And just like that...

...google shows only a single link to the front page of my zazzle store when I check for indexing. I don't get this stuff.

I'm in my 5th week. Several product views - up to 12 or so per day - but no sales as of yet. Also, no search engine hits. I've had a couple referrals from places I don't understand. Google Analytics is not my friend.

And a little search engine progress

OK, I can see the google bot has paid a little visit to both shops. It has now indexed several of my product pages on CafePress. On Zazzle, it seems to have attached search terms to my product lines or something. So, instead of individual product pages, it has indexed "fishing + gift" type pages with my product lines being the result.

It's progress no matter what.

I've decided I need to pretty things up with my Zazzle products a bit. I think adding background colors to some designs would be a good idea. I've done it on a couple, and I think it really helps.

Also, I found that my balloons design shows some of the reflection highlights go over the border when a dark background is added. Huge bummer as I'll have to re-do the entire line. Live and learn - I'll be sure to check these things before publishing from now on. This is one area where Cafepress rules hard over Zazzle. On CP, I just fix the image, upload to my image basket and replace the old with the new on all products. On Zazzle, I upload the image, change out the image and end up with a whole new product that has no search history, etc. I then have to delete the old products that do have search history.

Luckily, this particular design doesn't have many views as it is a small fish in a huge ocean of similar designs. It would be bad if I had to replace all my kids fishing designs. Those pop up fairly prominently in the marketplace at this point. I get hits on those almost every day.

Every little thing I learn the hard way is making my shops better, but I'm wondering if this will all be worth the effort in the end.

Baby Steps

Still no action with the search engines. I'm getting anxious, but no point in complaining. They'll get here when they get here. Slowly, the number of links grows when I search my store name.

I've added a few new designs to Zazzle. Zazzle gets first dibs, then I catch CafePress up. CP does win the search wars - I actually get a hit every so often, and CP products usually come up first in my testing.

Somebody gave me a 5-star rating on a design and joined my fan club at Zazzle. Not sure if they get something out of it - link to their site maybe? Maybe they just liked it - it is a decent design:

4 Weeks In

Alright - 4 weeks since I uploaded my first design, and here's what's happening:

CafePress: Not much. this site has had a few product pages indexed by Google, and very little else from other major search engines I've checked. I am getting a search engine hit every three days or so lately, but those searches do seem to be relevant for what it's worth. They've mostly come from my product links being featured on the search page. As I am opted out of the marketplace, I am obviously getting no hits there. Interestingly, when I search "brightsparktees" on Google, I still see several links to CafePres marketplace searches that are no longer valid.

Zazzle: I have not had a single hit from a search engine. Some of my products do show up in Zazzle search links when I search "brightsparktees" in Google, but not many. I see my products are on a few affiliate sites. I have not had any visitors from the outside world yet that I can tell. I am seeing 3 - 6 marketplace product views each day, and these seem to be picking up steam a little. Still no products sold.

Overall, it is hard to get too up or too down about things at this stage of the game. I can't expect much action when the search engines haven't done much to index my stores, and 4 weeks is still pretty early for that to have happened from what I can tell. So, I wait.......

I'm not sure the Google Product search listings are going to be a major source of revenue. That's the one area where I have quite a bit of exposure outside of my store and the Zazzle marketplace, yet I am seeing next to no results.

I wish I had some way of knowing where my product views are coming from on Zazzle. I'm pretty sure they are marketplace views since Google Analytics doesn't pick them up as store visitors, but are they coming from people scanning the actual marketplace, or are they coming from people landing on a marketplace listing from a Google search? It's frustrating not to have this sort of information available.

Zazzle Product Views vs Google Analytics

So yesterday I had several product hits and expected to see traffic on Google Analytics. Nope. Zero. I can only assume Google Analytics does not track views from the Marketplace. If that's true, the good news is that I'm getting people to look at my designs when they pop up in the marketplace. The bad news is that they don't like what they see:)

I am approach ing 1,000 products for sale in my Zazzle store. Granted, I need to go through the galleries and cull some things. I'm sure I have adult shirts with cartoon worms that probably won't sell very well and are just cluttering up my store. Still, I'm getting there. The number on CP is probably higher due to the fact all available shirt styles show up in the store. I only have a small sample of shirt styles available on Zazzle, but as Zazzle allows the customer to pick out whichever style they want, I really only need a couple samples to catch eyeballs.

For some reason I really feel momentum building. Why would that be? I haven't sold a thing and I have no idea whether people will actually shell out their money for my products. I guess product views bring hope, but I'm sure that feeling will fade in a few days unless the views start to convert now and then.

Possible progress

There are signs of possible progress towards getting a small flow of traffic started. I see I now have products showing for sale on a few different websites - I assume these are affiliate sites pulling with RSS feeds or something.

I've had one visitor today to the CafePress store, and a few product hits at Zazzle. Those Zazzle hits are somewhat of a mystery to me. So far they don't seem to translate into visitors according to Google Analytics. I have no idea why. We'll see what it says tomorrow - I know for an absolute fact I was not responsible for those hits today.

I am now more than three weeks into shop ownership at CP and Zazzle. I should be closing in on indexing from the engines soon I'd think. I hope.

I'm also happy with the SEO work I've done. It should be enough to generate traffic via search engines if it is going to happen. Considering CP has already gotten sporadic hits despite very spotty indexing, I'm cautiously optimistic.

Zazzle is going to be an exercise in drawing my own traffic, just like CP. Since I'm opted out of the marketplace at CP, I've known from the beginning I'll get no help from them. Zazzle is more of a disappointment. Their marketplace is borderline useless. Store owners post products to the marketplace instead of images, so when somebody decides to load an image onto every product offered, including every shirt style and color, the marketplace gets gummed up pretty quickly. I've got a pretty decent number of images now, but they're lost in the huge sea of marketplace products. At CP, even with what I assume were more images in the marketplace, I could find my images with a reasonable search. Not so at Zazzle, with a couple of exceptions.

Zazzle site is pretty much the way I want it

Well, that wasn't so bad. I got the customization stuff done on the zazzle site. I just never liked the fact you had to use the sidebar to navigate around, especially from the front page. I now have big department link buttons I've color coordinated to match the site. Plus, I figured out how to code text to match the default important text Zazzle supplies, so I think it looks a whole lot better.

I still have some icon link work to do down in the bowels of the store, but that won't take much. I'm glad I took on this little project now instead of after I have a bunch more content. Now I can just slip new products and designs into the new framework as I go. I'm sure I'll keep trying to pretty the site up as I go.

This is a fun project. I should learn a bunch of new stuff at the very least.

Customizing Zazzle

Alright, today is the beginning of a big customization project at Zazzle. The default store looks fine on the front page, but I don't really like the "guts" of the store all that much. Basically, you go to a product line and it lists all the products in that line. So, if you have 10 designs on 1,000 products in "cartoon art", you'll get an image of every single product each carton art design is available on - t-shirts, buttons, stickers, hats, etc. in several pages that the visitor needs to scroll through. I don't think that's happening. I'd never stick around for that.

So, I am going to attempt to customize my store to work with thumbnail images that link to a product page for just that one design. It'll really creat a huge mess of a sidebar with all those sub-sections, but my visitors won't need to use the sidebar anyway with the links.

I guess what I'm saying is I'm going to make Zazzle product pages look like CafePress. How's that?

Gearing up for the holidays

The most frustrating thing about waiting for search engine indexing is not knowing when it will ultimately happen. I've now pretty much missed the "back to school" season, which I knew would happen with my timing. That's on me.

So, now I'm gearing up for the holiday shopping season. I want at least a small representation of all the major holidays, just for the design seekers. I've started with Christmas since that's the biggie. I'll also try to get some Halloween stuff going soon. Thanksgiving, maybe. Pictured is my favorite Christmas design. I call it "Funny Christmas Prayer". If you can't read the text, the little boy is praying that Santa be sent back with "the good stuff". Click on the t-shirt to see the Christmas section of the CafePress store.

Counter issues on Zazzle

Well, as fun as it is to watch traffic ramp on a new site, I guess it just may not be possible on Zazzle. There are three ways to check traffic activity there - turn on the widget that tracks visitors to the store on the homepage, check the product views, and Google Analytics. The problem is, none of them seem to ever agree.

Yesterday, I had three product hits, including one item hit twice. The in-store counter said I had two visitors. Google Analytics counted only me visiting my own store. I did not visit the products that showed hits.

So, I think at Zazzle I'll be able to see only general traffic trends, not exact numbers.

Impressions So Far

OK, so roughly two weeks into my experiment, here's what's happened:

I've learned to make absolutely sure designs will be sale-worthy by keeping them simple. I had a couple designs on CafePress that looked absolutely fantastic - really really awesome - on the preview panes. I ordered one just to make sure. In the mean time, somebody else ordered one off the marketplace (before I opted out). Mine arrived. It looked like absolute crap. It had some color shading stuff going on and it just didn't work at all. It looked like a mud puddle. I feel bad that somebody bought it and keep hoping it will be returned, but so far it hasn't.

I've learned that keeping two sites up and running is suboptimal. I'm doing twice the work and have no idea whether it will result in twice the results. However, you never know when a POD company will pull the rug out from under you the way cafepress did to it's shopowners, so it is probably best to have a second option at least visible by the search engines just in case. Still, I'd like to have twice as many designs and products out there instead of half as many twice as often. Or something.

Two weeks in I've had only a very small handful of visitors from search engines. Less than five spread across both stores.

Two weeks in I don't think I've had any visits from the Zazzle marketplace, but I can't be sure because stat counters don't work there. I've got Google Analytics, but I'm unfamiliar with it and don't know how well it suits my wants compared to sitemeter or similar.

I thought I liked the Zazzle store setup best, but I think I actually prefer CafePress. It just seems so much more organized. I think there are custom html solutions to improve the zazzle store, but that's again more time away from populating cyberspace with my goods. Besides, I'm unsure how important a nice looking store is. I'm guessing most people come in through search and land on a specific product. We'll see.

My sections and products are growing nicely in numbers.

I started out working on Zazzle and catching up on CafePress when I had time. I'm starting to reverse that trend as CafePress is just easier to work with. Uploading images to Zazzle is better, and they have a MUCH larger item description section, but aside from that, I'm liking the user-friendly CafePress. If only I could use the Marketplace without feeling like a schmuck.

Let's Get Ready To Rumble

Hi There! I'm running a little experiment (actually two little experiments) and I'm going to use this blog to chronicle my successes and failures.

The experiments involve these Print On Demand (POD) t-shirt sites and whether I can make money on them. I'll be using two - CafePress and Zazzle - with the same designs on each. My goals are 1) see if I can make any money at all, using knowledge gained along the way to improve my chances, and 2) see which site out-performs the other.

I've already got both stores up and running, but not found by the search engines, other than a few scattered pages, so I'm starting this blog at ground zero. Each site is roughly two weeks since inception. Well, the CafePress site has been around since 2007, but under a different name and with no legacy designs.

The sites can be found at http://www.cafepress.com/brightsparktees and http://www.zazzle.com/brightsparktees.

I've got my images in the zazzle marketplace, but I've opted out of the cafepress marketplace. After reading up on that site's latest news and forums, it seems cafepress has recently changed the rules of the game in their marketplace. I won't go into it, but suffice it to say, they are a bunch of unethical bastards, and I won't be playing their little game. It'll make things more difficult on cafepress I'm sure, but that's part of the game. Advantage zazzle.

I'm no great artist, but I will do my best to create quality designs that people will be happy with. So far I'm pretty happy with what I've done. I'll hope to keep getting better and improve images as I improve with the graphics software.

I'll create images in a wide range of topic areas to give myself a shot at the overall marketplace. I'll evaluate what works and what doesn't and adapt appropriately.

So, wish me luck. I hope to prove somebody of limited talent can at least pay off the $5/month fee to have a premium shop at cafepress, while also making customers happy with the quality of my work. Advantage zazzle.

Oh, and if you are reading this and are good as this stuff, feel free to drop me a line making fun of me:)