READ and LEARN 

a guide to better sales

WHERE? 

list of things I have done

The Shop-a-Rama Family

This is a service just started using and I have very high hopes for.
The Shop-a-Rama Family provides consolidated advertising opportunities to Cafepress.com® shopkeepers. Promote your shop on the One Million Pixel T Shirt pages for as little as $5.00 per quarter!
The Shop-a-Rama Family will advertise its topically coherent portals using print ads in related magazines, print ads in college and university publications and portal specific online ad placement using Google Adwords.
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 1,761,570
Alexa ranking at Aug 25 2006: 4,749,465

www.4thclick.com

Cafeshopper and 4thclick is growing fast so don't miss the opportunity to request an affiliate shop at www.4thclick.com
The cafeshopper/4thclick team is very helpful and will give you all the necessary information you need so you can open your own affiliate cafepress shop using their platform. Together with your shop you get a Google site map and an automated Google base feed that will help your store SEO positioning and hopefully your sales. 4thclick is a deal because for a minimum fee (you only pay them an affiliate fee for every forth sale you generate) you can have a professionally looking affiliate store or integrate your store in an existing web site!

www.adwords.google.com

Probably more books have been written about this service than any other advertising service in the internet! Be careful when you use it and be ready to constantly re-think your campaign till you find something that works. The idea is that you place ads in Google search engine results and in pages related to you subject selected by Google or even by you. You pay Google a pre determined fee for every one of your ads that receives a click. This fee can be set from 0.05 cents but a very low fee for a very popular category won't show your ad anywhere because there are other advertisers willing to pay more for the few top listing positions. Where your ads show is determined by keywords so you must be as specific as possible because unfocused keywords can lead to many impressions and many impressions in the wrong search results or wrong sites lead to many "junk" clicks.
For example I sell designs of girls playing contact sports. One of the sports is wrestling. If I put the keyword "girls wrestling" my ad will appear in many searches generated by people who use this specific keyword to search the internet looking for pictures of girls wrestling but not necessarily t-shirts or apparel, most likely they are looking for nude pictures of girls wrestling . On top of that they don't even read the details of a text ad so when they click on my ad and they don't find what they are looking for, they exit my site charging me around 20 cents for their brief visit.
There is a "safety net" though, you can set a limit of what you want to pay per day so when this ceiling is reached there are no more impressions of your ad and there are no more clicks.
I'm running an adwords campaign right now with very little results.

www.squidoo.com

This one needs no introduction since you are already getting this valuable info from it. Did you know though this is also a place you can easily set up a page where you can advertise your shop and your artwork? Look whatI have done to promote my Girl VS Girl shop and my online artwork portofolio The possibilities here are endless!

www.myspace.com

This is another site with millions of people are visiting per day, searching for new friends and posting messages and ads. Having an account here is a must. Sometimes it's a bit difficult to access myspace or even log in but most of the times it's a great place to be and meet people. From the 77 million users there is no question some will be interested to visit your profile and from there your shop. So join in and after the first week (they won't let you post anything for a week) you can start searching the groups and inviting them to see your shop and become your friends.
This site can be a very useful tool to attract visitors to your profile and to your shop but it won't allow you directly to advertise. This means that if you start posting messages of the nature "BUY MY T-SHIRTS NOW!" your account might be suspended. I have used the site to contact specific groups by posting in bulletins and topics related to my designs inviting people to either vote for them or just check them out.

www.friendster.com

Another site similar to myspace is friendster. I have recently joined this site with my profile and my first impression is that is a bit less customizable than myspace and it doesn't have the huge amounts of traffic volume myspace has. They advertise that they hold 27 million profiles or accounts so still it might worth to check them out. The good thing is that they have a classifieds section where you could post ads immediately compare to myspace 7 days waiting period from the day you open your account. The rules are pretty similar with myspace ad submission rules.

Yahoo search marketing

This is yahoo version of the popular Google adwords. The main difference is that with yahoo you can see how much others are bidding and you can stracture your bids accordingly. Here the minimum bid is 0.10 cents.

www.advertising.msn.com

Yet another major search engine that offers advertisement. MSN is the Microsoft network. Here you can advertise on their network (that's all sites run by MSN) with a variety of text ads or banners or at the MSN search in similar ways you do with adwords and yahoo search marketing. One of the things that they advertise is that they won't pause ads that have low click rates.
I haven't yet tested their services.

www.adbrite.com

This is a similar service to adwords or yahoo search marketing but in this case you select the web pages your ad or banner will be shown. The adbrite people are basically selling you daily, weekly or monthly advertising space for a fee that depends on the popularity of the page you want to advertise. You can choose from a huge list of pages but again you must be very careful where you choose to advertise. Here you must be careful to choose pages that have visitors form the countries you think can generate sales for your products. I have been using their services but I have also learned that you must be very selective to where you want your ad to show up. A very popular site will cost you tons of money and will generate for you many clicks-though included in the price you have paid-might generate minimum sales. One good thing with adbrite is that you can try daily test ads usually for a dollar or two so you can see if a page you think it is a great place to advertise in reality can generate any sales for you.

www.blogads.com

Another service that is very similar to adbrite but the ads are placed only in blogs. They sell space by the week or the month and their prices start from an average of 10 dollars per week. They have a nice engine where you can search for the most appropriate blogs related to what your product is according to demographics you provide. Compare to adbrite all ads here can have an image but there are restrictions that are related to a blog layout.

www.craigslist.org

Craigslist is a free directory where you can place multiple ads with up to 4 pictures in a huge number of cities around US and the world. There are some things you should know about this great service (it generated my fist sale) before you start submitting ads there. Open an account! Yes you can place ads without an account but chances are if you place multiple ads they will be rejected as spam. It has happen to me. Again even with an account make sure you vary the text and title of your ad and rotate different images. Select the most crowded cities or where you think your product will sell and run your ads. I'm currently running multiple ads on t-shirts, mugs, boxers and other individual merchandise in a list of 20 cities. Another advantage of having an account is that you can easily renew your ads without having to re-type them when they expire.

www.usfreeads.com

Another nice service I have used. This service works better if you buy what they call a gold membership for 10 dollars a year.With a gold membership you can run up to 25 ads with one picture per ad. The ads expire every 40 days but you can renew them as many times as you want for the year length of your subscription or upgrade them to "featured" ads and post more photos and other goodies for an additional fee. I have found their page well organized and more professional looking than graigslist and they offer to you some tools to track your ads and see how many people are viewing them, upgrade them to feature ads for a fee, and keep altering them to you liking.
Right now I'm running about 20 ads there with a gold membership.

100 Best Cafepress Shops

My own top site ranking list put up without any restrictions. As with any other list it is better when you submit your banner to copy the voting cote and past it in your links page or anywhere in your Cafepress shop page you want. If you are considering theories about "leaking links" let me tell you that if you are a new shop owner this is the last you should worry about right now. You need as much exposure as possible.
Alexa rating at June 2 2006: No data-rates host

I have joined numerous lists like that and I'm getting plenty of traffic a day and yes I'm also getting the occasional sale!
There is also a number of other similar sites around so here are the most important ones that I carry a listing myself:

www.topshirtlist.com
Alexa rating at June 2 2006: No data
www.cafexchange.com/topsite
Alexa rating at June 2 2006: 6,515,777 -this is the cafexcahnge page rate.
Aug 25 2006: 6,235,816
www.shoppingring.net/t-shirts
Alexa rating at June 2 2006: 353,210
Alexa rating at Aug 25 2006: 358,694
www.cafetopsite.com
Alexa rating at June 2 2006: No data
Alexa rating at Aug 25 2006: 5,074,252
www.buytshirtshere.com
Alexa rating at June 2 2006: 506,454
Alexa rating at Aug 25 2006: 595,906


SOME INFORMATION YOU WILL FIND INTERESTING:

You might have asked yourself why most of the sites you see here let you add your t-shirt at their lists for free? Well most of then do have adsence advertisement installed (or some other kind of paid advertisement)that brings them some revenue but most of them they get money out of the following method: they append their own affiliate commission junction PID after your link and get a commission out of every sale they generate. This is generally considered an acceptable way and a win-win situation for both parties. At the end anyone can build a list himself with his favorite shops and add his commission junction PID at the end, this is what the affiliate program is all about.

www.cafetalent.com

This is a free independent site that was founded in order to provide cafepress shop keepers with an additional means of promoting their stops, as well as passing along advice to new or would be shop keepers. They have a variety of things you can do there and it worth the time to check them out. Right now I have listed my shop to their directory.
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 1,532,798
Alexa ranking at Aug 25 2006: 1,236,081

www.shirtrank.com

This is an interesting site where you can place your t-shirt design(s) for free and watch people voting for it or not. It has a very clean layout and certainly it worth to try it but I have found that there are few issues with the way the voting works that might make someone to think twice before submitting a design. First the vote seams to be controlled by cookies and no IP's so if you know how to block incoming cookies at your browser you can vote as many times as you want and control the ranking. That means you can not only give multiple good votes to your design but you can also give multiple bad votes to other competitive designs and plunge them to the end of the list. An easy way to understand what I'm saying is to see how many designs have only "excellent" and "hate it" votes and very few in-between. Statistically this is not possible.
I admit I have given this a try myself after I noticed that the first days of publishing my designs I have been collecting only negative votes.
UPDATE
After this posting I have seen my designs sinking from being in the 12 first positions to the 1024! On the same time the number of votes given to them have been reduced and 95% of them registering "hate it".
Run your own conclusions. Maybe the next thing will be my designs disappearing completely!
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 231,852
Alexa ranking at Aug 25 2006: 341,027

www.t-shirtrank.com

This is another t-shirt ranking page that also sells place for advertisement. It looks like these guys have a better system of controlling multiple votes plus they tell you how many times someone linked from your design to your shop.
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 610,822
Alexa ranking at Aug 25 2006: 632,587

www.tshirtranking.com

Another site using the same interface. Here again you can add your site and get voted. It looks like you can only vote form the site itself; buy clicking on Information panel next to the image and then vote for this site. Trying to vote from the voting code created an error for me.
This must be a pretty new site because at the time of this post the Alexa ranking was:
No data

www.darnfineshirts.com

Yet another site where you can submit your t-shirt. Here actually there is no restriction on how many t-shirts you can post for free. I assume only measure is your own time and willingness to do so. Since right now I have three lines of designs I put up one form every line. Again you have to put the code at your site if you want to get votes but you can also vote form the site itself.
The site from first hand looks clean and at the moment of this posting there is no annoying Adsence advertisement.
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 3,878,035
Alexa ranking at Aug 25 2006: 2,786,635

www.t-shirtcountdown.com

A site very similar in layout with www.t-shirtrank.com You can place your t-shirt here for voting and to generate incoming traffic to your page. These people seam to also run another site, www.t-shirtlinks.com where you can place a text link to your shop.
You can buy paid advertisement in both sides for additional exposure.
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 69,023
Alexa ranking at Aug 26 2006: 67,813

www.iloveyourtshirt.com

Here is a site that's a bit different than the others. Still you can submit an unspecified number of t-shirts as long as you have pictures of the t-shirts and not just the print to send them. They rank them in pages so when other people submit after you, your submission sinks deeper eventually disappearing in the 400+ pages they have. When I submitted my designs I start receiving numerous hits from the site but after a few days the hits stopped so I assumed my designs have been moved down by newer submissions and not easily accessible. Lots of limited edition and high profile companies like lacoste are submitting here, so be aware that there are a huge variety of styles and designs many not following the standard cafepress print positioning and size.
A nice touch is that the give a free t-shirt to every hundredth submission.
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 283,513
Alexa ranking at Aug 25 2006: 311,623

www.t-shirtexpo.com

Another web site where you can submit up to 5 of your designs for free. They have certain guidelines for the submissions and it usually takes a few weeks to get approved but the site looks clean and not too crowded. I have personally submitted 3 designs so far but only one has shown up (after 3 weeks but they send me an e-mail to notify me) and the other two are still listed under the pending category.
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 763,367
Alexa ranking at Aug 25 2006: 1,258,615

www.t-shirtforums.com

This is a forum about t-shirts and the t-shirt industry in general. If you register for free they will let you upload a design to their gallery. If you ask me it never hurts to have your design listed in as many places as possible.
Alexa ranking at June 2 2006: 100,732
Alexa ranking at Aug 25 2006: 86,238

www.ineedhits.com

or
www.superhosting.net

Everyone has to start from somewhere and free web page submission is not a bad start. There are many sites that let you do it but I haven't yet found one that will let you submit to more than 20 engines at once for free. The links I provide might cover some of the same sites but if you try them all you will end up with a good number of starter links. Be aware that most of those engines will e-mail you back so you can verify your submission.

HOW? 

list of tools I have used

www.statcounter.com

This is the only counter you will need. Again you must have a premium shop to add the HTML code but if you do it worths the effort. Open an account and select the invisible counter. From my reasearch it looks like that -unless you want to lie and start the counter at one million visitors or more- it is better to use the invisible counter than the visible one till you have enough visitors to make your page look it is popular. Cut and paste their code at the end of your footer and a small button or icon will show up at the bottom of your page. You can click on that to link to the statcounter log in page. These guys provide you with a free log of the last 100 visits to your page so you know exactly who is visiting and from where. Make sure you check all the "statistics" on the left of the page and don't limit yourself to the bar graph. They have a paid service if you want to increase the log size but it won't worth it unless you constantly have more than 100 unique visitors a day.

www.internationalvoting.com

This is a site where they host for you a free poll and your visitors can vote for the design they like the best. You can customize the poll yourself and upload images of your designs and let your visitors give a single or multiple votes to the design they like the most. There is a limit to how many designs you can put but the whole idea is great if you want your visitors to participate and also give you a clue to what they like and what they don't. For example you can cast your vote for my designs here. There are many services in the internet that host polls but so far this one is the only one I have found that is free, free from advertisements and lets you upload image. So why don't you grab the opportunity to vote for your favorite Girl VS Girl design?

www.nichebot.com/ranking

This is a must tool! Here you can place your keyword(s) and your URL and see how your keywords are ranking your URL in Google! What does this mean? It means that if you are focusing in the key word "T-shirt" this tool will search up to the top 1000 sites that use "T-shirt" as a Keyword to see if yours is one of them and then rank it!

www.inventory.overture.com

This service uses the yahoo logs to tell you how popular your keywords have been in yahoo the last month. You can input here your special keywords and see how many other people have used the same keywords in the yahoo search engine.
Here is another idea you can use to set up you keywords combining the above tool and a little help of your Explorer browser. Do you know that if you go to a competitor's page ( doesn't need to be a cafepress page any page will do this) and then press View>Source on your browser a new window will open and display for you the HTML code of that page? Up on the top you will see something that looks like:<meta name="keywords" content= and then a set of keywords. Well those are your competitor's keywords so check them against yours and learn from them. You got my point.

www.dshield.org

Use this tool if you know the IPs of your visitors and want to know more about them and where exactly they come from.

Keywords tool

This tool will help you generate keywords for Google adwords and yahoo search marketing campaigns. It will aslo stracture them for adwords and yahoo search marketing according to the money amount you want to bid.

www.alexa.com

Alexa is a search engine that publishes detailed traffic ranking statistics for every page in the web. You only need to enter the URL of a site and Alexa will give you all the statistics. If you are out trying to do a targeted campaign in specific web pages and asking for advertising space it's a good idea to personally check out and see what kind of traffic these pages are generating. This is also a great tool when using adbrite, blogads and even adwords targeted site ads for up to the day statistics.

THE BIG DON'Ts LIST 

What you should not be doing or what to do if you want to throw your money away

Other valuable resources 

a list of other things you might want to research

Success with CafePress.com

This book is your guide to getting started with and making the most of the premiere internet source for print-on-demand products. If you've not yet joined, this text will walk you through every step of signing up and getting rolling. If you're a member already, this text will give you advanced concepts and customization tips & tricks for your Premium shop.

www.t-shirtmodels.com

This site offers relatively inexpensive (I wouldn't say cheep) professional photo shoots for your apparel products. Basically you choose from a list of about 30 male and female models the one(s) you like and the site arranges a photo shoot with a professional photographer. The only thing you need to do is send them your t-shirt or other articles of clothing for the model and your payment. I haven't used this service so I don't know how reliable it is but from what they post at their site you can reject a photo shoot you don't like from small thumbnail images they send you.
Shoots start from 75 dollars per hour but some times the model requires a 3 hour limit.

Banner page

Ever wanted to have a page where people who request your advertising banner can go and grab the banner including the HTML code? This is a tutorial that helps you set up a page like this using the yahoo geocities enviroment.
The advantage of having such a page is that you can constantly update your banner's design without having to update the code!
This is not a how to make banners or gif animation page.

Books about Google adwords and classifieds 

Here is a selection of books offered by Amazon that can help you understand internet marketing.

Winning Results with Google AdWords

by Andrew Goodman

Amazon Price: $24.99 (as of 07/04/2008)

Google Advertising Guerrilla Tactics: Google Advertising A-Z Plus 150 Killer AdWords Tips & Tricks

by Bottletree Books LLC

Amazon Price: $20.68 (as of 07/04/2008)

Making Money With Classified Ads

by Melvin Powers

Amazon Price: $15.00 (as of 07/04/2008)