Cafe Press Divinity Gardens

I first discovered Cafe Press when I was looking for a site for someone else to display their artwork on. Once I started looking around it hit me, I can do this! Thus started my quest for ideas for T shirts and over 80 other products for personal and home items that my designs could be applied to.

A good photo editor or logo maker will become pretty much must haves eventually. You can spend lots of money on different programs but while getting started you can use Microsoft Photo editor or a similar program that will help you to resize and doctor up your photos or images.

Choosing your designs needs to be based on both things that interest you and what you feel the market is looking for. We tend to do better with things we are familiar with. I'm from the southern United States therefore I thought it only fitting to create a section in my Cafe Press store called 'Southernisms'. I love humor so I created a category called 'Humor'. I've been very much into learning more about being a wise woman and all that entails so I got inspired and created a 'Wise Woman' section. Get the picture?

Do your research for categories by typing in some categories on Google and see how many sites come up for them. Another way to research is to use the 'keyword selector tool' listed above in the links section. This tool will tell you how many times in the past calendar month a term has been searched for. It's a handy tool when you are creating your tags for your images which you must do for your products to show up both on Cafe Press and on the search engines. Pay attention to T shirts that people are wearing and notice those designs too.

Go to the Cafe Press home page and click on the Communities section then go to the forums. There is a massive amount of information posted there from other Cafe Pressers that will aide you immensely. I can't tell you how much I've learned just by visiting these forums. Generous Cafe Pressers will list third party tools, suggestions to help your site to get traffic, shops to link to and so much more! The Learning Center section of Cafe Press is also a wealth of information with tutorials that will help you to get started when opening your shop.

Most of what I learned though has been by just jumping in with both feet and going for it! I add designs often and love being able to share my creations with the world. Hopefully you will check out my shop and feel so inclined to get creative yourself!

Happy Designing!

Itaya
Divinity Gardens