21st Century Affiliate Marketing

Selling my own designs on CafePress

I have been selling products in my CafePress shop for several years and there are many things I like about it.

I enjoy selling my designs and earning commissions on a regular basis, but I’m not much of a graphic designer and there are many things I like that I don’t have either the time or the talent to create and sell.

Promoting designs created by others on CafePress

At one point, I was doing well with earning commissions through the CafePress affiliate program, but that dropped to almost nothing when they went from a private affiliate program to using Commission Junction.

CafePress changed the pricing model for products sold through their marketplace

Last year, CafePress made some changes and when one of my designs sells in their marketplace, I earn a smaller commission than when the same product with the same design sells in my shop.

Most of my sales in November and December were through the CafePress marketplace, so my earnings were smaller than they would have been if they were made through my shop.

On top of that, I didn’t earn any affiliate commissions.

Getting started with Zazzle

So, I decided today to look into Zazzle and see if it was something I wanted to try.

I have a lot of friends who have either moved from CafePress to Zazzle, or they have shops at both of them.

Getting started with Zazzle is very easy

I set up my account and opened my brand new Zazzle shop today.

There’s not much in it, yet.

Basically, I’ve chosen a theme, entered a bit about me on my profile page, uploaded my standard profile photo, and set up some of the optional stuff for promotions.

Adding designs and products to Zazzle

Now, it’s time to modify some of my best-selling designs and add them to products at Zazzle. That’s going to take some time and will be an ongoing process. My goal is to have most of my best selling designs on both CafePress and Zazzle before October, so they’ll be ready to promote in time for the massive November-December buying season.

I’ll start later this week with one of my best selling designs on CafePress and see what it takes to add it to multiple products on Zazzle. I’m sure there will be differences and I may run into obstacles as a result of my experience with CafePress and being so new to Zazzle. We’ll see if these are serious obstacles or just speed bumps.

Zazzle has their own private affiliate program

in addition to selling my own designs, I’m looking forward to trying their affiliate program and selling designs created by other people that I find and like.

For instance, when browsing through their marketplace, this afternoon, I found a design that cleverly combines two things that speak to me, and possibly to you, with a bit of humor.

I’m a huge Star Trek and Star Wars fan and I was really angry last year with the bailout of banks and financial institutions that were considered too big to fail.

That’s why I laughed when I saw this design:

A lot of people use the abbreviation, “lol,” to say that they laughed out loud when seeing something. I don’t make a habit of that, but I really did laugh out loud when I saw that design.

I like it better than my own Too Big To Fail design.

The nice thing is, if someone sees this and buys either a product with my design or the more clever death star product then I’ll earn a commission.

I enjoy earning a commission.

Really.

The more, the better!

Even though I don’t have a single product in my Zazzle shop, yet, I can still earn by promoting other people’s designs, and I like that.

When I have products in my shop, then I can benefit from any other Zazzle shop owners who choose to promote my products.

A sale of one of my designs through someone else’s affiliate link slightly reduces my earnings, but that’s more than made up for by their promotional efforts, so I’m happy to share part of the profits with them.

There are significant differences between CafePress and Zazzle

So, I still have a lot to learn about Zazzle, but I’m liking what I’ve seen and learned up to this point.

Another difference between CafePress and Zazzle is that you have to pay for a premium shop on CafePress in order to have multiple designs in your store, but on Zazzle, it’s totally free.

Even though it only costs about $7 per month for a premium shop on CafePress, this ought to appeal to you if you don’t want to pay anything and still have a way to earn money through online marketing.

Discussing Zazzle on Squidoo Marketing

I’ve started a discussion in the Zazzle Group on my Squidoo Marketing community for discussing opening a Zazzle shop, creating designs, adding them to products, and promoting them.

Since I’m a complete newbie on Zazzle, I’ll use myself as a guinea pig and talk about some of the things I do to create the products and market them.

I’m sure I’ll make some mistakes and I may have some ideas you never thought of, so I’m hoping it will be a useful discussion. You can see it here:

I am a newbie to Zazzle - do you have any advice?

That discussion is primarily for people who enjoy using Squidoo to market their products, but we’ll also be discussing other avenues of promotion and sales. You’re welcome to come and join us there, if you want.

In conclusion…

I like what I see so far at Zazzle and I’m looking forward to exercising what they offer and promoting designs I find that were created by other people, too.

I’m looking forward to seeing if I can develop a new, reliable, and growing income stream with Zazzle.

What about you?

Do you have any thoughts about CafePress, Zazzle, or either of their affiliate programs?

Act on your dream!

JD

If you’ve been reading my blogs or sites for any length of time, you know I live in an area where only dial-up Internet access is currently available, and it’s also an area with old, copper phone lines so that means I’ve been connecting at much slower speeds than my equipment is capable of.

This wasn’t much of a problem a few years ago.

Now, however, it has become a much bigger problem, especially for someone who earns his living from online marketing.

For the last week or so, I’ve had access to high-speed broadband and it has made all the difference in how I perceive what I and some of my friends are doing online.

For example, I’m a huge fan of Mitch Mitchell’s I’m Just Sharing blog and Aussie Sire’s Wassup blog.

As much as I enjoy both of their blogs, sometimes it has been frustrating trying to get them to load. Many times, I would have to load a blog post two or three times before the entire page would load.

This week, however, they load the first time, every time and do it quickly. That has made it much easier and more enjoyable to read what they have to say. The same holds true for quite a few other blogs I read on a regular basis.

The benefit to me is that I’m less frustrated and can read more in much less time. That increases my motivation to participate and also decreases the amount of time I spend waiting — and playing solitaire while the pages load. (In fact, I’ve only played two games of solitaire in the last week, and there were many times in the past few years when I would play several games while waiting on one page to load, so that’s a huge difference.)

Broadband makes it much easier to edit my sites

Truthfully, it hasn’t made much of a difference in editing my own blogs and sites, because I tend to do a lot of low-bandwidth things on them and intend to continue with that approach. Still, high-speed broadband opens the door to working with video in the future, especially when promoting local small businesses on Murphy Gold. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time and I’m looking forward to it.

I can view and edit my Squidoo lenses, now

Where it has made a huge difference is being able to once-again edit my Squidoo lenses reliably and easily.

I was having a problem even seeing my own Squidoo lenses the last year or two. Editing them was even more problematic, especially some of the larger lenses such as my Site Build It lens.

The result of my problem with loading the lenses with slow dial-up was that I became more frustrated and less prone to update the lenses when people added sites to the voting Plexo modules.

The benefit of high-speed broadband is that I find it easy to view the lenses and edit them. Now, instead of being frustrated when I receive an email telling me that someone has added something to a Plexo module, I look forward to seeing what it is.

Usually, unfortunately, it’s some lame-brained spammer trying to spam their totally off-topic link on my site, but there are some nuggets in all the mud where people are suggesting excellent sites and lenses that I’m happy to add.

Publishing the lenses is much faster and much more reliable with a fast Internet connection, too.

The result is, over the last week, I’ve updated more lenses than I did in the last several months combined.

I can see my CafePress store much better now

Over the last couple of years, it seems that it has become harder and harder (and much slower) to edit my CafePress store and do all the things that are necessary to keep it up-to-date and to add new designs. As a result, I just stopped updating it.

We all know that makes a great recipe for stagnation, fewer sales, and loss of income. It’s exactly what happened.

Now, however, I can load the store in seconds, as opposed to sometimes taking ten minutes or more for pages with lots of products.

I’ve only tested editing a couple of pages, but I was able to make changes in five minutes or less that would have taken over an hour with my dial-up connection — if it were possible to successfully complete them at all.

A lot of people don’t care for my designs, and that’s okay. The good news is that I’ve sold a lot of products through my CafePress store and look forward to selling lots more. I have over 100 designs that I’ve never added to my store because it just wasn’t worth the time and effort.

I’ll be adding quite a few of them in the coming days and I’ll be promoting my CafePress store much more actively in the future.

In fact, I’ll probably be opening more stores that are focused entirely on a single niche and I’ll be promoting them heavily on several sites.

Will that increase sales? I’m sure it will. I’ll know for sure a year from now.

One of the things I’m sure will increase sales is lowering the prices.

In the past, I’ve used a premium pricing strategy for my CafePress shop. I expected few sales, so I raised the markup I’d receive on each sale.

Now that I have reliable, fast access to editing my shop, again, I’m changing the strategy.

I just lowered the prices on all the products in my store to reflect a moderate pricing strategy. I’ll earn quite a bit less per sale, but I expect that to increase the number of sales.

So, just a few minutes ago, while writing this post, I lowered the prices of every product in my shop, some of them substantially.

A fast broadband connection even makes Site Build It better

I intentionally design both of my sites that are powered by Site Build It to be low-bandwidth friendly.

I want people with slow connections to be able to read what I write and I want those pages to snap on the screen for people with faster connections.

I’m not going to make many changes in that regard, with the exception of adding a few videos.

I’ve known for some time that the popularity of video on the web has been exploding, but it was a waste of time and effort to even try to view them with my slow connection. This week, however, I’ve found how easy it is to watch video in real time with a fast connection and I know that video is more interesting to lots of people than pure text.

I still remain a text-oriented person, but I recognize an opportunity when I see it.

Another very interesting thing occurred to me this week. For all the years that I’ve been a Site Build It subscriber, I’ve always read the Action Guide and never even tried to view the video version of it.

That changed this week. For the first time ever, I watched the entire video version of the Action Guide and I have to admit that hearing someone speak while watching animation that was used to illustrate some of the processes really did make some of it more understandable. In fact, I’m going to watch the Days 2 and 3 videos again this evening.

Even though I have a good understanding of the three-tier structure of a successful website, the new tier-structure video made it much more understandable and I’ll be implementing some changes to both of my SBI sites over the coming days, as a result.

A fast connection doesn’t lessen the work, but it does make my efforts more efficient

I don’t know of anything that is reliable and honest that reduces the amount of work that it takes to be a successful online marketer, but I do know that a fast broadband connection makes a world of difference in improving efficiency.

Of course, that makes sense, but it has been a real eye-opener for me.

Back when I was a Systems Administrator for a local ISP I had direct access to a fast broadband pipe and it was nice, but that was before so many sites relied upon javascript, java, audio, video, and other things that benefit from high-speed pipes.

So, I was able to do just about anything I needed to do from home on dial-up almost as efficiently as I could do from the office using broadband.

But, that was a decade ago and things have changed drastically.

Now, there is a world of difference between slow dial-up access and high-speed broadband. That difference is much bigger and more important than I realized, and it is a very important difference for anyone aspiring to make money online from affiliate marketing or just about any other form of marketing.

Now, I’m wondering what other things I’m going to discover that will make my online marketing more effective.

What about you?

Do you have any thoughts or opinions about the differences between slow and fast Internet connections and the effectiveness of your online affiliate marketing efforts?

I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts.

Act on your dream!

JD

I was just updating my Promote Your CafePress Store lens on Squidoo and started wondering why someone would add a link to their shop, but would neglect to reload the page and vote for their own shop so it would rise closer to the top of the list.

What would be a valid reason for this behavior?

Could it be a basic lack of understanding of how the Squidoo Plexo modules work? On most of my lenses with a Plexo module, I have it set to add the link right away and send me an email message. When I get time, I go through those messages and look at what has been added to my lenses. If something is off-topic, I delete it.

Usually, I click on the link to see what was added. If I like it, I’ll click the up-arrow on my lens and vote for it.

The more up-votes, the higher the link will appear in that list.

Now, I’ve been remiss in looking through the CafePress shops in this lens, but I’m going to rectify that omission in the next few days by visiting those shops and voting for the ones I like.

I made some changes to the lens this evening. Instead of showing just the top 25 lenses (based on vote count), the lens is now showing all of them. I also removed the option to vote down a store in the list.

Still, I wonder why someone would build a store at CafePress, want to sell their merchandise, would add a link to their store on my lens, but would neglect the simple act of voting for their store and asking their friends to do the same.

Lack of understanding? Being too scattered in what they’re doing? Lazy?

I’m not going to make that mistake.

If you visit my Promote Your CafePress Store lens, I hope you’ll take the time to click the up-arrow next to my store, John Dilbeck - Shirts, Mugs, and Hats : CafePress.com. Currently, it’s at the top of the list with only two votes! Hopefully, after writing about it, my store will stay at the top of the list, or at least near the top.

If it doesn’t, that’s okay, too. I created the list with the anticipation that CafePress shop owners would list their store, and ask their friends to vote for it. I’m hoping other visitors to the lens will look at the stores in the list and vote for their favorites. Maybe the best stores will rise to the top, eventually.

Helping my friends promote their shops

Originally, I created the lens because I had friends with CafePress shops who were not selling their merchandise. Some of them had some high-quality designs, so the lack of sales must have been due to the lack of proper marketing.

Now, I know that one link on a lens will not create an overwhelming rush of customers to your store with their credit cards outstretched as they join in a mad frenzy of shopping, but it is a start.

Promote your shop

Have you taken that first step? If you have a CafePress shop, have you added a link to your store on this lens? Don’t forget to reload the page and vote for your shop.

Have you promoted your shop anywhere online? How are you attracting visitors to your shop so they’ll buy products with your designs?

Squidoo Marketing Community

A few months ago, I started the Squidoo Marketing Community so my fellow lensmasters could share ideas, help each other, and do a better job of marketing using their Squidoo lenses. There’s even a CafePress Shops group there so we can focus on discussing ways to promote our CafePress designs.

CafePress Affiliate Marketing Program

Did you know that CafePress has an affiliate marketing program managed through CommissionJunction.com? They do, and it pays pretty good commissions.

As a shop owner, I welcome sales by affiliates and I’m happy to provide part of my profits to them for any sales they make.

As an affiliate, I’m happy to accept a commission for helping to sell someone else’s items through my marketing efforts.

As you may know, my CafePress shop is located at Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com and I welcome anyone who would like to purchase my designs and/or any affiliates who would like to earn a commission by marketing my designs to your readers.

Do you have a CafePress shop?

What are you doing to promote it?

If you don’t have one, did you know that you can open your own shop for free?

An even better deal is opening your shop and upgrading it to a premium shop. You’ll be able to do much more with it. Considering all that CafePress provides, the low monthly fee for a premium shop is a real bargain.

How satisfied are you with your CafePress store?

I know everyone isn’t as satisfied with CafePress as I am.

So, what’s your experience?

What do you think?

Tell us about your CafePress shop and what you are doing to promote it.

I’m interested in your experiences with CafePress, learning more about your shops and the designs you sell, and how you’re marketing your products via CafePress.

How can we work together to help each other increase our sales and make more profits from our CafePress stores?

Act on your dream!

JD

Rate this:

2.9

I am a huge fan of Squidoo and use it as a major part of my marketing mix.

I recommend Squidoo for a number of reasons. The lenses are easy to build and you can always go back and modify them whenever you want. It’s free to use. They even pay you to use their free service - how’s that for a deal!

Why do they call it a lens?

Squidoo calls it a lens, actually one page on their site, because you can focus the page on a particular topic. Not every lensmaster does this, but the more successful ones tightly focus a lens on just one subject. If you want to cover multiple subjects, you can always create new lenses, and Squidoo offers several ways to help you cross-promote your related lenses.

Are you a Squidoo lensmaster?

I am happy to be a squidoo lensmaster and I currently have about 70 lenses. I had more, but had to delete almost 50 of them when one of the companies I was promoting changed direction. It’s time to start creating new lenses about the topics in which I’m interested.

Here’s my profile page: John Dilbeck, Squidoo Lensmaster.

If you examine this page, you’ll see that in addition to listing all my lenses, I can customize the page to link to other sites, including this blog, my Cafepress store, my Lulu store (which needs lots of work next year), my profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and more.

If you’re reading this, I invite you to follow me on Twitter and become my friend on Facebook.

I think you can see at a glance that your Squidoo lensmaster page is a good way to link to other sites that are important to you.

If you get serious about Squidoo, you may want to create your own lensography to list your lenses in whatever way you want to present them. Here’s my main lensography (you can have more than one): Who is John Dilbeck?

Now, remember that you don’t have to build a lensography about yourself, although it is recommended to keep track of all your lenses and to present them however you want. You can build multiple lensographies.

Let’s say that you are promoting a particular product or service and you want to have multiple lenses, each of which discusses a major feature or benefit. You can create a lens about the main topic and then link to each of the sub-lenses. Even though each page is totally separate on Squidoo, you can present them organized logically and all together. That gives you a lot of flexibility.

Do you have a blog?

If so, you need to create a lens about it.

Why? Because you can tell people about your blog, syndicate your RSS feed, and get the benefit of Squidoo’s high rankings in the search engines.

For instance, I have a lens for this 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog.

Do you have a CafePress shop?

How would you like to promote not only your store and the products within it, but also be able to promote other products sold on Cafepress - and earn some money doing it?

CafePress has an affiliate program on Commission Junction, and it pays a nice commission when you sell other people’s products. However, just by building a Squidoo lens, you can promote products without having to join at CJ.

But, you’ll make more money if you sell your own products from your lenses.

I have a CafePress shop at Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com and sell products just about every day.

I created a lens, John Dilbeck’s Shirts, Mugs, and Hats, where I link to the store and some of my best-selling items. There’s also a section where you can add a link to your Cafepress store, and I show random products from searches farther down the lens. I earn money on every sale, and you can do the same thing. It just takes a little time and creativity.

I even created a lens mainly designed to help you promote your CafePress shop. Several dozen shop owners have taken advantage of this, but few have gone back after adding their shops and voted them up higher in the list. Always remember to reload the page after adding something to a Plexo list so you can vote for it.

Come and Promote Your CafePress Store.

By the way, did you know that you can open a CafePress shop for free? Once you’re serious about it, you may want to upgrade to a pro shop. I did, and it’s basically free for me since my first couple of sales every month pays the fee and the rest of my sales are all profit. Not a bad deal.

Learn how to get started at CafePress and Make Your Own T-Shirts.

Promote Your Favorite Products and Services at Squidoo

As you may already be aware, one of the services I enjoy promoting the most is Site Build It! I’m both a satisfied customer and a very happy affiliate.

I have several lenses where I promote Site Build It!.

One of my most popular lenses is Site Build It, a revolution in website design, hosting, and promotion and I invite you to visit the lens, if you’re interested.

I think one reason this lens is popular is because I help other fellow SBIers promote their sites and lenses there. If you are an SBIer and have a website powered by Site Build It!, you are welcome to submit your site to the appropriate module on that lens. If you have lenses about SBI, there is a place you can add it, too.

You’ll note that I even welcome affiliate lenses from competing 5 Pillar affiliates.

As I have time, and as more services are announced at SBI, I’ll be adding more lenses discussing the benefits of those services.

Hint: I can’t tell you any more right now, but Sitesell will be announcing an exciting new educational service in about three weeks. Stay tuned for more information. I was on a conference call about it, just this afternoon, and I think there will be people who will want to take advantage of this new service. That’s all I can say, right now.

Squidoo offers much more

There are many modules that can be added to lenses to help you promote what you’re doing and help people find what you’ve written.

They offer a Twitter module where you can show your latest tweets.

Lijit.com has a special module so people can search your content via their search engine. When you add it to a lens, you can specify which lenses to include in the search results.

By going directly to Lijit.com, you can get code to add their search to your blogs and sites, too. You can see it in action in the right column of this blog.

Want to sell products from Amazon? There are modules designed to make it easy to do just that.

It would take a lot of blog posts to cover all that Squidoo offers to help you accomplish what you want, so I’m going to stop here.

How do you become a lensmaster

It’s easy to start building lenses on Squidoo. Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it. Do it now, while you are thinking about it.

Remember, you can start simply and then expand your lens(es) whenever you want. I edited three of my lenses and republished them while I was writing this. It’s pretty easy once you learn how to do it.

Learn more from other Squidoo marketers

I would like to invite you to join us on the Squidoo Marketers community.

Come and learn from people who are using Squidoo in their marketing mix. Share what you know. Tell us about your lenses. Promote your CafePress shops.

It’s a friendly little community, and I’m looking forward to you joining us and participating there.

What’s your opinion?

So, what’s your opinion of using Squidoo as part of your marketing mix? I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts, opinions, and comments about your experiences with, or lack thereof, using Squidoo.

Act on your dream!

JD

Rate this:

2.9

I’ve been missing in action the last couple of weeks.

After Mom’s funeral and burial, I thought I was doing okay. For about a week, I was surrounded by family and some of my closest friends and everything was going well.

Then, last week and this week, I have been alone in this house with so many memories of my Mom and Dad, and I just haven’t felt like doing anything. So, I took some time off. Mostly, I’ve been watching movies and TV shows I’ve rented from NetFlix and sleeping.

I’ve downloaded a couple of thousand emails and responded to the most important. The others will be skimmed or just deleted. If you sent me an important email and I haven’t responded in the next week, please resend it. I’ll try to keep up from here onward.

This week has been rather miserable. I woke up from a nap and thought I was getting a kidney infection or worse. The pain was sharp and intense. I couldn’t get comfortable sitting, standing, or lying down.

Fortunately, after a few days, I was sure it was a pinched nerve instead of a kidney infection or stone, so I started doing some easy stretches several times a day. Yesterday, I felt a pop when I moved just right and the pain is now much less and seems to be going away. That’s a very welcome relief.

If you’ve ever been in constant pain, you know how hard it is to concentrate on doing anything while you’re hurting.

I didn’t expect Mom’s death to take all the wind out of my sails, but it did. So much of my life has been focused on caring for her that I just didn’t know what to do. So, I gave myself permission to do nothing, for awhile.

This morning, I woke up for the first time feeling like I wanted to get back to work.

I tried making myself get back to work last week, but it wasn’t working. Today, however, I feel very different. I’m looking forward to getting my business back on track and writing about the things that have been working for me.

Fortunately, even though I haven’t felt like doing anything for the last three weeks, my websites have been working night and day for me. I’ve continued to make affiliate commissions for sales of Site Build It! and other products I’m proud to use and promote.

Even though I haven’t done much of anything with my Squidoo lenses for the last couple of months, I still received a payment from Squidoo this week and that doesn’t take into account the sign-ups to various offers and affiliate commissions I’ve made on those lenses.

Lots of you have been purchasing t-shirts, calendars, mugs, shopping bags, and other products from my Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com shop, powered by CafePress. While sales are lower than last year, it’s always nice to see lots of “You made a sale at CafePress” subject lines in my incoming email. Thanks to all of you who have purchased this year!

And, of course, there are quite a few other, smaller, income streams that add up to enough to make working at home profitable and worthwhile for me.

I have plans for more systematization of my marketing efforts in 2009 and I’m going to share what I’ve been learning with you in the coming months.

To be sure you don’t miss anything, you may want to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed (see the large RSS icon at the top-right of every page) or subscribe to the postings via email by filling in the form at the top of the right column of every page, right below my photo.

I’ll do my best to make it worth your while.

Despite the world-wide economic problems, it is still worth promoting quality products - whether they are your own or via affiliate links - and earning from every sale.

Everything moves in cycles. The economic situation will improve in time, and those who put in the work now will be in a good place when confidence rises and people start spending more in the future.

It’s okay to take some time off, now and then, but it’s not okay to quit.

I’ve just been taking some time off, and now it’s time to go back to work.

Act on your dream!

JD

Rate this:

2.9

I’ll be the first to say that I don’t understand the real scope of the financial bailout of Wall Street firms and all the ramifications of passing, or not passing, the bailout that is being fought over in congress.

All I know is that I work hard, spend within my budget, no longer use credit cards, am completely debt-free, and see no reason that my tax money should be sent to bail out greedy people who didn’t manage their risk properly and got into debt over their heads.

Truly, I don’t understand it.

Since there’s not much else I can do, I added a new design, I am too big to fail. Where is my bail out?, to my CafePress shop.

Will this help to solve the problem? Of course, not.

Maybe you would like to wear one of these products to protest this whole mess. Maybe not. It’s up to you.

Sigh.

JD

Rate this:

2.9

A Little About CafePress

I’m sure you know by now that you can get a free account at CafePress where you can upload your custom designs onto about 80 products - free.

You can open your own free or premium shop at CafePress.com and sell your own designs. Whether you want to sell t-shirts with slogans, your own original books or CDs, or clothing, mousepads, calendars, and other products with your own original art, you’ll find CafePress an easy way to set up your online store and let them take care of the printing, processing, shipping, and customer service — and send your royalty checks for the sales you make.

I’ve been a shopkeeper at CafePress since 2002 and I heartily recommend the company. I love getting emails telling me that I just made a sale and then, a few weeks later, getting my commission checks in the mail.

If you are serious about selling your products on CafePress, I seriously recommend that you get a premium store. You can create multiple sections and offer your designs on more products. It is much easier to manage a single premium store than multiple free ones. I know. I also know that I am making more sales from my premium store than I ever did from my free stores.

I invite you to visit my CafePress shop at Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com. You will find an eclectic collection of products with a variety of designs.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have opened several themed premium shops and I am thinking about doing that next year. It is much easier to market a themed collection because you can target your market much easier and it is easier to describe what you are selling. Each premium shop costs only $7 per month (less if you pay annually), and I’m earning enough that my shop is basically free, since it is paid for out of my commissions earned.

A Little About Squidoo

You may not have heard about Squidoo, but you will.

Squidoo is becoming very popular. In the few months since it was introduced, nearly 41,000 lenses have been built.

You can open a free account at Squidoo and create as many lenses as you want for free.

In fact, you may even earn money from your lenses. I’m getting small commission payments each month, and they are growing. You can, too.

CafePress and Squidoo Co-Branded Lenses

Now, for the news I just learned about a few hours ago.

CafePress shop owners can now create a new CafePress co-braned lens by going to the CafePress headquarters on Squidoo and following the directions. It looks to me as if you must create a new lens to participate in the joint venture, so, in addition to my Custom T-Shirts lens, I just created a cobranded lens at John Dilbeck’s Shirts, Mugs, and Hats Store at CafePress.

Why go to the extra effort?

I believe in promoting my efforts as widely and as often as possible, so a new lens that links to my CafePress shop can’t hurt - and neither can linking to it from other lenses, websites, blogs, and so forth.

Additionally, I don’t know how CafePress and Squidoo are promoting lenses created through the CafePress Squidoo headquarters, but I did see a link to my new lens and to my list of lenses on the CafePress headquarters. So, I’m getting some additional promotion, at least.

What I don’t like about it

There are many positives to selling your products on CafePress and creating lenses on Squidoo. I’ve mentioned some in this post, and I’ve talked about others previously in different locations.

I’ll stipulate it as a given that you should do this if you are selling any designs through CafePress.

But, all is not perfect with this solution.

For example, on my new lens, I just wasted over an hour trying to use the automated tools provided for picking products from a particular CafePress store, in this instance, mine.

I know I have a white tshirt that says “Because I’m the Mommy, That’s Why!” and I can find it in about a minute on my site.

But, when I tried searching for it using the promote a store part of the CafePress module, I could not find it. I know it is tagged with both “johndilbeck” and “mommy”, but it never showed up in the search.

I know I have many products with “USA” on them and I tried to find them using the search. I found many of my other USA flag wear products, but never did find the USA tshirt or sweatshirt.

So, I manually linked to them in the introduction of the lens and deleted the promote a store module. I’ll replace it later, when I have more time.

The CafePress affiliate program

Recently, CafePress introduced an affiliate program and it’s starting to pay off for me. In fact, I’m earning enough from the affiliate program that my premium shop is paid for through those commissions and I get to keep the commissions from all my product sales. I like that, and I’m eager to increase both income streams.

So, I’ll be doing some extra promotion over the next few months leading up to Christmas and the holiday shopping season.

I know I don’t produce the best products on CafePress. I do mostly styled text designs and lots of people don’t care for them. But, now, as an affiliate, I can recommend more topical designs, cute designs, artistic designs, and others that I like.

You can, too.

Unless you can drive a ton of targeted visitors to the site, you will not get rich, but you could make several hundred dollars through this affiliate program.

Here are some categories of products you can purchase at CafePress. Do your gift buying early and avoid the crowds!

• Politics
• Pets
• Dogs
• Humor
• Junior’s Gear
• Bumper Stickers
• Art and Photography
• Fantasy Art
• Military
• Geek
• Pop Culture

Something for everyone

CafePress offers millions of products from hundreds of thousands of designers, so there is probably something there for everyone.

Not only that, but creative and artistic people can sell their own designs, and everyone who is willing to exert the effort can recommend their favorite designs through the affiliate program.

We all prosper by helping each other promote and sell our products.

It’s great to see Squidoo and CafePress working together to help us in our efforts.

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Context Tag: t-shirts, mugs, hats, CafePress, American flag, patriotic shirts

I would like to thank the good people who have been buying items from the USA Flag Wear section of Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com. If I knew how to contact you, I would thank you personally.

If you’ve never browsed this section of my CafePress store, I think you’ll find some patriotic products here that will be just what you’re looking for.

Designs in the following categories are available on multiple products.

• America the Beautiful
• USA - Don’t Tread On Me
• God Bless America
• God Bless the USA
• I’m Proud to be an American
• Land of the Free, Home of the Brave
• Let Freedom Ring!
• USA - No More Sanctuary for Terrorists
• Americans - Soft and Cuddly on the Outside, Hard as Steel on the Inside
• USA
• American Flag
• USA - We Stand United

If you have any suggestions for products you’d like to purchase, please feel free to let me know.

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