New style for Nifty's Product Grid sharer page

We like to keep Nifty up-to-date and relevant in this wonderful, chaotic internet world in which we virtually live. This time, it's the turn of the product grid sharer page to come under the spotlight.

A big thankyou to the feedback that molded it into it's final form (second piccie, below). You know who you are, Dale, BK and Malissa - 💐💐💐

Ever since we built the product grid sharer page tool for Nifty, it's used the same layout. It was time for a freshen-up.
Compare the two. Here's the original:

the old layout for the product grid sharer page

...and here's the new layout:

click the image to see this new layout for real

I think you'll agree, it's a cleaner and fresher look and might tip the balance in helping you get a few more sales 👍

We've only just put this live - why not be one of the first to see it for real?

make your own here

Enjoy 😎

Zebookfreec featured picks working well

Each day the Zebookfreec featured picks showcases three collectible art ebooks for free download.

Zebookfreec's unique proposition is that all ebooks in the collection are collectible in their own right, including as they do, gorgeous artwork from movie, tv and comic-book franchises and also from indie artists.

They all share the same thing in common, other than being free to download, and that's thing is they're all linked to their page on Zazzle where they can be bought to add to a real-world collection.

Today's free download featured picks are Supergirl, Thor Ragnarock and House Mouse:

Gigs on fiverr for Zazzlers

The Nifty tools I've built for Zazzlers are used over and over again by most of the Zazzlers who give them a try.
Even though they're simple to use, there's one group of Zazzlers who don't use it much at all:

Those who don't realize their Zazzle store is a business

And that's the group of Zazzlers who are new to the concepts to do with promoting their Zazzle designs as a business would - and that can prove to be too much for many. Those Zazzlers are happy to share from each product's page when the fancy takes them.

What I'd say to them is that by having a store on Zazzle you are a business and to be successful in business you have to behave like a business. And that means promoting like a business does.

Do you?

For example, do you do any marketing campaigns? Any seasonal event deserves its own campaign and right now, Valentine's day is approaching. To get the results we'd all like to have, takes far more shares than we can ever hope to achieve by hand, sharing from product pages and collections.

How to get the message across?

Any Zazzler who is serious about taking more of a business approach needs to use tools powerful enough for the task. At the very least, the tools should multiply your effort and take 10 minutes to get the results you could only hope to get by spending hours at it without the tools.

Reaching those who would benefit

The main way I try to reach Zazzlers about the Nifty tools is via the Zazzle forum but I recognise only a tiny percentage, overall, visit there. So to try and reach more Zazzlers I've put up a couple of gigs on fiverr.

The first is a gig where I build an ebook for them (using the Zebookfreec service) out of one of their collections. The second offers to pin the content of one of their collections to either one of my boards or one of theirs at the rate of 12 per day until finished.

I'm hoping that people who get in touch about the gigs will (eventually?) be open to the idea of using the Nifty tools, with the standard brilliant, free hand-holding I give.

Zebookfreec groundwork completed

As you'll know if you've been following things, we've spent the last month or so working on Zebookfreec.

Looking upstream, it's a service aimed primarily at Zazzlers who want to reach into a new marketing channel, one largely untapped until now. Zebookfreec makes it possible for Zazzle storekeepers / designers / affiliates to promote their or other's art and designs via ebooks.

Each ebook page is a product, with image and title linked to the product page on Zazzle. Here's an example of a page 

example page from a Zebookfreec ebook - title and image linked to product page on Zazzle

And looking downstream into the channel, the target market is anyone, including kids, with a Kindle or other ebook reader or tablet. The exact target audience depends on each ebook's subject matter and currently includes:

• Parents wanting something different for their kids' bedtime story time or just to cuddle up on the sofa with and spend some quality time
• People who love Superhero artwork and comic books
• People who enjoy art

The main thrust of the 'offering' is that these ebooks are collectible in themselves and, where the content is something like posters or postcards, the ebook is a catalog of collectible art they can buy for their own collection.

The ebook features are:

• Made from one of your collections on Zazzle
• Every page links to the product's page on Zazzle
• The back page has both a bitly link and A QRCode link to the live version
  - this means someone can be showing someone else your ebook and the second person can whip out their mobile/tablet and point its camera app at the QRCode. It'll take them to the onlive version where they can buy as well.
• Every link has a referral id and tracking code so successes (referral income!) can be tracked
• Choices for you to get the referral sharing split that suits you (from none to all)

When you own the copyright of the entire content, you're able to publish your ebook on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and on ManyBooks. One of ours on ManyBooks had 35 downloads in the first 3 weeks of uploading it.

Links:
Find out more about getting your own ebook made
See and download today's free featured picks on Zebookfreec
Browse the full list of Zebookfreec titles available for free download

Filling Zebookfreec's Shelves

I've now added a few more collectibles to the list of titles available for free download over at Zebookfreec.

They're all from Disney and so far include:

• Disney Princess
• Winnie The Pooh
• Frozen
• The Muppets
• The Seven Dwarfs

If you have kids who've enjoyed the movies, comics and characters then they'll love having these collectibles for their Kindle or other ereader / tablet.

download your free collectible ebook
- which will your kids choose?

Disaster for some, YQL withdrawn from service

The live product grid widget and live slideshow widgets you would generate using the Nifty Promo Control Panel for Zazzle are both broken.

Yahoo has withdrawn YQL from service. It's the backend tool used by those widgets to work with Zazzle RSS feeds. Alternatives are being looked into.

This is what they say.

Important EOL Notice: As of Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019, the YQL service at query.yahooapis.com will be retired. This will impact users of datatables.org as well as developers who creates features using this YQL service.
To continue using our free Yahoo Weather APIs, use https://weather-ydn-yql.media.yahoo.com/forecastrss as your new API endpoint. Contact yahoo-weather-ydn-api@oath.com for credentials to onboard to this free Yahoo Weather API service. Other YQL based services that use query.yahooapis.com will no longer operate.

All Society6 tools are broken as well. Luckily I'd already removed the dependency on YQL from all but those two Zazzle widgets but hadn't even started on the Society6 Nifty tools.

Watch this space for any developments.

Nifty is moving home...

From the very beginning, Nifty has been living as a lodger on my www.kdl.to domain. Great news - it now has its own place at niftytoolz.com

At the same time it's gained some new features to help develop a brand new, real-world sales channel, overlooked until now and therefore ripe for the harvest.

You'll also be pleased to know that it's had a good sweeping out of the dustweby corners and that caught me a few unusual-circumstance bugs.

It's new home is here: https://niftytoolz.com/npcp/nifty-promo-control-panel.html

The New Nifty enhancements

Here's a quick summary:

• Improved handling of description lengths when displaying products
• Improved product grid display on mobile and tablets
• Much-improved search facility on slideshows (widget and sharing page)
• The Live-print Catalog announced in the last newsletter has been refined and improved
• Make a QRCode graphic for your slideshow or product grid in Nifty and use it in your marketing support designs - they're great on the backs of your business cards.
• Multifeed option, there for when you need it. Simply ignore it and all tools will work as they do now

Make a QRCode for your product grid sharer page in the following section of Step 2

As the screenshot says, there's a similar button in the 'share a slideshow page' section so you can choose what's best for any given purpose.

Here's one I made for my fine art collection. It's for a product grid page because I like the way they work on mobiles. It's quick and easy to swipe up and down through the product designs.

your mobile camera app should recognise this automatically and
offer to open the web page in your device's browser

If you've not used QRCodes before, you're part of a shrinking population! They're almost second nature to millennials and younger peeps. Most camera apps on mobiles and tablets recognise them automatically and when they do, they offer to open the page in the device's browser.

They're great to put on your marketing material and give one more avenue by which potential customers can reach your designs! Real marketing pros will love the added reach this gives.

Why not point your mobile at the QRCode and see what happens?