How to Make Pinterest Pins in 20 Minutes: An Easy Tutorial

Log into your Canva account and type ‘Pinterest’ into the search bar on the homepage.

Select Pinterest Pin (1000 x 1500px).

This will ensure that your design matches Pinterest’s recommended image size for pins.

At last count, Canva had 11,300 Pinterest pin templates.

Scrolling through all those to find one you like will take ages. So, I recommend using the filter options to narrow down your options to those that best suit your needs.

Here, you can search for pins according to:

– Style
– Theme
– Subject
– Topic
– Color.

For example, in this image, you’ll see that choosing mental health as your theme will bring up a whole bunch of pin templates that are perfect for your therapy practice.

Once you’ve found a template you like, tap on it to view a larger preview.

Happy with your selection?

Great, then click Customize This template and let’s keep going.

If you used my Canva Pinterest profile cover tutorial, the next few steps should be familiar to you as you’ll be editing your pin in much the same way.

First, you’re going to change the colors of your design.

To do this, tap any element in your design.

Notice how a colored square appears at the far left of the editing menu? Click that to bring up the color selection menu and pick the colors you prefer.

Here’s where I usually recommend sticking to the same colors you use in other aspects of your business branding, such as your website and therapy practice logo.

That’s still a smart idea, though -as you’ll see at the end of this tutorial- I broke my own rule with my first few pins for Therapist Marketing Tips, mainly so that I could show you the variety of design possibilities available on Canva.

You can change the color of your text on Canva in pretty much the same way that you edit your element colors.

The only difference is that when you select your text, you click the letter ‘A‘ with a line underneath it that is the same color as your text.

Clicking that brings up the usual color menu that you can use to select the right colors for your design.

Since we’ve already got the text editor menu open, it makes sense that the next step to learning how to make Pinterest pins on Canva is to change the text itself.

To do that, just highlight the text you want to change as you would with any other software and replace it with your own.

You can then use the editor menu (shown in the image above) to customize all of the following aspects of your text:

– Font
– Size
– Color
– Styling (bold, italic, underline, bullet lists, etc.)
– Position
– Effects and animation.

When I refer to ‘design elements’ on Canva, I’m talking about the icons, graphics, and other non-photo visuals you can add to your design.

For example, in this tutorial, you can see that my chosen Pinterest pin template has a series of upwards-facing arrows to the left and right-facing arrows on the right.

Since I’m making this particular pin for my guide to creating a therapy practice Instagram account, I also added the Instagram logo by going to Elements – Graphics and searching for Instagram.

You can do the same simply by using the search bar to find the graphics you want. Then, either click on a graphic element to add it to your design or drag it into place.

Speaking of dragging, if you’re not happy with how your graphic elements are positioned in your design, all you have to do is click and hold on to that element, then pull it into position or resize it.

You can add free stock photos to your Canva Pinterest pins in the same way that you add elements.

Only this time, navigate to Elements – Photos. Then, search for the type of image you want and add it to your design.

Alternatively, you can go to Uploads and import your own images from your device.

When you’re 100% happy with your design, give it a name, then tap the Share button in the top-right of the screen.

This brings up a dropdown menu with all the different ways you could possibly get your design out into the world. For this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to manually download your design and upload it to Pinterest.

To download your design, tap the Download button from the drop-down menu. This will bring up another menu where you can change the file format and adjust some other settings.

I recommend keeping everything the same and hitting the big, purple DOWNLOAD button to save your design to your device.

With your pin ready to go, open up Pinterest and go to Create-Pin.

A pop-up window will appear with everything you need to create a new Pinterest pin.

To begin, first, upload the design you just created on Canva.

You can do this either by dragging and dropping a file from your device or tapping on the arrow to upload.

Next, you have four details to add to your pin.

A. Pin Title – This should closely (if not exactly) reflect the title of the web page you’ll be linking to with your pin.

B. Pin Description – Tell people what benefit they’ll gain by checking out your post.

You should also be adding relevant hashtags in this description to boost your visibility on Pinterest.

C. Alt Text – An essential aspect of your design for both accessibility and SEO, your alt text should describe your image in a way that makes it easy for users with visual impairment difficulties who access the web via screenreaders still understand what the image is and what it’s about.

D. Destination Link – Here’s where you add a link to the page or blog post that you want people to visit after clicking on your pin.

Before you hit the publish button, click on the drop-down menu next to it to choose which one of your Pinterest boards this pin should be saved to.

If you don’t yet have a relevant board for this pin, you’ll find an option to create a new one at the bottom of this menu.

Finally, when you’re happy that your pin is ready to go live, simply hit the publish button.

When that’s done, so are you. You’ve successfully learned how to create a Pinterest pin and add it to your Pinterest account.

All that’s left to do now is repeat the process for each new piece of content you publish on your site.