Making money at Zazzle ?

I tried CafePress for a while and no success you really must commit yourself to it.

Have a look at the zazzle forum - Ideas and sites used to promote your store - Zazzle Forum

Its pretty well hidden, so some people don't spot it. I linked to the "Promote" section where people ask for products to promote.

Great knowledge again. I think it all depends on how well you market your product.

Thanks

Thanks for all the replies.

However, I don,t agree with your comments. The difference between marketing your own website and marketing zazzle products is that when you send traffic to your own website if they buy something you get the sale. With zazzle you are only driving traffic to Zazzle, not to your product. If someone goes to Zazzle via your marketing efforts, as soon as they get on the site they will start looking at all the other designs on there. So not the same as driving traffic to your own website.
Zazzle is a very good business model, get other people to design items and for them to drive the traffic.
However, alas its not for other people. With so much choice and quite high prices my conclusion is that its not an area someone will make a lot of money.

I have seen my sister do this before. I am not sure she is still doing it now or not.
But I could see that it's a really hard work. Getting traffic is kinda hard. And theres a lot of work to be done. Setting up your store etc2. Plus, I don't think the commission is that high.
It would be much easier to create an Amazon review site and build some quality links to your site. Just my suggestion.

Kevin

I think you really have to have a brand name before you can make money at CafePress, Zazzle. Like "The Oatmeal" or "The Onion". People who actually want to buy your merch because you have a cult following.

Otherwise like you said, you get lost in the masses.

Making a full time income off of Zazzle would seem hard/near impossible to me. Setting it up and using it as one of the many streams of income for some of your existing other sites though is very doable.

You can make quite a bit of money on zazzle, but it is advisable not to make it your only source of income. Having all your online income dependant on 1 website or stream is suicidal in my opinion just ask the people who were relying on adsense only to wake up one morning and find that their account has been shut down.

With zazzle there are 2 ways to get images to use either
1. create them yourself or
2.use royalty free stock photos or public domain images

i am not an artist or designer so can only talk about the second one

My key to selling on zazzle is to use images that are currently selling. I do not try to reinvent the wheel.

To find what sort of public domain pics are trending i to go to a major site like AllPosters.com - The World's Largest Poster and Print Store! or Art.com - Posters, Art Prints, and Framed Art Leader. and browse their vintage and fine art section and sort by bestseller. With all posters determining if an image is public domain it is quite easy as they display the copyright date for the art with art.com you need to be diligent.

Once you find the images you want to use just use TinEye Reverse Image Search or GazoPa similar image search to perform a reverse search , this will fetch results of websites that you might be able to download the image from. Sort by size to find a high resolution image you can use to create products on zazzle.

The key is to have multiple themed stores. Do not just have one store with all sorts of images , instead open multiple accounts 1 account per niche, e.g you can have a store selling products created from Japanese art , another selling products with Leonardo da Vinci artwork etc.

You will need to do some marketing , you can build backlinks to your store use a zazzle referral link so you can earn a commission from whatever you are selling.

Also when building your store include keywords in your title, tags and description use long tail keywords.

marketing really depends on your niche but the principles are the same, say i was selling Van Gogh posters i would write articles about him and submit to directories, try and find art blogs to guest post on and let readers know they can VIEW don't say buy his works online at my zazzle store or even better on my blog.

Another way to market is to use photo sharing sites likeFlickr - Photo Sharing upload medium sized images and if the site allows it link back to your blog or zazzle store in the description let people know they can have it as a poster or printed on a t-shirt e.t.c You can find a lot of groups on zazzle join the ones related to your niche and add value add you blog or store url to your profile.

Create video slide shows from your images add appropriate text and music and submit to video sites. Add your store Url inside the video and in the description if allowed .

You can use a free software like http://pdfill.com to compile you images into a pdf file , you can add text pages with short descriptions and links to your store or blog and voilla you have got a a photo ebook you can submit to Scribd and all major document sharing sites.

With every money making method you will have those that are telling you it can't work but if you look closely you will find a lot of people banking big with that method.

Go forth and prosper

Thanks HorseStall. Your sites are exactly the type of thing I was looking at doing (different niches though).

I wouldn't say that I have made serious money at Zazzle, but I bet that if I scaled my efforts that I could easily make a nice payday there.

In order to be successful there - you gotta have a knack for designing or you can hire some designers on Odesk to do some batch jobs for you.

Obviously people like STATEMENT shrits, plus creating nice looking T-shirt text will cost you less when you are having the designs outsourced then having someone render you a fire-breathing dragon that looks rad. Does that make sense?

Here is a method that I used to generate some decent dollars on Zazzle.

People love celebrities - TV show actors - Movie Stars

STEP 1
Search for actors that are popular (go to perez hilton, or any celeb blog and find out who his hot)

STEP 2
Then search those people on YouTube, HULU, etc and find videos that summarize their funniest moments or TOP 10 best clips, etc.

EXAMPLE:
Ari Gold from Entourage
w w w .youtube.com/watch?v=sErn58DIpFk

Now go through those clips and look for wildly funny statements. If you are an Entourage fan then you know that Ari always screams, "LLOYD!!" or he makes fun of "e" - Ari says TONS of funny stuff and this show is an HBO Hit.

write down those funny statements and then check against Google and Twitter and see if people are talking about it. If they are or if people are using the statements in everyday chatter - you got a winner. Undoubtedly people are talking/buzzing about it.

Another example - Recently THE OFFICE debuted - Michael Scott's movie "Threat Level Midnight" It was hilarious and in that micro movie Michael had his own dance called "Do The Scarn" - Tons of people were chattering about this after the show.

Easy for an outsourced designer to make a HOT looking text that will print well on a shirt that says

DO THE SCARN! ( the office)

or

LLYOOOODDDDD!!!! (entourage)


Next step is to gather several of these sayings and send over a bulk order to your designer.

------

Now to make money.

Find the feeds in twitter of people talking about these sayings and join in the conversation and then drip a link to your shirt.

"do the scarn was awesome!! Michael Scott cracks me up. Check out this Do the Scarn shirt = EPIC (link)

-----

" gosh I wish Entourage would hurry up and come back on! I need to break out my Lloyyyd shirt (link)"

------

make sense?

so yes, you can make money with Zazzle. Above is a recipe that has brought me success. Hopefully you can make some extra dough doing what I just shared. Let me know how it goes

Cheers,
Preston

@mailey

well - aren't you negative. jeeze. i just outlined a blueprint for you to make some money with zazzle.

get out there and do it.

if you want some more help - let me know.

Thanks Preston and Branco- both great answers! I wouldn't put all my eggs in the Zazzle or CafePress basket, but use them as an upsell.

I'm an artist myself and have sold many original paintings before on ebay. I'm just starting to get back into it and looking for different ways to market myself.

I've been experimenting with videos and seeing if I can create a buzz this way. maybe I'll incorporate zazzle with this. I've made some sales on redbubble.com which is similar.

Cheers,
Michael

I have dabbled with zazzle, but i've yet to make a sale. I don't think it is worth putting hour of time into though.

I would not go swapping around!

Its misdirection, find something that makes you money or has already made you money and keep going with that.

The more time you deviate from your plan the more time you will face not making sales or money.

I don't make a fortune with Zazzle, but it does supplement my income. I put up my Zazzle stores and then forgot them. If I had put more effort into them, I would be making more. I know some people that make quite a good income from Zazzle but they put effort into it with creating Squidoo lenses, websites, etc.

i will start selling so that i may let you know !!!!!!

regads
sam

I would not considering investing any sweat equity into Zazzle right now...
Maybe at a later time though.
It's Alexa ranking (around 1,100) indicates that it probably receives a significant amount of traffic.

i tried it guys, it's not easy to make a sale there with thousands of products around, it's a miracle when a buyer finds you there, seriously!

I tried cafe press and I believe zazzle as well. I never made much if anything. You really have to put a lot of effort into promoting your store and even then I don't think most people are gonna buy from a site like that because personally I think the tshirt quality is low quality and prices are high for what you get. You can't count on people to find you and buy through searches you really need to promote your store. One thing I would say is that if you want to try to be found by searches do current events, current fad type stuff. For example leading up to the election make shirts for Romney, Obama, Tea Party, Conservatives, Libertarians, Don't Tread On Me, etc. That type of stuff is popular searches.

I've made about $60 out of zazzle over the past couple of years with no promotion, and I've only put a half arsed effort into actually doing the products and stores etc.

You either treat it as a quantity thing - and not many people have the time for it, or a quality thing, and submit epic designs.

Or you could promote.

It is possible if you make a full effort and optimise your tags properly, and promote it.

I make about $100 a month on Zazzle. It's really about the diversity and quantity of products you have in the store.

I've an OK amount of sales through them with little promo; It is tough though.

I created a Zazzle account back in '08 and put in about an hour of work back then and currently I have had 3 sales and $6.50 in my account. I'm thinking about putting some real effort in to it and giving it another shot.

I used Zazzle in 2010 for the Giants WS Run, made like $50 wasn't worth it. But it did set the foundation I needed for my clothing line now which is doing quite a bit more than that to say the least haha

I tried Zazzle, made $20 then I went stale as I got back into hunting and photoshop designing again, I like the features and ease of use of the store and such, but I found something better that is earning me $100 into my Paypal a day easily and it was absolutely FREE didn't cost me on thin penny, lol. I am thinking about going back to Zazzle after reading these posts, awsome stuff guys.

These type of sites are not very easy place for the newbies. To make money, I personally avoid them.

To make money with Zazzle and similar sites you will need two things: the products you sell and promotion. To promote you can use Facebook, Youtube, PPC...

I hate Zazzle. I designed some Rebecca Black/Friday tshirts when that song was all the rage and was going to donate all the profits to the Japan Earthquake.

Got 40 some orders over the weekend. On Monday, I find out they pulled my T-shirts because of "copyright issues"

Zazzle sucks.

Does Zazzle list your items on ebay? I had an idea for a line of T shirts for Hanukkah and I did an ebay search and what did I find? Several of the T-Shirts listed had Cafe press as their seller on their ebay cafe press store. So it looks like Cafe Press sells the shirts for you and you get the commission. NOt as cool as if you listed them on ebay, but you don't have to worry about selling them in smaller amounts, since with their power seller status they can sell unlimited quantities of your design.

I did not see anything from Zazzle on ebay, so maybe CafePress, in that regards, may be a better way to go! Anything that helps you drive traffic is a sweet deal to me!

I spent about one hour with zazzle in 2011. I now have about $7 worth of sales. In december 2011, I got some sales as it was christmas.

I've had a Zazzle store for nearly 4 years and you know how much I've made in that time in profit? About $200, at best. You know how much I've been marketing my stuff? None.

You can make decent money with Zazzle and I remember the first time I started my store I had about 100 products within a week. I get some small change here and there from them which is pretty awesome considering I haven't updated it in 4 years.

It was fun making stuff for them but Zazzle takes a huge chunk of your profit. I'm thinking of selling merchandize for my business soon but I'll do it with my own store through Shopify.

anyone know of similar scripts/clones/white label sites available similar to zazzle, cafepress and others? I am looking for a solution for users to make their own label that will go on a candle. Hallmark or sendoutcard of candles for every occasion, web/mobile based self designed w/ templates, having customer upload logos/photos to customize etc...

I have a zazzle store which I barely update, however, what is I though was important to share with you is how people are able to find your designs:

#1 If you upload designs often, you will be higher in the search field. I am almost sure what I read years back was that if you uploaded the design, it would present itself high in the search list, therefore linking someone not only to your design but ultimately to your store.

#2 Choose a niche that someone will search for and use synonyms in your tags, the more tags the better

#3 Upload often! (back to #1)

Some helpful links:
Your Product Tags and Description-The First Step to Getting Found in the Zazzle Marketplace | All I know about Zazzle
Top Ten Things to Know BEFORE Opening a Shop on Zazzle | All I know about Zazzle

Very interesting thread about Zazzle.

I started last week to upload a few designs after I saw how many bad designs are offered. I outsourced a design, which I wanted to promote with Teespring, but there was a risk of copyright infringment so I used sunfrogshirts to do some affiliate promoting and got about 8 sales. I wanted to add my own design, but since sunfrogshirts has a inefficient way of uploading own designs I tried Zazzle.

Zazzle is pretty cool with the huge variety of items you can print your stuff on.

I created own designs in Photoshop and Illustrator as vector graphics, but unfortunately I did not promote them yet and I think my views are very very low without promotion.

I honestly dont know how to get off the ground with sales. I made 8 sales on sunfrogshirts within a wekk and very little effort, but zazzle is hard to promote I guess.

any recommendations?

It can be done. Some people are making a ton of money. My best friend worked for Zazzle for about 6 years. His co-worker started selling his own tshirt and coffee mug designs through Zazzle. The guy was making 6 figures off the sales of his designs so quit his Zazzle job.

Yes indeed I agree with Gail_Curran. You cannot expect results if you are not driving traffic to your money site. Essentially, you can make money with any product as long as you get traffic to the site on a daily basis. Traffic is the lifeblood of every successful business.

I found more success at Spreadshirt. Many popular Youtubers are using this tee system for selling things.

Forget Zazzle,

Polyvore is the new trend/secret weapon.


Regards,

RDS

I have made around 300 dollars with zazzle, I think if you can try and include keywords that rank well on google. One thing I have noticed is certain T-shirts get A LOT and I mean a lot more sales than others, and it's not because they look better. They must be getting decent search engine exposure.

The best advice I had gotten when I was trying to decide if I should venture into Zazzle was to make 10 products a day and in about 3 years it would be possible to make a full time income. I am slower than that but can see how that formula would work if you are working hard at marketing at the same time. Since I posted a few months ago, above, I continue to grow my business. I am doing about 6 to 8 times better than last year at this same time and as I said above, I am finally making a serious and helpful part-time income.

I had rough times this past 1 1/2 years from a car accident and surgery and probably another surgery coming up, yikes. I know I would have done a lot better had that not happened because prior to the accident, I had figured out a lot of important things on Zazzle and was really ready to hit it.

There are people doing very well on Zazzle and others not. I think so much of it is marketing like everyone says.

Good Luck.