Thursday 21 December 2017

How to earn on Pinterest using nIFTTTy Feed Scheduler Pro

Following your requests to make the nIFTTTy Feed Scheduler more useful, we've now given you 12 time slots per day, up from the original 3, to speed up your income generation.

TLDR; 

Here's a summary of what it does for you, driven by applets from IFTTT (IfThisThenThat):
  • Earns you revenue - mainly from Pinterest
  • Schedule up to twelve times per day per feed per channel
  • Choose where to share them - popular channels (places) are:
    • Pinterest - a good revenue generator. Pins are rich unless Pinterest and Zazzle are having a tizz, as does happen from time to time. They're the best type for getting more exposure on people's home feeds and hence more chance of earning refrral commission.
    • Twitter - good place to generate revenue, if you have the followers
    • Facebook - good for your business page, much less so for ordinary shares
    • Google Plus - as per their terms of service, don't forget to declare it's an ad (use Ad: at the start and you'll be fine)
  • Supports tracking codes - make sure you use them to know where you're succeeding
  • Fully customizable definition of what appears in feeds and so what gets shared
  • Up to 10 IFTTT applets
  • Free version uses your referral id half the time and ours the other half
  • Monthly subscription version always uses your referral id

The green parts are automated, the purple shows the once-off setup you do.

✋ What you need for the Zazzle feed scheduler to start the almost-guaranteed earning for you is quite simple. You need both of these free things:
  • An account on IFTTT (IfThisThenThat)
  • A business account on Pinterest (it must be a business account)

How to earn from it - summary

This is just a summary - each step is detailed further on with screenshots.

We'll focus on earning from Pinterst, as that's the quickest way to get the $s flowing, in our experience. So here's how to start your revenue stream from Pinterest:
  1. Using Nifty, make your choices to get the product designs you want to schedule to automatically make rich pins
  2. Click/tap the nIFTTTy Scheduler button in Nifty Step 2, ready to set up the pinning schedule
  3. Set up your schedule, making sure one pin is scheduled for right now.
  4. Click the "make feed url for IFTTT" button and copy the feed url text you're given 
  5. Check it's working ok
    1. Paste what you copied into a new Firefox window (Firefox shows feeds rather than the behind-the-scenes xml gobbledook that some other browsers show)
    2. You should see one item in the feed. There'll be no image but don't worry, it'll be there when you share.
  6. Next, head over to IFTTT, create an applet and tell it to use an RSS feed as the trigger.
  7. Paste in the feed url you copied in step 4
  8. When it asks you for the action, 
    1. the first time you use the scheduler you might like to get it to email the products to you at the scheduled times. 
    2. If you do, Tell it to use email as the action and give it an email address you use as the "to" and another you use as the "from".
    3. If you're pinning, instead choose Pinterest as the action and complete filling in the info
    4. Give IFTTT say, 15min - 30mins, to get round to checking your applet and taking action
👇 Now keep reading to see how it's done, step by step with screenshots.

Step-by-step

Step 1: Prepare your feed

Using Nifty, prepare the product designs you want to schedule to automatically pin
Use the options in Step 1 to select the products you want to schedule for pinning. Make sure you look at the additional options (More options -> click the "show/hide" button) and change the page size to the maximum (120).

Step2: Open the scheduler

You'll find the place to open the scheduler in Nifty's Step 2


Click/tap the show/hide button next to "Make a nIFTTTy Share Scheduler" to see:


Click/tap the "open scheduler" button you see, ready to set up the pinning schedule for the products you've got selected.
💤 
More correctly, you're setting up an RSS feed spec that will be used later by IFTTT. 
This means that the actual product pulled will come from what's in the product feed at the time IFTTT requests it, so the products are only representative right now.
💤 

Step 3: Set up your pinning schedule

In the scheduler window that opens, set up your schedule. If you want to follow the times that reputable sites like Tailwind judged to be "best", click the "best for Pinterest" button. Then make sure one pin is scheduled for right now, so you can see the outcome fairly quickly.


Step 4: Get what's needed for IFTTT

Click the "make feed url for IFTTT" button and copy the feed url text you're given. ready for the next step.


Step 5: Check it's working ok

To check it's working you can paste the feed url into a new browser window to see its output. Remember, this is the product design pulled from Zazzle during this scheduled period.
Many browsers will show the behind-the-scenes view of the feed in gobbledegook but that's no good for human eyes.
💤  
In this case the gobbledegook is officially known as XML, which stands for "extensible markup language". There, you feel better for knowing that, don't you?
💤 

If you use Firefox you'll see a view of the feed as intended for people. You should see one item in the feed but there'll be no image on display - but don't worry, it'll be there when you pin.



Step 6: Create your IFTTT applet

Next, head over to IFTTT and create an applet by clicking the blue "+ this" button:

 

 and tell it to use an RSS feed as the trigger:




You have to choose that you want it triggered when it sees a "New feed item":


When you've done that you'll see where to paste that feed ur (at last!)





Step 7: 

Paste in the feed url you copied in step 4

...and click/tap the "Create trigger" button and you'll be taken to the sceenshot in Step 8.

Step 8: What to do with the product design

Now you're ready to tell IFTTT the "that" part of the "if this then that". So click the blue "+ that" button:



When it asks you for the action service, type in "pin" to filter the list:

...and then choose Pinterest to see this:


Click the only available option so you can start filling in the details needed for this action:

All the defaults are perfect. Fill in the name of the board where you want the pin to go. Finally, Add hashtags to the end of the "description" field, like this:



Click the "Create action" button to see:

By default IFTTT uses the first 140 characters of the feed to give a name to this applet. Change it to something that'll remind you of what it's pinning. A good one for this would be "black and white artwork to Fine Art board, 12 timeslots, every day.

Hit the blue "Finish" button and let things bake for a while. ⏰

If you made sure that one of the scheduled timeslots is occuring right now, then sometime in the next 15 minutes to half an hour, you should see the pin of the product design (the one that you saw in Firefox at Step 5) appear on your chosen pinterest board.

Where next?

You can have up to 10 active applets at any one time, so get working on the next nine!

Tips

Tip one: If you have sheduled 12 time slots every day of the week, in 10 days you'll have run through all items in the feed. This is based on you having chosen a page size of 120 right back in Step 1.

That applets now defunct, so delete it t and create a new one to replace it. If you use all the same settings in Step 1 as before, you can pull a different page of results, assuming there are more of the same to come.

When pulling from the market place, even narrowing things down with a department and fairly specific search terms, we can get many pages to play with before running out.

Tip two: Expect to wait a few weeks for your first referral commissions to start coming through, it's all down to the subjects you choose, the boards you use, chance and hashtags. The more you pin and the more they get repinned, the quicker it should be, building up as more weeeks go by.


Tip three: Make sure you use tracking codes (second screenshot in Step 2) that tell you what you want to know. Incorporate the board name and or a date and or the occasion being focussed on, in the tracking code - just make sure you stick with letters, digits and the underscore character (no dashes, space or special characters) and use less than 64 characters.

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Drop off questions in the comments or the usual places

Enjoy :)