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I’ll admit it- when I first set up my Pinterest profile, I was a little intimidated. Everywhere I looked, everyone was pinning beautiful tutorials and gorgeous photos and luscious product shots- and I was thinking, “How the heck am I going to create images even half as good?”
The first thing I realized was that I needed to not panic- and the second thing I realized is that I needed to take a look at resources I already had to help me do the job.
As a novice digital photographer, I began to realize that I had it within my capacity to take great photos. I began taking my DSLR out on the weekends and capturing some nature and landscape shots, to be used as backgrounds and images in my blog posts and products. All I needed to do was pay attention to lighting and keeping the background as simple as possible. When taking pictures of small objects- such as jewelry or mosaics I’d made, I used a lightbox- this gave me the right lighting and white background.
While I’m not one to over-edit my photos, I did learn a few basics things in Lightroom to help improve my images- mostly around cropping the images and adjusting the colors.
When I had a picture I liked, I used some free applications I have to add filters, and unique effects to those pictures. And watermarked them with my name, too. You can also use an online service to do this, one such as Pixlr.
If you use Instagram to promote your business, you can also pin your Instagram photos. Instagram makes it easy to apply interesting filters to your smartphone photos. You can use a program such as Pictacular to easily share your Instagram photos as pins on Pinterest.
Finally, you can also use Pinstamatic, a set of free Pinterest tools which anyone can use. Pinstamatic makes it easy to create pins in a variety of ways, including taking screenshots of websites, pinning tweets from Twitter, and so on. You can also quickly create pins featuring your favorite quotes, as well as adding captions to photos.
Another service I like that is easy to use is ShareAsImage – which makes it really easy to create memes, using your photos or theirs. You can also use a site like Imgflip or Memecrunch to create memorable memes.
You don’t have to have an unlimited social marketing budget to create great pins for Pinterest. In fact, photography skill isn’t even a necessity. With a little software and ingenuity, anyone can create pins that are worth sharing. Why not get started with these tools today?
