Making your art Work for you

If you are an artist of any kind - it is a place to put your stuff out there for the world to buy. You can sell prints, shirts, and buttons, whatever you want. If you are a writer, you can sell your book. If you are a musician you can sell your CD.

Cafepress has a base price on all products - this is what cafepress charges for the products, you mark it up - and your mark up is your profit per product. The average mark up is around $2.00. Then publish them - then they are open to the public.

The basic cafepress shop is free but you can only have one of each product they offer. This is good if you only have one thing you want to sell. But if you have many designs, you won't be able to put them all on all products.

The premium shop is $6.95 a month. A premium shop has many more options and customization then the basic. You can enter your own HTML and you can have as many products as you want.

Unless you already have a customer base - I say no matter what try out the basic shop to start - you can always upgrade your shop later.

You can use your "cafecash" (the money you made from products) to pay for the premium shop - so if you make enough sales in a month the shop will pay for itself.

You can't expect to just put your products or links out there are instantly people will flock to your products. You won't be quitting your day job. You have to learn about marketing and promoting.

1. - Know your audience. If you are selling shirts that say - "Filipino by association" don't market on your "all about goldfish" page. Find your people. The people who will buy your products, and market to them - don't spam them. An easy way to do this is to create a myspace for your shop and start adding friends you think might be interested in your stuff. If they accept your invites, you have a start. You can post bulletins, and post blogs about your products and any sales you have going on.

2. - Be descriptive. When making your products - be descriptive not only in the image search tags, but the product as well. Good search terms are what google is looking for as well as the cafepress marketplace search.

3. - Be Patient. Don't give up after a week of not making profits, cafepress as with almost any business is trial and error. Again look at the forums and get ideas from other shopkeepers as well as the cafepress employees - cafepress WANTS you to do well so they do well, so learn from them.

Zazzle works a lot like cafepress. You take whatever pictures you want upload them and put them on products.

A Contributor account is for the people who have the pictures they want to put on products. You must own the copyright to the work you contribute. You get 10% of every sale as the contributor of the content. Then there is the Associate account. An Associate account is simply a referral account - they give you special links to products to use on your website - to promote. If any sales of these products are made you get 7% of the sale. This is the easy was to make money without a lot of work.

The first step is to starting your zazzle contributor account is to upload your pictures. The bulk upload feature is nice, though on a dial up modem can take a while. The nice part is your pictures don't have to be ridiculously large like on zazzle (300dpi, minimum on some products) and they accept most file types.

The next step is putting these pictures on products. Zazzle has three kinds of products - Posters/Prints - Greeting Cards/Note Cards - Clothes. All of my art is featured on the Prints and cards, because I think they fit best in these formats.

Zazzle basically walks you through the process every time you create a new product, which makes it very easy.

Once your products are done you are instantly in business. After making the products you want I recommend you open an associate account.

Product Prices
Prints range in sizes the cheapest being an 11" x 16" for 9.95, from there you can change your media and frame it for a bigger price. The cards are much cheaper at 2.99 for greeting cards and 2.49 not notecards. And as long as the contributor remembers to check "customizable" in the making of the product you can customize your cards and prints.

Zazzle also pays via paypal and has a very low payout (you make a dollar in a month - you get it - as long as you are using paypal)