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!