Promoting Your Cafepress Store

If you are thinking about starting a cafepress shop the first thing you want to consider is what target audience are you going to try and reach? Is there are certain niche you want to touch on? Do you want to target teens? Adults? Kids? Maybe you will be like me and have a little bit of everything?

Once you decide what area you are going to delve into, the next thing to think about is how to promote it. You might have some great looking products in your store but if no one knows about them, no one is going to buy them! You might get a few sales here and there through the cafepress searches and other search engines, but you want to go beyond "getting lucky" with search engines.

There are a lot of ways to promote your website and here are a few that you can try.

*The obvious: tell your friends and family about it!
*Join forums that focus on the same subject as your store and be sure to add your link into your signature. Jump into different conversations throughout the forum and have your link seen by many!
*Put your link in your email signature.
*Make a myspace page! Check mine out: daftcreationsmyspace (I will focus more on networking through myspace later on)
*If you have your own personal myspace page be sure to advertise on it there.
*Make business cards.
*Make shirts or bumper stickers through cafepress to help advertise!
*Search for free advertising/classified sites to advertise on.
*If you have the money, you can pay for advertisement, just do your research and decide what you think will work best for you.
*Do lots of reading in the cafepress shopkeeper forum for other tips and ideas
*Join traffic exchanges. Yes, a lot of people say that they don't work, but I honestly think they do. Even through just surfing for credits I have found a few websites that caught my attention! Just make sure that your website is eye catching and attention grabbing!
*Be creative! I'm sure there are many strategies that will work, just use your mind and think of new ways to get your business name out there!

If you start a cafepress store, don't expect it to take off immediately. It can take months and months to get your business name out there unless you happen to have a decent amount of money for advertising! If you have the patience to stick with it, you will be successful and eventually your efforts will pay off.

I'm surely not acting as a cafepress professional, but I just want to pass along the knowledge that I learn along the way!

Interested in trading links?

If anyone has a blog similar to this one and would like to trade links and be added to me blog community listing then you may either let me know in a comment here, or email me at: tatteredsoul77@aol.com!

ChaCha invites are closed

ChaCha has just closed their guide invites. Hopefully they will open them back up fairly soon! If anyone is interested in becoming a guide you can still feel free to email me and I will put you on my list and when the invites come open again I will email you to see if you are still interested!

Are you creative enough??

If you have a creative mind and like to work with graphic design then a great start for you would be cafepress. They have all kinds of gifts including shirts, hats, journals, mugs, clocks, note cards and many other items that you can sell with your own design on them.

You can start out small and run a free store or you can pay a small monthly fee to have a nicer, bigger store with more options. You pick what products you want to sell and you design the artwork for on the product and then design your store. You set your own prices and you decide what you want to sell! Cafepress does the rest! When a customer wants to purchase something from your store cafepress does the leg work by taking care of the transaction, making the product with your design on it and shipping it to the customer. Cafepress tells you what their "base" price is and then you choose to set the price that you want to sell the products for and whatever price is above the wholesale price, YOU get! Once you reach the minimum payout ($25) they send a check out to you.

They also offer an affiliate program where you can help promote other cafepress stores and earn a percentage of what they sell (more info on that later) and you can also have other stores help promote you and get your name out to the public!

Running a cafepress store can be a lot of fun. I will be giving more tips and information on how to run a cafepress store in upcoming posts, but in the mean time be sure to check out my own cafepress store DAFT CREATIONS!

Where is my adsense?

Can someone help me out with adsense? It's not showing up in my blog but it's supposed to! I've put the codes in and done it exactly how I'm supposed to through blogger. I even approved the email from adsense asking blogger to have permission to use the code ..but still nothing is on my blog! The help page here is kind of worthless. All it does is explain how to put adsense on your page, but there aren't any trouble shooting posts!