Earn Money by Starting up a CafePress Shop

Niches are important, especially when it comes to selling products. You might be selling "geek" t-shirts on CafePress, but if you Google "geek t-shirts", chances are, your CP shop won't even show up in the first 10 pages. Pick a niche! Make sure your keywords all point to a specific subtopic, so if people google, "Funny LOLCAT t-shirts", your shop will be easier to find!

Pick your niche before you begin to build your shop. It'll make everything easier.

Now that you've picked your niche, hopefully you've got a few designs ready and raring to go. Before you start building, first figure out how you want to organize your shop! The most popular options:

-Organize by product. i.e. Apparel, House/Office, Bags/Buttons, Cards/Calendars/Prints
You could even go further and organize into narrower sections like Women's Apparel, Men's Apparel, Kid's Apparel, etc.
-Organize by designs. i.e. Photography, Colorful Designs, Dog Lover Designs, Cat Lover Designs, or whatever else fits your shop.

Start building sections and subsections and putting your designs into the right sections.

If you've decided on a premium shop, everything, from the background to the text colors and more is fully customizable using HTML or templates that CafePress provides. Even if you've gone with the basic shop, you can upload your own logo as well.

Here are a few links to help you if you need some HTML help!

HTML Tutorial

HTML Code Tutorials

Interactive HTML Tutorial

And in case you're a little Photoshop handicapped (which would be strange for someone selling designs for a living), here are a few Photoshop Help sites!

Photoshop Tutorials

MS (Microsoft) Paint Tutorials

GIMP Tutorials

Now that your shop has been established, it's still missing one thing...customers! The way to get noticed by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines alike, you need keywords. SEO is search engine optimization, a way that your keywords get picked up by search engines and get your website noticed. Now, I'm not the best at explaining SEO past the simple explanation, so if you're looking for more info on it, check out the Wiki Article for SEO.

CafePress gives you the ability to put in a section description and a section teaser, as well as individual descriptions for each product. Take advantage of all three by writing in a description filled to the brim with keywords! Now, that doesn't mean to just type out your keywords: Google hates that. In fact, sometimes they ban sites that spam out their keywords in that way. Write full sentences to describe the design to your potential customers while incorporating keywords.

I can't emphasize this enough:
KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS

And just like your niches, don't forget to be specific!

1. Blogging

Blogging is a very important part in promoting any business or website online. You can share your ideals on your blog (haha, Twix commercial), and it also works as a money maker. You can have multiple blogs and use programs like Google Ad Sense to put ads up and get money whenever other people click on them. The key part in this is to get a lot of traffic heading to your blogs, but if you keep making good posts and frequent ones, you'll start to build up a bit of traffic!

I suggest using some free blog hosts, like Wordpress or Blogger.

2. MySpace/Facebook

These days, just about everyone uses MySpace or Facebook. Make a Facebook page or a MySpace page, and make sure to promote it on your CafePress, or website (or whatever you have!). People will want to add you because they probably have a page as well, so you can update them more frequently! Even professional businesses are starting to make MySpace and Facebook pages, so keep your fans up to date with either page!

3. Squidoo

If you're looking to make free web pages, Squidoo is the place! Squidoo allows you to make individual "lenses", which are just like a webpage. They love CafePress, and you can make your own lens and promote your store to the world, for free! You can also make money from Squidoo (or give to charity), with their eBay, CafePress, Etsy, Amazon modules, ads, and more! Currently, you're looking at Squidoo!

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the CafePress frontpage with Squidoo to make your awesome CafePress lenses and promote your shop!

4. Twitter

Twitter is a great way not just to communicate with your friends, but also potential customers! It's free, and you can also Twitter from your phone! You can link people to important or cool things, or you can update your followers on what you were doing. Cool, huh?

Newsletters are an important way to communicate with your customers. You should keep a constant newsletter, whether it is once a month or once a week. The best thing is to keep it to once a month, because there probably will not be any important weekly news. You don't want it to get repetitive.

I use YMLP.com because the CafePress newsletter-forms just don't agree with me. Either way, you need to get subscribers somehow. The best way to do this is to put an HTML newsletter subscription form on your CP shop. If you have a contact page, you will want to put it on there too.

Once you start to get subscribers, you'll want to send out that newsletter. Keep your titles short and sweet, you don't want the subject line to cut it off. Try not to use too many exclamation points and do not write in all caps. Don't use titles that SCREAM OUT AND ARE IN ALL CAPS WITH !!!!!!! because the newsletter will probably be put in the spam box. Also, suggest to your subscribers to add your email to their address book so that your newsletters don't end up as spam.

When writing your newsletter, pick relevant topics. Use lots of pictures; don't make it all text, or no one will want to read it. Don't make it too graphic-filled either though, or it'll be a hassle to load for dial-up users. Remember, links, links, links! Update on all your recent designs, and any sales you may be having.

Something lots of people like to use is a "Buyer's Club". Offer a "secret sale" for all of your subscribers to your newsletter using hidden sections in your CafePress and then give them the link.

Sometimes starting up your CafePress shop is the hardest part. Choosing whether to have a basic or a premium can be the hardest part.

Basic Shops:
Basic shops are the free shops. They just recently got a makeover from CafePress, and are looking pretty sharp now! Here are the pros and cons of a free shop.

Pros:
-Free
-Recent makeover
-You can add your own personalized header
-Items are separated by categories.

Cons:
-You can only add one of each product to your shop
-No full customization options

Premium Shops:
Premium shops have more options than basic shops. The best choice is to pay $60 a year, which comes to $5 a month.

Pros:
-As low as $5 a month
-Full customization (including HTML)
-Unlimited amount of sections
-You can create pages inside your shop using "hidden sections"
-Separate your designs by category

Cons:
-If you only have one design, it's pretty useless
-Products not separated by categories (men's apparel, women's apparel, home, etc)
-Can get pricey

Basically, if you're looking to open up a shop with many designs, go for premium. If you're not looking to expand, you can make many basic shops for each design. It's all up to you and the details that matter to you!

Sometimes an external site for your CafePress can bring in a lot of extra income. Before you go for an external site, you have to know whether you can cover the prices, have the time to update it, and have a good host!

Here are some of the great webhosts out there:
-DreamHost.com
-StartLogic.com
-BlueHost.com
-HostGator.com