From Canva to Pinterest: Boosting Your Medium Articles

The Pinterest Experiment Starts

In my previous article, I wrote about using Pinterest to drive more traffic to Medium. After all, we want our content to be seen as much as possible by people who are genuinely interested in it, right?

Yesterday I created and configured my account. Today, it’s time to create that first Pin. Let’s get started.

Create a Visually Appealing Pin with Canva

I think most of us are familiar with Canva. If not, Canva is a website where you can easily create designs for things like social media posts, presentations, posters, and more things like that.

It offers lots of templates, graphics, and tools that make it simple for anyone to design professional-looking stuff without needing advanced skills or software.

When I clicked on ‘Create a design’ and typed in ‘Pinterest’, I saw several options:

Which is the ‘right’ one? I did recall Deni saying the following:

“Create pins in CANVA and add text effects to your writing. This will turn it into an MP4 (video format). When you go on Pinterest, instead of uploading a photo pin, choose ‘idea pin’.”

Let’s go for the Idea Pin.

For my first Pin, I chose to create something for my article titled “Why Doing Your Laundry is More Productive Than Pretending to Work”.

It took me some time to figure out what I wanted in terms of style, but eventually, I found something I liked. Question to you:

Do you think you should be consistent in style so you get kinda recognized/stand out?

Publishing the Pin on Pinterest

When I returned to my Pinterest profile, I saw a ‘+’ button where I could create a Pin or a Board:

For now, I selected the ‘Pin’. I started filling in all the fields and asked myself: “But where’s that Idea Pin?”

I thought I needed to click the Hamburger menu on the top left and select ‘Create Pin for Idea ad’:

Here I saw my drafts as I already started creating that regular Pin:

Here I asked for help from ChatGPT to work more efficiently. I prompted:

Create an SEO-optimized Pinterest description about an Idea Pin I want to publish. It’s about my Medium.com article called “Why Doing Your Laundry is More Productive Than Pretending to Work” containing the following content: [inserted the content of my article]. Analyze the writing style and write it in that style. Don’t exceed more than 800 characters due to Pinterest’s character limitation.

I wasn’t satisfied with the output, so I adjusted it a bit and inserted it. I was also able to create that ‘Board’ here, so I named it ‘My Medium Articles’.

Time to hit that ‘Publish’ button!

Now What?

Here’s the published Pin, and below you see a GIF version of it:

Now, when people click, they will come to this page:

When ‘medium.com’ is tapped or clicked, you’ll be redirected to my article. Alternatively, you can click on ‘Visit’ — in the image above displayed as ‘Bezoeken’ (yeah, Dutch — I know) and you’ll be redirected to the article as well.

Now I messed up one thing. I forgot to choose which part should be shown as the thumbnail. When I visit my profile, I see the following:

Of course, it would be better if the whole title would show up there. I don’t see any way to edit that, unfortunately. No, I also won’t delete it and publish it again. This was time-consuming enough already!😅

The next time it will be easier and quicker as I now know more about how to create it. I want to give it a fair shot, so I want to try it with something like 30 Pins.

Let’s see if it gets me more traffic! Hope this was helpful, and I’ll keep you posted.

If my words hit home for you or if this was valuable, consider showing some love — buy me a coffee. It’s cheaper than therapy!