NiftyPromoControlPanel Archives

Learn how to create Pinterest pins that get 20 X the impressions

I did some experiments with manually created pins because I wanted to see what the effect would be compared to those pinned using Pinterest buttons.

Impressions compared on very recent pins

a screenshot showing the stats for manually created pins — manually created

a screenshot showing the stats for pins created with pin-it buttons — manually created

Compare the impressions between the manually created pins (top image) and the pins created using a Pinterest pin (aka pin-it) button.

All of those pins were created in the last couple of hours and you can see the difference in impressions they’ve received already.

In a day or two, the manually created ones (Created heading) are going to be vastly better than the ones made with pin-it buttons (All Pins heading).

Impressions compared on 5-week-old pins

25 X the impressions compared to best-performing pin created with a button
(click to see larger – opens in a new tab / window)

The pins shown above were all created on October 1st 2022. The best performing pin created with a pin-it button got 9 impressions. Compare that with the manually created pin – it’s had 233 impressions in the same time frame!

So that’s 25 X the impressions. Read on to find out how you can achieve the same!

About pinning

When you use a Pinterest (aka pin-it) button to make a pin:

via the product page on Zazzle
using the Nifty Speed-Sharing tool
with the Nifty Auto-Pinner tool

..two observations:

The description text on the pin is the standard, bland description Zazzle provides for the type of product being pinned.
Yes, the designer’s description is ignored.
Around the same time as the designer’s description started being ingnored in favour of Zazzle’s standard one, impression rates on pins of Zazzle products dropped really low

I can understand 1) to some extent – some of the descriptions designers give are eye-wateringly inappropriate:

some stuff them with keywords so they’re not actually descriptions
some just repeat the product’s title
some use a generic description that’s unrelated to the design

The downsides of those I think explains Zazzle’s reasoning: they go for a generic description of the product type so their reputation is unharmed.

The drop in pin impressions 2) that happened around the same time isn’t a surprise. Why? It’s likely because Pinterest factors in the uniqueness of a Pin’s description in deciding what to show on people’s feeds.

Best way forward?

Watch this video on how to quickly and easily create stonking pins that’ll attract lots of impressions:

If you’re a serious Zazzle designer with a limited amount of time to devote to promoting, I’d suggest a combination of manual pinning and speed-sharing.

With a little more time, or you’re a designer with a small affiliate hat, I’d recommend doing the same, but more of it with both your own and other people’s designs.

A serious designer-cum-affiliate will do auto-pinning, speed-sharing of great sellers and maybe half a dozen manually created pins per day.

Nifty

Of course, any of those type of people who value their time will be using Nifty already. Not only to speed up their promoting but to make it easy peasy as well.

You can use Nifty for free if you don’t mind a 50/50 split on any earned referral fees. If that doesn’t appeal, you can get a membership by paying a monthly subscription (link opens in a new tab / window).

It would be really cool to hear about your experiences with manually created pins, so if you don’t mind sharing them, drop off a comment. Thanks!

New Nifty for Zazzle’s Promoter Program

Great news! The version of the Nifty tools suite that supports the new Zazzle Promoter Program has now been released!

How it will work

The new Nifty Promoter Program Membership works as follows:

You pay for your Nifty Promoter Program Membership and
- register the stores covered by your Zazzle Promoter Program account
- register the account’s Associate Id
When you use Nifty with that Associate Id (aka referral id) and promote products from your registered stores, all links created will be ‘clean’ – that is, no referral id, tracking code or promo code will be included
When you use Nifty with that Associate Id (aka referral id) and you promote from the marketplace, links for products from your registered stores will be clean, all others will include your referral id, tracking code and (if set) the promo code

Earnings

✅ Clean links will earn you a whopping 35% self-referral commission
✅ Links with your referral id and tracking code will earn you the usual 15% referral commission
✅ Your Promoter Program account will not be eligible for the Volume Bonus program

Note that the way it works is determined by Zazzle. The above is all based on answers we’ve received from them about the Promoter Program workings.

What will you be able to do with Nifty as a member of the Promoter Program?

Now the new Nifty has been released you’re be able to:

✅ Automatically pin many dozens of your links on Pinterest daily (with or without classy image frames)
✅ Share shareable slideshows of your products on social media (they won’t ‘slide’ until the image is clicked and the visitor gets taken to the slideshow page on the Nifty website)
✅ Use the speed-sharer to get your links onto social media real fast – all with hashtags created from your product’s tags
✅ Share the speed-sharer on social media so others can speed-share your links on their social media!
✅ Share links on social media to shareable pages of your product grids on the Nifty website – for those without web sites
✅ Make widgets for slideshows, scrollers, speed-sharers, product grids – and more – for your blogs and websites (yes, even free WordPress sites!)

Of course, you can still do all of the above with products from other artists and earn the 15% referral commission but we wanted to focus on the Promoter Program. But don’t worry, Nifty automatically creates the right sort of link depending on whether or not the product being promoted is yours.

New multi-product sharing image for Product Grid Sharer

We’ve updated Nifty and the Product Grid Sharer so, when you share to pinterest, facebook and twitter, you get an image made up of the first five products from the grid. It’s a bit like the image you get when sharing a collection directly from Zazzle.

We’ll give it a chance for any bugs to surface before doing the same for the Slideshow Sharer.

We’ve chosen an image proportion that works on Twitter and Facebook, and one with a vertical format for Pinterest.

Here’s what it looks like on each:

Twitter

Facebook

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/332562753734124763

Nasap – the new Nifty tool on the block

😭

We’ve had to withdraw this tool – IFTTT refused to play nicely with the approach we used. The random selection that made sure everyone shared different products just didn’t work out properly and very little was actually being shared after a handful of days.

To those of you who tried it, we’re sorry it ended up this way.

You can leave your exisiting pins / tweets / shares. They’re all fine and may actually lead to success in the “long tail” – ie over a period of a few months or longer. See Wikipedia’s entry for long tail.

Save even more time when speed-sharing

Update: We’ve done this now for both the Zazzle and Society6 Nifty CPanels

the new all-in-one speed-sharer – click to try

If you’re doing a promoting session where you want to promote the same select few products down more than one social media channel, until we added this update what you’d have likely done would be to open tabs for each of the speed-sharers and then flicked between those tabs, speed-sharing as you go.

With the new all-in-one speed sharer, they’re combined into one. No more flicking back and forward between tabs. It may seem like a small thing but it saves lots of time when you need to promote this way.

Examples of when you’d be using this approach

You’ve done a bunch of designing and you want to get your newest stuff “out there”, coordinated across your social media channels.
You’re having a little bit of a promotion campaign for a a few tightly-focussed product designs and you want to share in a coordinated way across your social media channels

Why is this coordination important?

When you coordinate across your channels in this way, it increases the chances of your share being seen by more people (ie a few from Facebook, a few from Twitter and some from Pinterest).

If you’re focussing on attracting potential custom by including a promo code, coordinating across the channels can boost your results.

Coordinating in this way can also give each product a little bit more prominence in search engines.

So, we hope you enjoy the time-saving you gain with this. 😎