Can you really Make Money Online?

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.

So, for a while I was getting a $250 check every 6 months or so. As you can see in the picture below, the revenue from CafePress dropped off the cliff once they changed their commission schedule (notice the 2 year span between June 2009 & July 2011?). These results are with little to no promotion, so if you really want to make money you have to get the word out and promote and do the work.

Since I began in 2006, I have made over $1,o00 from CafePress. This is pretty much all Free Money! I had to spend the time to upload, tag, and describe all the designs, but after that it was making money while I slept. Granted, this hasn’t allowed me to quit my day job (not that I would), but there were some shopkeepers who made several thousand each month. They of course had great designs, multiple shops, marketing plans, their own websites, and promoted, promoted, promoted.

CafePress used to have several ways to make money. You could send new shopkeepers to CafePress and get a commission on their sales (this ended in March 2009), you could get bonuses for selling a certain amount of product (they adjusted that schedule last year I believe), and you could get affiliate income if you were signed up in the affiliate network and sent users to other shopkeeper’s designs (not sure if they still have this). Now with the changes, most of the real opportunity is gone with CafePress. But the potential is certainly there with Zazzle.

I started my Zazzle Ha Ha Shirt Shop probably in 2008 and it has an earnings total of $100. So with only a handful of designs on the site, it has already produced some income. I am theorizing that by loading the site with all the designs I created for the CafePress site, I will start making sales each month and be able to share that information with everyone.

So bottom line, YES, you can make money online for free. Zazzle does not have a monthly payment, and allows you to open a premium shop for free. They also allow you to input your own markup.

The best thing about having your own website to promote your shop is that you can change all of the links to point to Zazzle now. Any marketing material is still valid and most users won’t even know the difference.

Were you earning anything off CafePress? Have you made any sales on Zazzle yet?

Slippy
From Pink Slip – Quit being a firing stick Pinata
Learn how to make money online by creating designs for T-Shirts and many other online opportunities.

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