Tips for having a successful ZAZZLE store

For those of you who don't know, Zazzle is an online site that allows you to open a gallery, put your own design on products and when a product sells from your gallery, you get a royalty. I have done some research about marketing my Zazzle store, applied many of these techniques and have been steadily selling! I will share some tips I've learned and hope they help you get steady sales with your Zazzle store.

ONLINE MARKETING ~

There are many ways you can market online. One way many zazzlers find helpful is to make lenses on Squidoo. You can make a lens about your zazzle store and link it with other zazzlers on there. It's very simple, sign up for an account at: http://www.squidoo.com/ and start adding info, pictures of your products, descriptions or whatever you fancy adding to your lens. You can also go onto other zazzlers lenses and rate their lenses with 5 stars and add a comment. It's always best that we help each other.

Another way to get you gallery listed is to add your store link every so often to Google & Alexa. The link for these are: Google: and Alexa: www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters.

A great and easy way to get your gallery noticed on the web is to add your store link as a signature to your emails, or signature to your posts in groups that you regularly post to on message boards.

Many people make blogs and include pictures of their products which is very helpful. Facebook,  Myspace and Twitter are also ways you can post your work or make fan pages for your gallery.

OFFLINE MARKETING ~


You can also advertise outside of the web in addition to online advertising. Make up some creative and appealing business cards with your Zazzle link & description. You can do so many things with these business cards. Keep them with you and you can put these on cars in parking lots, on bulletin boards in grocery stores (wherever you travel), in a library book (you never know!) or any other place you can think of.

A little trick that takes very little time & is polite also, is to post a thank you to the customer when you find out you sold a product(s). This is kind to the customer and also get's your name out there that this product sold. Anywhere you can get your name out, is more publicity and more traffic.

There are sites you can join, get your name online even more in return you post their logo on your page. Pretty simple and the logo is discreet. A few of these websites are: Traffic digger, link referral and ringsurf. There are many others, just what you're willing to put into it time-wise to sign up for all these different sites. I sign up for only free sites and choose not to have my gallery cluttered with logos. I feel that's distracting to they potential buyer, but it is helpful to choose a few.

I think to make many sales, you have to also look at what is popular. I frequently look at the Zazzle page and see what has sold recently, notice the themes. I also look at what has sold well in my gallery and try to figure out what people search out to buy. An example of being observant of what to make is before the election this year, I sold TONS of political merchandise. It was hot! I made it for both candidates & tried to make the designs crisp and creative yet somewhat unique. If a holiday is around the corner, pre-think this and make Halloween designs 2 months before Halloween.

Tips:

• Stamps are great because people buy in bulk & may come back for more! These are usually bulk sales. This is an example of what people need in bulk: wedding stamps, 40th birthday pins, etc. - good to keep in mind when creating!

• Tags! I always use as many tags as I can and use words I think people would look up if they were looking for my product! I go overboard with tags, but feel like if someone is searching for a soccer shirt and types in search bar "blue kids soccer shirt", if I have a product to match, they'll find it!
• Make your gallery personal (colors you like). Make sure you put some of your best work on the front page, pieces that are crisp and easy to read, yet in some way powerful. Also, make sure the gallery colors are appealing and don't clash! If someone opens your page and it hurts their eyes, they're not going to stay long and shop around.
• Change the front of your gallery to fit the season. Ex. around Christmas time post some Christmas items, Hanukkah items, New years items etc. Remove any Halloween from front page of your gallery during this time. Have your gallery front be somewhat pertinent to the season.

The Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Liberty Bell postcard I've sold 124 of. I took this picture while visiting Pennsylvania & decided to design into a postcard. It's a great idea to take pictures of your travels and think about what you can use for photo's on Zazzle products. Be sure to add many products, the more products you have the greater chance at selling!

With a little thoughtful work put into your gallery, you can sell, sell, sell!

Happy Zazzling all!