Automated Pinning - making a nIFTTTy Scheduler applet on IFTTT

Let the nIFTTTy Scheduler take the strain and pin up to 1000 products for you, spread over the days, weeks and months to come.

Pins made this way look great. Here's what one looks like in the list of your pins:

a Pin as it appears in the list of your Pins

 ...and below is the Pin itself. It's a Rich Pin, meaning that the prices are up-to-the-minute (nearly), and so will change if they change on Zazzle. Same for the title and description you see. The hashtags come from the IFTTT applet, as you'll see below. Cool, huh? 😎

the Pin itself

The link to the product includes the tracking code you set up (see later) and your referral id. If you have a Nifty subscription, pins will always use your referral id. If not, half the Pins will use yours and half mine (what's called a 50/50 referral split). If it's your product, you will always get any royalty due.

Summary

1. Set up the products you want pinned
2. Choose to make a nIFTTTy Scheduler
3. Set up your schedule details
4. Copy what you're given to paste into a new IFTTT applet
5. Set up the applet
6. Wait for your first Pin!

Step by step

So, on with the step-by-step guide to make your own nIFTTTy Scheduler applet.

👉🏽 First, as usual when your doing any kind of promoting with Nifty, you set up things in Step 1 of the Nifty Promo Control Panel to get the products you want to work with:

First set up the products to work with - here it's working on my store

👉🏽 Next, in Step 2, you choose and set up the tracking code to use for the nIFTTTy Scheduler before opening it:

Click the "show/hide" button and set up the tracking code before opening the scheduler

👉🏽 Click the button to open the scheduler and set up your schedule. Here's an example schedule:

Set up your schedule and click the button "Copy for pasting in IFTTT"

Now it's just a case of clicking the button to copy your feed url for IFTTT.

👉🏽 Next, log in to your IFTTT account, get to the "My Applets" tab and click the "New Applet" button:

getting ready to create your nIFTTTy Scheduler applet

 

👉🏽 ...and you'll see this:

the first step in creating the applet - choosing the "if" part

🎓 Before continuing, a quick explanation is in order.  IFTTT is put together as

• if a service you choose meets a condition you select
• then another service you choose will carry out an action you set up

👉🏽 The first step is to choose the service for the "if" part. You'll be choosing the RSS Feed service, so click the "+this":

handily, the RSS Feed service you want is at the top of the list of services

👉🏽 Click the RSS Feed icon and you'll then choose the condition; a trigger in this case:

available "trigger" choices for the "if +this" part

👉🏽 You want to pin whenever a "New feed item" appears in the nIFTTTy Scheduler rss feed, so click that choice.


🎓 The nIFTTTy Scheduler rss feed only ever has one Zazzle product in it and only when one of your scheduled timeslots is active. Remember, timeslots stay active for 30 minutes starting from their set time.


👉🏽 On clicking it, you'll see the following, where you paste in the RSS feed url you copied from the nIFTTTy Scheduler just now.

👉🏽 Here it is with the feed url pasted in from my example above:

paste the feed url given to you by the nIFTTTy Scheduler

👉🏽 Click the "Create trigger" button and you'll move to the next step, choosing the service to carry out the action you want:

getting ready to choose the service for the action part of your applet

👉🏽 ...so go ahead and click "+that":

choosing pinterest as the service to perform the action you want

👉🏽 Start typing "pinterest" and the list of services will be filtered as you type. Click the "Pinterest" one


🎓 This blog post is all about Pinterest but you could choose Twitter, Facebook or others. The exact steps in setting up the action vary by service.


👉🏽 Ok, so you've clicked "Pinterest" and now you choose the only available action, "Add Pin to board":

👉🏽 When you click it, you set things up for it:

setting up the action - the defaults given are near-perfect

👉🏽 Fill in your board name, being ultra careful to get the spelling and capitalisation right. Next, add hashtags to the "Add a description" field, being careful not overwrite what's already there:

hashtags are added in the IFTTT applet's description field

👉🏽 Add your hashtags to the description field - note that the "ingredient" graphic changes while you're typing into the field. When you click away from it, it'll change back to the graphic.

Almost there.... Click the "Create action" button and you get to name your shiny new applet:

default name / applet description - change to something more sensible

👉🏽 The default name / applet description isn't very helpful, so change it to something more meaningful to make it easy to recognise later. Here's a more helpful description I tend to use, one which includes a summary of what's being pinned and the name of the board:

✅  That's it, you're done! Click the "Finish" button and then just wait for the next timeslot in your schedule to become active. When it does, within half an hour you should see your first Pin appearing 😎