you want to make a pin, you can pull this template up from Canva, change the text, background image, and make any more small adjustments needed, and boom, you have a new pin in minutes!

To do this, you’re going to click ‘File’ in the top left corner, and click ‘Save to folder’.

From here, you can make a designated folder where you save all of your Pinterest templates. It is best to make sure this specific template has a name so you can identify it later!

And voila! You have now learned how to make a Pinterest pin in Canva, created a template you can use over and over again, and learned a little bit about SEO for Pinterest! 

Pinterest is a GAME CHANGER for any business, especially online businesses such as blogs. 

If you have a blog or small business and want to learn how you can use Pinterest to create traffic, generate leads and sales, and finally get your dream life, you will love my Pinterest course that is launching in a few very short weeks!

This course will be extremely in-depth, and walk you step by step through everything you need to know to start driving traffic from Pinterest to your site!

By time the course is over, you will have a Pinterest account that is set up for SEO, completely optimized, and bringing you thousands (and then hundreds of thousands) viewers each month. 

If you want to get notified when this course goes live in a few weeks, sign up below and I’ll send you a notification! ↓

I hope you learned a lot and feel way more confident about Pinterest pins than you did before you read this post! 

Have any questions I didn’t answer? 

Drop them down below ↓

I’d love it if you’d repin this post!