Make Money with Cafepress - #1 Focus

First off, you need to choose a focus for your store. Are you going to sell pet stuff? Rocker gear? Hobo enthusiast wear? Goth romance shirts? Everything under the sun?

I think that it is very important to choose a focus, and stick with it. If you try to be everything to everyone, it's just not going to fly. Instead, look around, and try to find a subject that already isn't being done well.

Why? Well, because you're going to be promoting your site, see, and successful shops have families of designs to choose from. One trend I've noticed in my shop is that I'm making multiple sales. Yes, one person buys many things. This is good! This is great! These people tend to buy similar types of products, so you want to offer more choices for them.

You also don't want endless competition, so look for the path of least resistance. A general pet store may not be so good, as there are tons of these on CafePress that are really well done. Maybe you ought to focus on a specific breed, and own that. Your sales will be better, I bet.

Choose a focus that you're really interested in. Sure, you'll have to make designs in this vein, but you'll also probably be talking about it all the time, writing a blog about your subject, or even making a MySpace page with this focus. Be interested, or forget it. It's a lot of work, and you'll get bored and quit if you're not passionate about it.

For me, my focus is monsters and odd characters. Sure, I've got some other random stuff in there, but all in all, it's mostly just monsters, skulls, and Halloween sort of things. This works for me because I'm really interested in it, and there weren't too many shops that featured nice, original artwork. (Which is what I do.)

Now, choose your store name, if you haven't already. Try hard to include your subject in the title, if you can. This will help search engines and your fans find you. Mine is MonsterMachine!

So, after you've chosen your killer subject, researched the competition, and grabbed a name, it's finally time to start thinking about designs.

My next article is Make Money with CafePress - #2 Design