Cafepress Success 101

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Guide to more clicks, more sales, more cash

Cafepress, what a wonderful thing. Well, it was. These recent Marketplace changes have alot of shopkeepers in an uproar including me. I don't understand Cafepress's intent here. I guess to pad their own pockets. But that's okay, you have to roll with the punches. There's plenty of ways to promote your own shop and drive sales that will get you the commission you truly deserve. It takes forever to add up that 10% commission, .40 cents and $2.20 at a time. This page is intended to give you some ideas to drive traffic to your shop and hopefully lead to more sales. It's a guide back to the basics of Cafepress Success 101.

Get Started Cafe "Impressing"! 

With the marketplace changes effecting our bottom lines, we must adapt and get more sales directly from our shops where we get the commission we set. There are plenty of ways to advertise your products online and offline to drive more sales to your shop.

#1 Secret To Cafepress Success 

Patience.

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If you design it they will buy... People have bought some of my things through the Cafepress Marketplace I thought NO ONE in the world would ever buy. After all, it's hit or miss with every click. The shirt above is a picture I took of my little girl's gingerbread house she made, I doctored it up and made sales. Want one?

You might think things on the internet "etail" are you super fast paced. Some things are like eBay auctions, but building,maintaining, and growing a stready stream of customers through your Cafepress shop is a daily challenge. There's alot of competition.

But this ol' internet's not as big as you think. Like Michael Bolton would say showing your cafepress shop a little "Time, Love, And Tenderness", you can become a "Cafepress Success"

Best Design Software Available 

Work smarter not harder

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If you want something free, try Gimp 2.0
If you want something nicer, try Corel Draw.
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 Education Edition [DVD]

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 Education Edition [DVD]

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 lets you tackle creative graphics and design projects with confidence. New tools make it easier and quicker than ever to deliver any creative project, from layout and photo editing, to illustration and bitmap-to-vector tracing. Powerful text and layout enhancements give you the look you want plus market-leading file compatibility makes collaboration easy. Updated high-quality content, a step-by-step Hints Docker and new tutorials written by experts get you started fast. Professional and aspiring designers along with anyone who needs to express creative ideas will be able to turn their ideas into professional results: from distinctive logos and signs, to striking marketing materials and eye-catching web graphics.

Avg. Customer Rating: Amazon Rating

Amazon Price: $85.49 (as of 11/28/2009) Buy Now
List Price: $99.00

Cafepress Shopkeeper "Must Do's" 

Check them off your list today

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  1. Promote Your Shop Offline-Get Business Cards
    FREE Business Cards Plus 14-Day Free Shipping $50+
    Business cards are a must for any serious shopkeeper. How else are you going to promote your Cafepress shop offline? Hand one out to everyone you come across, it will pay off. Odds are they will visit your shop and hopefully tell a friend. At VistaPrint you can get 250 business cards for about $6.00 shipping. That's an incredible deal. On your business card you will want to have all your information like shop name, your name, email address for contacting you and your web address which brings us to our next must do for Cafepress shopkeepers, a unique domain name for your shop.
  2. Register Your Domain Name-Very Professional$9.99 Domain & Email
    Although your shop has it's own Cafepress URL (http://www.cafepress.com/yourshop) when you're trying to spread the word about your shop it's much simpler if you have a cool sounding web address to give out. You simply decide the name you want, check with Register.com to see if it's available and grab it before somebody else does. They are very inexpensive, usually around ten bucks a year. It adds a professional touch to your shop. Once you get your own domain name (www.yourshop.com) you point it to land on your actual Cafepress URL. It will look much better on your new business cards as well.
  3. Join Linkshare-Earn Extra Affiliate Money
    LinkShare Referral Prg
    Let's face it, not everybody that visits your Cafepress shop is going to buy something. The fact is only about 2-3% of visitors will make a purchase. So why not give them other banners and/or products they can click on during their visit? If they buy something from that merchant, you get paid. Nice... Oh yeah, it's totally free. Never ever pay to promote someone else's products. They should be paying you and that's the way uh huh, uh huh, I like it.
  4. Hey Webmasters! - Add hundreds of thousands of images to your site - Free!

    Join the AllPosters.com Affiliates Program and get access to hundred of thousands of images for your site. AllPosters.com has images from popular movies, music groups, sports teams, fine art, and much more. Adding these images to your site will enhance your content.

    Furthermore, you get paid for improving your site with poster/print images! All of the images you use will link to AllPosters.com where your site visitors can make purchases. When they buy something, AllPosters.com pays you 20% of the sale. If the visitor decides to purchase within 10 days of their last visit from your website, you'll still earn commission on the sale! It's easy to sign-up, build links, and track your sales.

    Sign up today!

Obvious Tips for Cafepress Success 

I pity the fool who don't read these tips

  1. Very simple. Fill in the blanks. Cafepress is about your visual designs and images but search engines want keywords. There's all kinds text boxes on Cafepress to enter keyword rich names and descriptions of your products. Name all your products give them descriptions. No excuses. How else will anyone find it's not described properly. Search engines are smart, so just fill in blanks with the correct information. Of course if you have a premium shop with multiple sections, be sure to name each section, section teaser and section description. All these are great places to load up with accurate words describing your products. How else are customers
  2. Link, Link, Link How did you find this page? Some crazy combo nation of words to find what you're looking for. It's a beautiful thing. The more links you have out there, the more chances people (customers) will find your products. Blog about your shop, put some links on your MySpace, Facebook, with links. Another idea about linking is the old saying "if you can't beat them, join them". If I had made this very webpage on my own from the ground up, it would be a struggle to rank in searches for several months if even then, but thanks to Squidoo, it's right here in front of you. Ride the big boys coat tails! They are fighting the search battle for you everyday. Take advantage to promote your shop!
  3. Stay Current Need a new idea on what to design? Watch TV for an hour! Whether it's news or regular shows. You'll see tons of ideas and trends right there on the screen. Like right now, Barack Obama Inauguaration Gear is number one. I'm not that political myself, but I am a businessman. I got in on the Election craze last summer. I made Obama and Nobama t-shirts, stickers, and buttons, etc. Whether your political views lean to the left or right, get in the middle of the huge selling opportunity in politcial gear at Cafepress. If you design it, they will buy. The media and word of mouth is the best free advertising out there. It gets ideas into people's (customers) heads and then you capitalize by having your unique product when they go looking for it online.
  4. "Fun-Centrate" This word is a combination of "Fun and Concentrate". Sit back and do some thinking before you start designing. Break out the old fashioned paper and pencil. List your ideas and thoughts. And then, "Funcentrate" over them. Circle what you like and cross out ideas you don't like. It's usually not a good idea to go "guns-a-blazin" into the Cafepress world. A little brainstorming now can mean mores sales down the road. My philosophy, "Work smarter not harder". Experiment with your designs. When you decide on a design to make, try it in different colors and styles. See what works. Tweak, tweak, tweak until you are satisfied. The little extra time you took to design it will show. Your customers will be satisfied as well. Good Luck! And see you at Cafepress.

Join AllPosters.com 

It's free

Hey Webmasters! - Make $$$

The AllPosters.com Affiliates Program is a great way to make money with your website. Link to AllPosters.com and earn 20% of every purchase made by your site visitors at their website. If the visitor decides to purchase within 10 days of their last visit from your website, you'll still earn commission on the sale! You can link to AllPosters.com from a selection of over hundreds of thousands poster and art print images as well as poster stores and mini stores. They have posters related to just about everything (e.g. movies, music, sports, art, animals) so no matter what the content of your site is, you will find images that are a good fit. It's easy to sign-up, track your sales, and build links because the site generates all the HTML code for you.

Sign up today!

Build a Squidoo Lens 

Squid, what?

What the heck is a Squidoo Lens? Well, you're looking at one. Squidoo is a super cool website that allows you to sell any Cafepress item, Ebay, or Amazon Products, make a page on anything in the world and make extra affiliate bucks along the way. You create a webpage, or a "lens" as they call it. You can promote your Cafepress products free and a very easy way to make extra money along the way. Very interesting and very addicting. Loosely put, it's an easy to build one page website. These lenses are a great way to showcase your best sellers from your Cafepress Shop and get more free exposure to help drive sales up, up, up. All for free on Squidoo.

If you don't have time to build Squidoo lenses yourself, I would be glad to build one for you. Take a look at some I have made for my cafepress shops below. Those could be your designs burning up the search engines everyday. If you are interested, please Contact Me - jdanwheeler@yahoo.com
featured lens DesignWheel™ Squidoo Showcase

DesignWheel™ - offers unique t-shirts and gifts like buttons, stickers, mouse pads, clocks, coffee mugs, etc. Designs include - The Famous My Grass is Blue, NOBAMA, Will You Marry Me?, Thin Red Line, Go Green Light Bulb, Seriously Funny, Band M...

featured lens Funny T-Shirts @ DesignWheel

Looking for a seriously funny t-shirt? Sure, we all are. Check out some of the best from DesignWheel. You'll find "TV Color Bars" T-Shirts, "That's What She Said" Ringer T's, "Keep Off The Grass" Sweatshirts,...

featured lens Sticker Town™ Showcase

Sticker Town is a little online store to drop by when you are travelling around the internet looking for unique stickers. We offer unique oval stickers, rectangle stickers, and bumper stickers with new designs added daily. Our stickers are printed on...

featured lens Cool Music Baby Onesies

I'm a graphic designer and a new dad. It gets better and better everyday. Always something new. I have put together some of my designs here to showcase my love for music and my child. She loves listening to music with her daddy. I used to be a classi...

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The Jolly Roger is the name given to any of various flags flown to identify a ship's crew as pirates. Historically, the flag was flown to frighten pirates' victims into surrendering, since it conveyed the message that the attackers were outlaws and w...

Share "Your" Tips 

How do you Cafepress?

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Open Your Cafepress Shop 

Haven't opened a shop yet?

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Try Zazzle 

If you're totally fed up with Cafepress, try Zazzle...

Zazzle is another great print on demand service. They are similar but also offer many different products you can add you designs too. Of course they have t-shirts, apparel, etc. And they also have skateboards, Keds shoes, postage stamps, and many more unique choices for you to sell. Give it a try, it's completely free. Nice.

Click here to visit Zazzle's website

5 More Cool Pages 

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featured lens Rockabye Baby CD Collection

The Rockabye Baby! CD collection transforms timeless rock songs into beautiful instrumental lullabies. The soothing sounds of the glockenspiel, vibraphone, mellotron, and other instruments will lull your baby into a sweet slumber.

featured lens Old School Sesame Street Musical Guests

Sesame has been an institution on television since 1969. Teaching children about the alphabet, numbers and a host of other topics. One thing they always incorporate is music which makes learning more fun for the children. I love music myself and alwa...

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I grew up in the 80's. G.I. Joe was king. I had a ton of action figures, vehicles, planes, etc. But like the goofy kid I was, I decided to blow them up, have "real" battles in the backyard, and destroyed most of them along the way. Now 20 years later...

featured lens Coolest Fact Ever

I first learned of the coolest fact ever on a Friday. It was like any Friday, it couldn't get over fast enough. The weekend was waiting. I was doing some research on the 1977 Pontiac Trans Am Smokey and the Bandit Car. Before I knew it, I had been ma...

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by JDWheeler

J.D. is a graphic designer for Sticker Town & DesignWheel, Squidoo Lensmaster, Blogger, Member of BlueFridays.Org

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