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One thing that really helps out when you are trying to figure out how to design or organize your shop is to look at other people’s shops. You can see a lot of different types of styles or organization techniques. This will help in determining what you like best and how your shop could look with some of those layouts.

Need some help? I was IM’ing with a fellow shopkeeper last week who started building out his Zazzle shop around the same time we did. He of course has progressed a lot faster and done quite a bit with his shop. You can check out At Ease Tees Zazzle shop here. He also maintains a blog – At Ease Tees Blog. As you can see, he has focused on a specific niche that he enjoys writing about and designing for.

So go on to Zazzle and start looking at some of the shops to get a feel for some of the options out there. Let us know if you find a good one.

Slippy
From Pink Slip
Quit being a firing stick pinata! Make money from home online in your free time. There are plenty of online opportunities that are free.

One of the frustrating things about some of the other Print-on-Demand (POD) sites is that you can only load a limited number of images at a time. With Zazzle you can bulk upload fairly quickly. Below are the steps to load a bunch of images all at once. If you have taken my suggestion about organizing them in separate folders by theme / design, then it will be really easy to load them all into a group at once.

To Load Multiple Images into your Zazzle Store: Read More

You found the link for this the first day and started reading right away right? No?

The Zazzle Seller Blog has a treasure trove of useful information on it. If you haven’t go to it or viewed it, I highly recommend it. Where do you think one of the first places I went to on Zazzle was? Their articles are specifically for helping people learn how to do things or showing shopkeepers new tools. It just isn’t some blog with random stuff, it is a real tool to any shopkeeper to not only get first hand information but also keep up with new tools that can help you sell more product, upload product quicker, promote your products, etc.

If you did find it, you will also have seen that there are several blogs to choose from beyond the Sellers Blog. (and what do you know, Zazzle uses WordPress – I told you it was everywhere). If you click on the little down arrow on the Community section you will see the Sellers Blog, Tech Blog, ArtProjekt Blog, Twitter link, Facebook link, Forums, and Pulse.

That is a lot of community support they have going. If you had been following me when I wrote about CafePress, you would already know that the forums and blogs are treasure troves of information. There are a lot of people out there willing to network and help fellow shopkeepers out.

So check out the blogs, forum and other community sites. Also, start organizing your designs into groups if you haven’t done so already. Next week we will try some mass uploading. If you already have your designs in their appropriate groups (use subfolders), then it will be easier to grab then when uploading.

Slippy
From Pink Slip
Quit being a firing stick pinata – make money online today.

Teaching you how to make money online by using Zazzle and other print on demand sites.

In a word – Yes. Shown below is my list of checks from CafePress. You will notice the drop off in commission checks once they changed their commission schedule in June of 2009. Keep in mind how much you will be paying for a shop & how much you can earn and if you haven’t started you probably won’t cover their $7/month fee so I would go to Zazzle. Zazzle may prove to generate residual income here in the next year though. So far my Zazzle shop is earning about the same as my CafePress shop was in its early days.

When I first started with CafePress, I put up one shirt with a free shop and had a sale in about a week. I then did the premium shop route and started loading a ton of shirts. Then about 11 months later went in and re-tagged all of them because I had done it incorrectly. Throughout that first year I was getting about 1 or 2 sales per month. Once I input the tags correctly (keywords so people could find the products in the marketplace), my sales went to about 5 a month. In April of 08 I loaded about 200 or 300 more designs and my sales increased to about 10 a month. That was $50 a month profit for doing very little. It was also $50 a month regardless of whether I visited the site or not. I had no blog to promote the shop, I did little promotion on my own other than to create the Ha Ha Shirt Shop website and link to my products. Of course that was just there to give people a name of a site to go to and not really done with good SEO. It therefore did not and still does not rank too well for terms like T-shirts. It does however get about 10 visits a day.
Read More

So you found the guidelines by yourself right? No?

Well here is where I found them: There are some big menus at the top of the page each with a little arrow. Click the arrow to the right of the one that says “Create”. You will now see a list and at the bottom right of the list there is “Image Guidelines” and “Guide Files”. The “Guide Files” will bring you to the templates.

Each product has their own template just like we saw before. Click on one of the templates (the little blue links that say PNG | PSD) and choose one of the formats. I chose PNG since that is what I create all my files in. This brings up a screen that has nothing but the template. This screen is now one big picture file and you can right click and do a “Save Target As” or you can choose the file, Save As.

You can now open those templates from your image software. I went ahead and saved several templates just so I wouldn’t have to go back. I didn’t save them all, just a lot of the more useful ones like the horizontal and vertical shirt, the bag, the hat, etc.

“Yes, Yes, I found the templates – you gave us the link last week. How do I create a product?” Read More

Ok, you have signed up, and played around a little with Zazzle. Now lets fill out our profile.

Avatar:

If you don’t already have an avatar (those little pictures), then try and spend some time creating one. Here is a link to a very good post on what you should think about when creating an avatar.

After you log in to Zazzle, click on the My Account link at the top. This will bring you to the dashboard. The dashboard is going to be where we start from now on since we can see all the different tabs across the top from here.

Royalty:

The first thing I did was go to change the royalty settings. Under the “My Account at a Glance” there is a link for Default Royalty. I clicked it and then made the change as I saw fit. I simply typed in a number for the % and it calculated what a average sale and royalty would be. Read More

Ok, you clicked on the Zazzle button above, and are now at the homepage.

• You will see in the top right corner of the screen a “Sign In” link. Click it
• On the left side there will be a spot to sign in / create a account
• Fill out the form
  • Username (this will be your shop name as well. For instance, my username is HaHaShirtShop and my shop name is HaHaShirtShop. So the url (address) to my shop is http://www.zazzle.com/HaHaShirtShop – same thing for one of my other Zazzle shops, the username is the shop name.)
  • Password
  • Email Address
  • Birthdate
  • Check/uncheck the box about receiving updates
  • READ THE RULES then check the box
  • Click Submit

That is about all there is to it. You are now a shopkeeper on Zazzle. You can go further into your profile and fill out items such as name, interests, etc. You can also fill out account information such as SSN or FedID # and where they can send the checks. Click around and become a little familiar with the layout. It is much different than CafePress, but in many ways much more intuitive and efficient.

How did you do? Did you get signed up? Let me know the names of your shops so we can see each others designs.

Slippy
From Pink Slip
Quit being a Firing Stick Pinata!

Follow me on Twitter – @JohnnyOptimist
Subscribe to my RSS feeds – top right corner of the screen

ZAZZLE was chosen as the Print-on-Demand (POD) site to start. At Zazzle – you can use the same designs and templates that you already created if you were using another POD. I am going to try and load as many designs into my CafePress shop as I can so I maximize the potential earnings. Now, ON TO ZAZZLE! Read More