PICMONKEY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE
TO CREATING SOCIAL MEDIA IMAGES:
PicMonkey is our program of choice for creating all of our social media images mainly because of it’s ease of use.
One of the best ways to drive traffic to a blog post is by promoting it on Pinterest with a beautiful, eye-catching pin. Creating pins that readers want to click is not as difficult as it seems when you use PicMonkey!
Our favorite graphic design tool for our blog is PicMonkey. This is exactly how we use PicMonkey to create social media images that attract our engaged audience.
When we sit down to create images for a post, we create our blog post images and our social media images all at the same time. This is simple to do because the only difference in the images that we create is their size.
We use similar colors and fonts in every image and we also use a similar style in all our images which is part of our branding.
To create images for your social media using Picmonkey, follow these steps:
1. Open PicMonkey.
First of all, open PicMonkey and then choose “design” and “custom size.”
2. Choose the appropriate size.
Optimal sizes are:
Blog post – whatever size your theme recommends
Pinterest – 600 x 900
Twitter – Tweeted image 1200 x 675
Instagram – Post image: 1080 x 1080
Story image: 1080 x 1920
Facebook – shared image: 1200×630
Link image: 1200 x 628
3. Choose the background:
After creating a canvas of the appropriate size, choose the background color for your canvas. If a photo is going to be your background, you can skip this step, but if you choose to put text on top of a colored background, this is where you choose the background color.
Next, click on the “basic edits” on the left, choose your color and then click “apply.” Your entire canvas should change to the color you selected.
If you are using a photo, click “overlay” which is the butterfly icon and choose a photo from your computer to import. You can then resize the photo by clicking on and dragging the corners to fit your canvas. Click “apply.”
4. Add text to your PicMonkey image.
Next, click on “Text” which will open a text box on your photo. Move the box to the appropriate place and then in the left column on the screen, choose your font. In the small box that pops up, choose centered, aligned left or aligned right. Type whatever you want your image to say and click out of the text box.
5. Compress the image and save it.
When the image looks the way you want it to look, go to the bar on the bottom of the “Layers” box and click the icon that looks like a stack of papers. This will compress your image. After compressing, click save and choose a place on your computer to save the image.
Finally, rename the image to something relevant. Use keywords that your audience might be googling so that your photo has good search engine optimization.
6. Use PicMonkey to create all the other images for all your social media.
Repeat the above steps using the size that is appropriate for the platform you are creating the image for.
7. Add alt text and image title attributes.
If you are using WordPress, when you upload the image to your blog, in the uploader window you will see a place to add alt text and image title attributes to your image.
Adding alt text and image title attributes is important because this is what helps your image to be discovered by Google, and we all know that being discovered by Google can be a pretty good thing.
HOW TO OPTIMIZE IMAGES FOR SEARCH ENGINES
8. Repeat the process for all your social media platforms.
Use this same method to create an image for each social media platform. After creating all of your images, it’s time to start promoting that blog post!
Use our link to try PicMonkey for free! While PicMonkey is made for creating beautiful graphic images, it is also a great photo editor for your personal pics. If you have been considering PicMonkey, now is a great time to try it:
Note that if you do choose to purchase PicMonkey with our link, we may get a small commission at no extra charge to you. Try it! We think that you will like it. We use it every day with our blog and always appreciate the ease of use that comes with PicMonkey.
Grab our quick guide and checklist “HOW TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR BRAND NEW BLOG POST” below. In this guide, we give you specific steps to complete to make sure that your blog post gets as much exposure as possible and we also include the checklist that we use with every single post that we write!
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