Zazzle - How to Make, Sell and Market Your Own Products on Squidoo

Getting started is simple.

Just go click here to go to the Zazzle Login Page.

From here you can register for free, and login to start creating your one-of-a-kind products.

Well, now that you've registered, you're going to need an idea. There are two things you can put on Zazzle products - pictures and text.

If you have cool artwork, photographs, drawings and the like, you can upload them to Zazzle from your computer and put them on clothing, mugs, keychains, everything they have in stock. This includes logos which makes Zazzle great for making business attire, office supplies and giveaways.

Note: You still have to respect copyrights, so if the logo, photo, artwork or other picture doesn't belong to you, you can't use it (or if you do, expect to get legal complaints from the owners).

If you aren't artistically inclined, you can still apply text to any of Zazzle's products. You can control the font and color of the text applied.

Zazzle gives you a window that shows what the product looks like and what your pictures or text look like on the product. You can make the text and pictures bigger or smaller, and move them around the product and see what the finished product will look like. You can even put multiple pictures or blocks of text on each side of the product.

Once all of your text and images are loaded, you can arrange them on the product view, which shows what the product would look like with the elements on it, or click the Design view button to see the elements as arranged on a flat space. Here you can move the boxes with a little finer tuning to get image and text elements exactly where you want them.

Each element you add will appear on the right side of the screen. By clicking an element, you can edit that element, or delete it from the finished product. You can always load more elements at any time.

When you're satisfied with the product from all angles, you can add it to your shopping cart and buy it for yourself, or click the Post for sale button and include your new creation into the Zazzle marketplace.

Note: Be sure to edit the title at the top so you and others can find your creation, and make it brief but descriptive so people know what they're getting.

Zazzle has lots of products to choose from that are blank canvases, waiting for your artwork and clever text (including real canvasses!)

25 product types with 350 variations including size, materials and shapes.

Clothing

Zazzle offers economy and name-brand t-shirts in a variety of sizes, styles and colors. T-shirts will always be popular, and if you have cool artwork or funny sayings, you can do really well.

What's amazing is Zazzle also offers Keds shoes! Available in Women's and Kids' styles, you can stock your own virtual shoe store with the right styles and colors.

Zazzle also now offers embroidery for hats, hoodies, track jackets and bags. Their machine is pretty sophisticated, and can turn out some impressive embroidered products.

Trucker hats are available for your printing pleasure and baseball caps are available for embroidery.

Aprons for the kitchen and Ties for the office are also available.

Bags

Zazzle offers 6 different kinds of tote bags, each with different cuts, some with zippers, pockets and enclosures.

Stamps and Cards

Profile and Business Cards - Choose from a standard business card or a variety of other cards to give away for business or to friends. Fully customizable.

Greeting Cards, Note Cards and Postcards - Customize the front, rear and inside of the cards for special occasions, scrapbooking, correspondence, professional use or just for fun. The postcards are ruled for use in the mail.

and speaking of the mail...

Stamps! You can actually create your own U.S. Mail stamps with Zazzle. Put photos, logos or whatever you want on real postage. Part of the stamp is taken up by the stuff that makes the stamp legal postage, and the rest of the space belongs to you and your content.

Photography and Artwork

Not only can you put your photos or artwork on products, but you can make it look like real art, too.

Posters - Turn your artwork or witticisms into card stock or paper posters with a variety of paper options.

Canvas Prints - Turn your artwork into real artwork by having it printed on one of two types of real canvas. Suitable for boarding or framing.

Photos and Enlargements - Have your pictures developed on professional photo-quality paper or have them blown up.

Both photos and prints can be framed by Zazzle as well. Choose from over 100 frames and mats to showcase your photography or artwork.

Home and Office

Calendars - Use a variety of calendar formats and the ability to insert pictures on the front and for each month to create professional calendars.

Mugs and Steins - Put images or text on several types of mugs including nice stainless steel travel mugs, frosted mugs and steins.

Miscellaneous

Stickers - Round stickers you can put anywhere and bumper stickers for your car (although I suppose you can put the bumper stickers anywhere too).

Magnets - Round or square, with a Mylar coating to protect your artwork or witticisms and a full magnetic backing.

Photo Sculptures - Turn the focus of a picture into a 3-D photo sculpture. Can be turned into standing sculpture, magnet, hanging ornament, pin or keychain at your request.

Pins - Round or square pin-back buttons with a Mylar coating. Great for expressing yourself or running for office.

Ok.

Are you ready for this?

Seriously.

This is pretty cool.

Skateboards! - Yes, Zazzle has 3 styles of skateboard decks available in a variety of lengths, all made from maple which look nice by themselves, but put on your killer graphics and you've got a beautiful customized board. Pre-drilled so you can attach trucks, or you can order Zazzle's components including Independent trucks and Ricta wheels.

Once you've created your products, you can sell them by creating a gallery, and you can promote individual products in a variety of ways.

At the top right of the page when you are logged in is a My Zazzle link. This will take you to your Zazzle dashboard. From here you can modify your account, view your gallery and products, and view your Zazzle earnings.

Much like Squidoo, you set a threshold for how you want to be paid, and when you reach the threshold, Zazzle sends you a check, or makes a deposit in PayPal. The minimum threshold is $25, but you can set it higher. More on this later - let's not get ahead of ourselves!

When you have created products, you can add them to your gallery.

Note: Sometimes after creating a new product, it takes a little time for your gallery to recognize it.

Click the Gallery tab to view your gallery or change its appearance. You can make use of several stock templates, or you can customize and create your own.

Click the Products tab to select which products will be viewable by the public. Click the checkbox beside each product you want to make public. When you have selected the products you want in the gallery, click the View In Gallery link. You will be taken to the gallery and your selected products will be live.

You can also select a product and click the Add to Featured or Add to Top Picks links. These will create a special page listing up to 10 featured products and up to 3 top picks, adding some additional customization to your gallery.

Once products are in your gallery, anyone viewing your gallery can select the products and put them in their cart.

Congratulations - You're ready to make products and money with Zazzle!

Zazzle makes it easy to promote your products (and others) as well.

Click the Gallery tab to build a Merch Booth that can be placed on MySpace or Facebook.

You can also select a particular product from the order page and click the AddThis button to send it to dozens of blogs and networking sites like Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. The more of these sites you are a member of, the more you can spread the word of your products.

Referal Income

You can promote products in Zazzle on any website by creating a star link, and make additional income when people purchase products from that link.

When you place a link that contains this:

www.zazzle.com/username*

in the href tag, with an asterisk at the end, you receive an additional 15% on top of the royalties already programmed into your products. This only applies to your account.

This makes the link a referral link to your store automatically, and you can put it anywhere that supports HTML.

Like This

There are other cool promotion tools that allow you to use your referral ID to make money from other people's neat Zazzle products.

The easiest of which is probably the Gallery Link Maker. Just enter the username of the gallery you want to promote, and it creates a link for you.

I used the online Disney store as an example: Disney Ink Shop (which is really well designed, by the way).

My referral ID is embedded in the link, so any purchases made from that link net me a 15% referral bonus. It's that easy.

Check out Zazzle's Associate Program for more information on making money from referrals.

Note: You can't use the referral program to make earnings from other people's stores at the moment. Here is a lens that explains in more detail how it works for you, but not for other stores - Zazzle Referrals - The Fine Print Simplified.