We’ve added a new feature to Nifty to help your Zazzle store get promoted. You can now submit your store for promotion by the affiliates / artists that use Nifty as part of their promotion strategy.
screenshot of the store submission form
When anyone submits a store, they’re first asked to pin/tweet/share 20 designs from a store that’s been submitted previously (chosen at random).
So there’s two ways to get promoted when you submit your store to Nifty, by:
affiliates using the new “pot-luck” button in the Nifty Promo Control Panel
someone submitting a store after you and your store gets chosen as the one to have its 20 products pinned/shared/tweeted
All good quality stores are welcome. Submit yours if you like – the sooner the better! If you think about it a bit, it’ll make sense…. stores submitted earlier have a slightly better chance of being chosen.
Only for those who don’t pay a Nifty subscription: you might, if you’re very lucky, bump into one of the “Easter Egg” goodies we’ve added.
Wait, what’s that?
It’s just a bit of fun but we’ve hidden a bunch of “Easter Eggs” in the Nifty Promo Control Panel. Each one is something you’ll love – so far you could get:
one of the various time-limited free subscriptions to Nifty
one of your collections listed in Nifty’s featured collections panel
We’ll be adding more as time goes on 😎
Here’s what one looks like:
An example of one of the “Easter Eggs”
The more you use Nifty, the more likely you are to bump into one. Good hunting!
March 2021 This no longer works – IFTTT have withdrawn this ability for applets that pin to Pinterest from an RSS feed.
IFTTT have today (September 10, 2020) introduced a limit of 3 applets without paying for their IFTTT Pro Subscription. If you had more applets than that, you’re allowed to keep them.
That means it makes sense never to delete any of your existing nIFTTTy applets when they run out. Instead you’ll want to edit the applet to replace the exisiting feed url with a new one (and, no doubt, rename the applet in line with what it’s now set up to pin).
The simplest way is just to use the nIFTTTy Scheduler to make your new feed url and replace the applet’s existing one with the new one.
Only for the brave
To save time, some people might want to dive in and edit the feed url in the applet directly. If that’s you, there’s one important thing you need to know – how to tell the scheduler part of the applet when the applet was “made”.
It needs to know so it can work out which is the next item to pin.
So how do you tell it?
You change a specific part of the feed url, the one beginning with cdt=
Here’s an example feed url with that part highlighted in light blue:
You visit the Epoch Converter website (opens in a new tab), put in the date of the day the applet is to first start and click the button as per the screenshot. You needn’t worry about the time as the scheduler just uses the date part and starts counting from the beginning of the day.
When you visit the page, the incrementing counter you’ll see is the cdt number for right now, so you can use that if you want your applet to start today. If you want it to start tomorrow, then you’ll need to put in tomorrow’s date as per the screenshot.
Once you’ve copied the cdt number just replace the existing one after cdt= in the feed url with what you just copied.
That’s it, done.
Of course, if you’re changing the search term and / or department id and / or category id as well, you’ll need to change those in the feed url as well. If you want to do those as well and you’re not sure of what you’re doing, it’s probably best to use the nIFTTTy Scheduler to make the new feed url instead.
After consulting with Zazzle, we’ve removed all except the “clean” image frames. Those were the ones that were available to the nIFTTTy Scheduler when creating pins for Pinterest. Zazzle were concerned that they looked like adverts coming from them, not us.
Zazzle required a specific statement to be placed on the image frames themselves and it was just too much effort to go back and update / remake all the exisiting ones. If we’d just removed the offending ones, there wouldn’t have been enough left to give variety between us all 😞
The “clean” image frames are the ones where the frame colour follows the average colour of the product image. As the text used is applied programatically, it’s something I’ve been able to change easily.
Example of a “clean” frame
Now we’ve made the change, all existing nIFTTTy Schedules that were using image frames have now automatically switched over to using the clean ones.
There’s nothing for you to do – all will happen “behind the scenes”. If you were one of the ones who put in the effort of designing image frames for everyone to use, thanks and sorry it’s turned out this way 💐
We’re pleased that we’ve been able to respond so quickly to make sure the Nifty tools are fully compliant with Zazzle’s terms and conditions.
As is usual, since first releasing the video feature of the Nifty Product Stager, we’ve been improving things. We’ve tweaked the timing for each animation and the pause at the end of each cycle.
What does this mean? It means a viewer has more time to view and take in each design.
Here’s one we just made for one of the great designers at Zazzle. We loved the cute dragon!
The Product Stager gives you a shortened bit.ly link to use when sharing the video on social media.
It leads to an auto-generated page on our new PickFromHere.com site showing all the products in the “pull” from which the video was made. They’re laid out in a product grid, with each linked to its product page on Zazzle.
Note: if you’re going to share on Pinterest, you can’t use the bit.ly link because Pinterest doesn’t allow shortened links. Instead you need the long link in the Useful copy-paste items for your share section at the bottom of the Product Stager.
