How To Choose Colors That Get You Pinned

Most big bloggers will tell you Pinterest is their biggest single source of blog traffic.

It's certainly mine. By a long way.

So however great your content each post needs a great "pinnable" image.

And "pinnable" means big & bright with a "read me" title and stand out colors.

Now that's fine in theory but whilst I can happily hack HTML all day long, I really suck at graphics & design. Choosing colors that look good, go together and grab pinners attention sends me into a spin!

But with the help of a few tips and completely free tools that do most of the work for me I do manage to produce pictures that attract attention at link parties and on Pinterest.


(N.B. None of the links in the post are for affiliates - they are just free tools I love.)

PicMonkey

I host two linky parties and every week read absolutely brilliant posts that I don't pin because the image is too small, too dark and hasn't got a title ... I know from experience no one will re-pin that post.  It's so frustrating that I can't use Pinterest to get these bloggers the readers their content deserves.

PicMonkey is a free tool that lets you easily resize, crop & brighten images and add titles.

If you are not using it do!

It will take you 30 minutes max to master & I promise you will make a difference.

Color Schemer

Unless you have a stunning image, the easiest way to get pinned is a nice bright title color.

You can use PicMonkey to pick out colors in your image but these are often not great.

This is when I resort to another free tool Color Schemer which lets you search for palettes created by other users based on key words.  The key words can be specific colors or characteristics e.g. bright, bold or inspirations e.g. summer.

These were some of the fab palettes that a search on "bright" gave me.

I then work various of the palette colors into my images as in the image for this post.

Color Hex

My other favourite free tool is Color Hex.

I use it a lot when I can pick out a reasonably bright color from my base image using PicMonkey.

I then go looking in Color Hex for brighter shades and tints of the color ...

... and for "analogous" or "complementary" colors that will make it stand out even further ...

There are loads of color tools out there but having tried lots these three are my faves.

If you struggle with design like me do give them a go and see if they help.

If you found this post helpful do follow my blogging board on Pinterest ...

And check out these other blog design posts from the Mommy Archive ...