{How To} Hide Pinnable Images in Blog Posts

When you’re creating a blog posts – and hoping it might go viral (admit it, you know you do) – you might want to create a multitude of beautiful graphics that will look oh so good splashed across Pinterest, which by the way is the third largest search engine.  There’s just one problem: you don’t want your words overshadowed by a scrolling chasm of graphics attached to the bottom of your page.  So what is a blogger to do?  Hide them of course!

Make Loads of Pinnable Graphics

The perfect size for a Pinterest Pin is 736 pixels wide by 1104 – 2061 pixels tall.  Long pins stand out and get attention, but if you make them too tall they will get cut off on mobile (and you and I both know that’s where the majority of people are checking Pinterest – on their phones).  Try to keep your aspect ratio for pins between 2:3 to 1:3.5.

Put the Graphics Your Blog Posts

Here’s an example of my pinnable graphic for this post:

 

See what I mean?  Kinda big and distracting.  Especially when the featured image for my blog post is horizontal and already present.  (I know I can shrink it, but this is the teacher in me offering a visual … bear with me).

Hide Your Pinnable Graphics

Since you’re going to need to be able to easily find the code for the graphic, I suggest putting your graphics at the end of your blog post… all the way at the bottom.  Don’t worry, no one will see them anyway.

Open up the “Text” tab at the top of the page and scroll to the bottom where you placed your graphic.  You will see a snippet of code starting with <img class>.  This is the code telling the internet the address of your image and how to display it.  The code will always end with />.  Now that you have found it I want you to add a little extra something to this bit of code to the front, right in from of <img class>:

Now tack on this code at the end: </div>

So what did we just do?  Basically this little extra bit of code tells computers everywhere to not show anything found between the <div> tags, essentially hiding the picture from display but allowing it to live on inside your blog post.

Now take a look at the blog post – the graphic is now gone!

Share Your Blog Posts with Extra Hidden Graphics

I have successfully used the plugins Social Warfare (for social sharing) and Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover And After Post & Page Content (a little Pinterest button appears on the images you do have).  And when you go to share or pin images, this is what you’ll see:

See?!  There is your hidden pinnable graphic.  So go ahead, add as many as you want.  Hide them and forget about them… until you start seeing tons of traffic coming from Pinterest.  You’re welcome.

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