How To Start Your Own POD Business

POD stands for Print On Demand.

A POD People is a person who runs their own business using POD technology.

Print on Demand items are made up one at a time as the costumer orders them, rather than mass produced.

This has to be the #1 most asked question by POD people.

Help! I Haven't Made A Sale!

Well, since there are millions of CafePress shops, and millions of Zazzle Galleries, and more than 140,000 authors using Lulu to sell their books, most of them with an average of 10 books per author, you have some stiff competition.

First of all, ask yourself some questions:

* How long ago did you create this shop?
* How many designs did you create?
* How often do you create new designs?
* How many products did you put each of your designs on?
* What have you done to promote your shops?

* Better tags, keywords, titles, and descriptions.
* More design choices.
* More products per design.
* More exposure to your shops.
* To raise your prices.
* To create even more shops.
* To be patient and wait for customers to find you.

What Do You Do That I Didn't Do?

I can't really answer that question, because I do not know everything that it is that you did. However, if you read every thing on this lens, you will learn what it is that I do and than you can decide for yourself, wither or not you are doing everything I am doing or not.

CafePress is probably the oldest and most well known of the POD printers. They cater to artists and authors who want an inexpensive way to get their art and books to the public.

When most people think of POD, usually the first company that pops into their head is CafePress.

I joined in 2004 and for the longest while only had 5 shops, but I linked to sigs in forums I chat on, so I was getting pretty regular sales (well, 4 or 5 items a month, it was better than nothing)

In 2006, I went mad and created about 80 more shops! LOL! Because I had so many shops now, I can't possibly link them all in my sig links anymore, so instead, I created a Freewebs hosted website to post links to them on, and posted the link to that page in my forum sigs instead. That actually didn't work out to good, because sales didn't rise, they just remained steady, even though I had doubled and tripled and double again how many shops I had. I've heard other folks say that starting a Freewebs site boosted their sales. So it works for some folks. Maybe you could try that as well?

My saw a huge jump in my sales in the Spring of 2007, when I joined Squidoo, (it's free to join) and started using it to promote my CafePress shops. Now I've got sales coming in pretty steady, from the items I promote on Squidoo. I wasn't sure how Squidoo would do, so I only tested a few items out with it, but sales of those items went up, so now I'm slowly expanding, and adding more and more of my items to my Squidoo account. I'm very hopeful that this is going to just throw the fish out of the water and bring my sales up loads and loads, cause it did so good with the few items I had listed already.

I created a MySpace page for my shops, but so far that hasn't done much to affect sales.

In fall of 2007, I opened my first Premium shop, and it basically makes enough sales to pay for itself, with about $30 extra for me to keep, so it does get more sales and more often, but it also takes a good chunk of those sales to pay for itself as well. Still, as long as it continues to pay for itself and have some left over, I going to keep it. But, basically I'm making more money with my free shops than I am with my one premium shop.

I started a FaceBook group as well, but that's new this week, so it hasn't had a chance for me to tell if it'll increase sales or not.

I too, have left flyers. I also leave post-it note in public restrooms, with nothing but the shops address written on it. No idea if those affected my sales or not.

Anyways, long story short: I get most of my traffic/buyers via clicks in my forum sigs (I post on over 100 different forums), and off of my Squidoo lenses, so those are the two ways I feel are best to promote shops, simply because those are the two methods that worked best for me.

I really have no idea. When I looked I could not find anything about it in their ToS.

I hope I never reach the limit if there is one! I have done much better with my 80+ basic shops than my one premium shop.

I love having loads and loads of basic shops, and I have tons of ideas for many more, so I'll just keep on adding new ones until I finally hit the limit if there is one, but I don't think there is, cause I read one poster a while back who mentioned they had more than 300 basic shops!

My biggest sale was also my only big sale, and a great one time: WOO-HOO! for me. I wish it would happen again.

Normally my sales are small: 1 or 2 buttons or a shirt or a couple of stickers. No body ever gets more than 2 or 3 items.

However, in March of 2007 I got one order for one of my antique postcard Easter designs, (see picture at right ---> ) I think it was a baby bib. Than about 2 weeks later, that same person came back and bought one of each of EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT featuring that design!!!!!! OMG!!! I almost flipped when I saw that! I couldn't believe it! I wish I had had that design on more products. I think it was on 12 different items at the time. I've since added it to more products, half in hopes she'd come back and buy the rest! LOL!

Sadly that was the only time I've ever gotten a big order. My sales continue to be regular, but small and only 3 or less items at a time. Oh well. Here's to hoping that happens again.

One of the biggest and most popular producers of POD products ever is Zazzle.com. Zazzle is known for it's high quality products and eye-popping colorful (and 100% FREE!) user galleries. Unlike CafePress, you get to build a colorful shop called a gallery, where you can edit and show case your products for free. (CafePress has this option as well, but they charge a monthly fee.)

Zazzle artists love the chat room feel of the comment boxes added to their galleries, allowing artist/buyer interaction. Buyers can stop by a leave feedback about your gallery, your products, your designs, and they can even upload pictures of themselves wearing your designs.

My favorite thing of all about Zazzle is the great promotional links they provide their artists. From blog widgets, to product image links, they have everything you need to promote your products on any website. Here is an example of an image link provided by them, for one of my designs:

I joined in 2004 about one month after joining CafePress. I created about 15 products and left my gallery completely unedited, and than did not visit the site again, until a year later when I got a check in the mail for items I had sold.

I didn't return to Zazzle for so long, because, I simply forgot I had an account with them! If I had not gotten that check, I might never have gone back at all.

In 2005, I still had dial up, and the way the Zazzle site is set up, you really can't do much about uploading and editing your products if you have dial up. The Zazzle site is one big massive Flash media on top of another on top of another. Every page is jumping and moving and filled with slideshows and products images that open popup windows so you can see the image up close. In short, the Zazzle website is the dial-up users worst nightmare. I visited it rarely, and only added about 15 new items that year.

I did nothing to promote my gallery, as I myself had great difficulty getting it's Flash media pages to load, and felt it pointless to try to promote a shop if I did not even know what it looked like! However, the check still kept coming, as people still kept buying my very few products.

December 2005, saw the death of my beloved Pidgie, and the rise of the animal fund raiser built in his honor: The Pidgie Fund. Bu the end of the year, I had my second gallery on Zazzle.

In 2006, not much had changed. I still had dial-up, and Zazzle still had multiple flash media things on every page, I tried in vain to upload images via their Flash media image uploader, which took 7 hours to load 5 pictures and than crashed my computer. I stuck those items on products, and than did not go back to Zazzle again the rest of the year, but the checks still kept coming in the mail, only now twice as many checks came because I two galleries instead of one.

Enter February 2007 and my switch from dial-up to Time Warner Road Runner cable. First thing I did was to test RR against Zazzle's monstrously outrageous blinking, sliding, moving Flash media website and low and behold, it actually loaded! Finally for the first time in 3 years, I got to see what the Zazzle website looked like fully loaded, and for the first time I got to see my Zazzle Gallery.

By the end of March, I had over 200 designs on over 1,000 products in my Gallery, while The Pidgie Fund took off with another 30 designs on over 500 products.

With the success of Copper Cockeral and The Pidgie Fund Zazzle galleries, I decided it was high time The Twighlight Manor Press had a Zazzle gallery of it's own, and now I was running three Zazzle galleries with over 300 designs on more than 2,700 products!

I now had three checks coming at a time from Zazzle, and bigger checks, more often, as I began to actively promote my three galleries.

My saw a huge jump in my sales in the April of 2007, when I joined Squidoo, (it's free to join) and started using it to promote my Zazzle galleries. Now I've got sales coming in pretty steady, from the items I promote on Squidoo. I wasn't sure how Squidoo would do, so I only tested a few items out with it, but sales of those items went up, so now I'm slowly expanding, and adding more and more of my items to my Squidoo account. I'm very hopeful that this is going to just throw the fish out of the water and bring my sales up loads and loads, cause it did so good with the few items I had listed already.

I created a MySpace page for my shops, but so far that hasn't done much to affect sales.

I started a FaceBook group as well, but that's new this week, so it hasn't had a chance for me to tell if it'll increase sales or not.

I also leave post-it note in public restrooms, with nothing but the shops address written on it. No idea if those affected my sales or not.

Anyways, long story short: It was a long bumby ride getting started with Zazzle, but once I made the switch to cable internet, my Zazzle career really took off, and is now my #1 source of income bringing in $40 to $120 each month since I started promoting it on Squidoo.

I joined Lulu back when they was a little blog trying to convince authors they could produce a good product. They had just started their website and was being run by 5 computer geeks out of their home. My first impression of Lulu, was that it was the hokeyest hair brained idea any kitchen-hobbiest self printer had ever tried to get going . . . and I love it! I was one of the very first people to sign up.

Over the many years since than, Lulu has evolved and changed. What started as a hokey idea, took off like wildfire as more and more self-published author joined the ranks.

After about two years, LuLu underwent a massive face lift, leaving behind it's early days as a tiny bloggy looking site, and becoming one of the biggest, most visited, and by far the fastest growing POD printers in history.

Today, just 4 years later, Lulu competes with the giants such as Amazon.com and Scholastic Books. LuLu has blown the Scam POD printers such as iUneverse right out of the water and has rocked the book publishing world with it's onslaught of paperback and hardcover books, completely and 100% controlled by the author. Lulu is the baby of the book publishing world, but she has the big house traditional publishers up in arms and trembling with fear as they see their own careers with a dim future, for if LuLu continues on the path she is on right now, the book publishing world may very well see and end to traditionally published books all together.

I have nothing but good things to say about LuLu.

In the information above, I talked about each POD printer and my experience with them separately. In this section of the lens, however I'll talk about things that apply to any of these companies and any others you may use as well.

How much promotion do I do?

A lot!

Constantly.

Each and every day.

Oddly, though, I had my shops for 4 years sitting there doing nothing at all, before I did a single bit of promotion at all!

My early years on CafePress & Zazzle were spent designing and building. I had been bitten by the creative bug and focused only on that.

Now however, these past few months at least, I have focused on nothing but promotion, and not created a single new thing!

I guess I go in waves.

Most of my promotion is done through Squidoo; a little bit comes from other sources too: MySpace, FaceBook, Freewebs, Blogger, WordPress, Proboards, NaNoWriMo, chat rooms, message boards, forums, post-it notes in public restrooms, all the usual stuff; but Squidoo is were most all of my traffic and sales ae coming from so thats where I put my best efforts.

~~~~~>^..^< The EelKat has spoken.

Yep. That's what I said.

Post-it notes in public restrooms.

Simple, easy, quick, and when you are on the road as much as I am, you know where every single public bathroom is at every single store, mall, gas station, library, fast-food take-out, and rest stop from York to Biddeford to Bangor to Arcadia and a little bit of New Hampshire and Vermont too. There is hardly a town, city, village, hamlet, or township in Maine that I have NOT left a trail of Post-it notes in public restrooms in. A family of 7 + lots of travel = lots of in the car time = lots of looking for public restrooms = "Hey! why not write the URL of my web sites on a whole package of Post-it notes and leave one in every restroom we stop at!"

Making a name for yourself locally, doesn't have to be very hard to do, and you don't have to do it on a large scale. It's as easy and a cheap as getting 100 business cards printed up with your name on them, and the URL of your shops. On mine I have a picture of one of my paintings printed on the back side of the cards as well.

My Business Card (Front):
(click on the picture to see the back side image)

My Profile Card (Front):
(click on the picture to see the back side image)

The advantage of business cards or profile cards, is that they are small and you can carry 100 of them in your pocket. You can leave them EVERYWHERE and give them out to EVERYONE.

Did you eat breakfast at McDonald's today? Did you remember to leave a business card on the table or chair? The next person to sit there will pick it up.

Did you do some research at the library this week? Use your business cards as bookmarks and than leave them in the book when you put it back on the shelf.

Leave one in the shopping cart after you get done putting your groceries in the car.

Tac them up on community bulletin boards.

When you shake hands with people you meet, ask them if they have your card, and than hand them one.

Walk up and down the beach handing them out to vacationers and tourists.

Go to the mall, and introduce yourself to strangers, tell them you have just opened a new business and would like to give them your card.

There are millions of ways you can use business cards, and millions of places you can leave them, and millions of people you can give them too, all you got to do is get out there and start handing them out.

I found this to be one of the most interesting questions I was ever asked, and felt I must put my answer here on this lens.

I never even thought about it. On the other hand, I work for myself, living 100% off income I bring in from various online sites of which CafePress is only one of, so I would probably never write a resume either.

I'd have to say though, that if I did ever have to write a resume, I think I would most certainly include my CafePress or Zazzle info as well as the info about the other online places I do business with, including Squidoo, Associated Content, Helium, MyLot, Printfection, LuLu, Amazon, eBay, and any others I have done business with, because it is my career as a home business, and therefore would belong on a resume.

I have noticed that sales are very seasonal based. I get a few orders each month, but around Easter and Halloween I get a ton of orders all at once, because I have a lot of Easter and Halloween type products.

If you are selling regular year-round designs only, than I would suggest that you add more designs and try adding some seasonal themed ones. Like say one with hearts for Valentines season. Or Pumpkins for Halloween season. Easter eggs for easter time. So on and so forth. That way people who already bought your regular designs, would be inspired to buy the seasonal versions as well.

I don't know if that would work or not for everyone. It did for me.

This is another common complaint I see on t-shirt designer forums. People want to set up shop but are afraid too, for fear of design theft. So how do you find people that are copying your designs anyway? How do you know somebody is copying you?

I wonder the same thing myself. I hear people say they catch others using their designs, but I've not heard how they found out.

I find it troublesome to know that there are people out there who copy other's designs. I have not let that fear stop me from creating new products to sell though. I would really hate it if I ever caught someone doing that with mine, cause my designs are all of my artwork.

Some of my paintings take weeks to finish, cause I paint on canvas and have to wait for the layers to dry before I can continue the next layer. Not only do I put a lot of hard work into my painting, but the cost of paint and brushes is not exactly cheap, and the thought that someone would be so evil as to copy my paintings and try to pass them off as their's just makes me want to hunt them down. oh it makes me so mad!

To date I've never found anyone to be copying my work and hopefully no one is. I really don't know what I'd do if I found someone doing that though. In my writing career I'm known for my fierce protection of the copyrights on my books and characters. In the past when I have found people copying my work, I reported them to the FBI, their web service provider, and anyone else I could think of. Their websites and blogs were quickly deleted off the internet. If that happened to my art on CafePress or Zazzle, I'd probably contact the FBI and show them proof that the work is mine, by bringing in the original canvas, cause I never sell my original paintings, only prints of them, I keep all of my originals. I have zero tolerance for thieves, and show them no sympathy and no mercy. One only has to read one of my many articles protesting fan-fiction to know just how much I hate thieves.

This was one of the most interesting and irrelevant question I think any one has ever asked me! LOL! The actual question rambled on about how the clip-art I was using was amazing, and they wanted to know which software I had bought that had these graphic on it, because they wanted to buy it as well so they could use the same images on their t-shirts!

OMG! Did this person even actually LOOK at my designs before they asked me this question? I think not. As often happens to me when I am on forums, I get flooded with "spam" emails and "Spam" IM's simply because on the forums I visit, I leave my account with the option to let others email me or IM me. I get a lot of interaction with other members as a result. Unfortunately I also get a lot of drive by spam as a result as well.

One of the pit-falls of letting people contact you via a ProBoard forum, is that they can send the one message and hit the button that says: "send to all users online". Since ProBoards has over 3 million active users on it's forum, you can get a lot of answers to your question, simply by posting it to everyone who is online at the moment you sent the message.

I think this was the case in the question about my "clip art graphic". Well, however the question got sent to me and how ever irrelevant it was to my actual artwork, it does pose an interesting point, which I felt I should discus in more detail:

I was an artist before I joined CafePress or Zazzle.

I took up drawing before I learned to read and write. Those who know my books, know that I wrote and illustrated volume one of The Twighlight Manor series when I was just 3 years old. Granted the original edition of that book was 16 pages long and had more pictures than words, but still ten years and three editions later that same book expanded into a full-fledged novel, and resulted in 30 other volumes, 3 spin-off series, and an onslaught of illustrations, many of which went on to be featured on my CafePress and Zazzle products.

Where do I get my art for my CafePress and Zazzle products? Straight out of my own head! The designs I use on my products are not clipart found on some disc, nor are they computer generated using a software program.

My art is hand drawn in pen & ink, with pastel highlights, and watercolor washes. I also do oils, acrylics, watercolors, and fashion illustrations.

My most popular designs, are my pet "spot" illustrations. A Spot Illustration is a tiny illustration created for use on chapter title pages in books. I originally used these pet pictures for my Pink Frog books, however, they became so popular as images on my CafePress and Zazzle products, that I began to create them for the sole purpose of using them on these products.

Well, the point I'm trying to make here, is the reason my art sells, is because it is MY ART and not CLIP-ART.

If you are just starting out, I would advise you to avoid the temptation to buy a clip-art software, because chances ae good that 100,000 other members of CafePress and Zazzle have already bought that same software and are already selling those same images on their own products. Why would you want to sell something that somebody else has already done?

The secret to selling your art on CafePress and Zazzle, is to actually sell YOUR ART. And no, you do not have to be a professional artist to sell things on CafePress or Zazzle. My mom and each of my 3 brothers all have CafePress and Zazzle shops of their own, and not a one of them is a professional artist.

All you need is a box of crayons and a pad of paper to get started. Yes, a 24 pack of Crayola crayons is ALL you need: it's all I used on several of my top selling designs! See the picture loaded in this section: it's made with 3 crayons and took me less than 2 minutes to scribble out on the back of a flyer, and I used it as a book illustration later on, and now sell it on CafePress.

Just grab some crayons and let your inner child draw to his heart's content, and before you know it, you will have several great designs, uniquely you ready to upload to CafePress and Zazzle!