CafePress Class in Los Angeles Area

Posted on March 12th, 2007 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: CafePress.

Long time CafePress shop owner and graphic designer, Jean Roth is again teaching a course on CafePress at West LA College. She posted this on the CafePress forums:

Hello Fellow CPers

I will again be offering the college extension course I did in October on how to kick-start a CafePress shop. I know whoever reads this is already is on your way already :) but do feel free to pass this info on to friends in the LA area who might be interested. And please excuse the shticky wording — its from the catalog!

Do you have great idea for an original t-shirt or putting your art on a poster? Have you ever thought of starting your own online business? Rotem Gear creative director Jean Roth will once again be teaching a class at West LA College where she will show you how to design and create your own products and sell them online through CafePress–with little or no overhead.

Find out what products you can sell (see sample products to check out the quality!), how much money you can make, the type of investment required, print methods, how to upload images, how to attract shoppers to your webpage and much more. **Students will actually set up shops of their own online during class. **

The 3-hour class is perfect for artists, graphic designers, hobbyists, business owners, non-profit organizations and self-employed people who want to bring in some extra cash or create a full business.

Wednesday, March 21, 6:30-9:30 pm
West L.A. College’s Westside Extension (310) 287-4475
Direct link to course info

How to Register

The course is not by CP, so it’s from the point of view of a veteran shopkeeper, but it does have CP’s blessings :)

BTW if this is helpful for anyone — this is the list of resources I give out on a CD to the students .. feel free to use and share!
CafePress Resources

http://www.rotemgear.com/CPCourseCD.html

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Easy Visual Site Statistics - Crazy Egg

Posted on March 10th, 2007 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: Marketing, Website Tips.

So I’ve been testing out statistics tracker, Crazy Egg for a few months now.

I’ve been quite happy with them and have been meaning to do a positive write up on them, but with a recent addition to their service they have gotten even better!

In a nut shell (or should I say eggshell?) Crazy Egg gives you statistics you can find through other services, but it does it with a great visual interface which shows you visitor habits in a very intuitive way. There are three main tools, all are shown first over a live picture of your website page.

They have a heat map overlay, a list of what links got clicked the most, and then an overlay with clicks and stats coming off as “flags” from links. The new addition to their service is also on this “flag” — it’s a “More” option which shows referring links. So, for example you can see a “flag” on a link to a t-shirt and then be able to conclude that, “People who clicked on this came to the web page because they typed in “T-shirts” in google.

It’s a brilliant service and the free version allows you 5000 visits a month. The whole thing works like other trackers, you insert some javascript and then visit their website to view the overlays.

I’ve used it to test two versions of my homepage and found it quite easy to see the impact in my changes.

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Online Encrypted File Backup - 2 Gigs Free

Posted on March 5th, 2007 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: Website Tips, Deals.

Mozy is an online backup site that allows you 2 Gigs for free personal storage and has pricing for unlimited and business storage as well.

A feature I like is that data is encrypted on your computer before it is sent online. You can even use your own encryption key so not even Mozy can see what it is. PC Magazine and the NY Times give the service positive marks.

While the 2 gig deal is for personal use only, I figure I can use this for personal file back up and that will mean more room with my other back up system for business files.

Mozy’s website is: https://mozy.com but if you’d like to throw me a referral (you and I will get an extra 250 Mb in our free accounts) please use this link: https://mozy.com/?ref=43N4QB

Thanks to Tony for the heads up on this company (I used his referral link).

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CafePress to Offer Women’s Plus Sizes & Kids Dark Shirts

Posted on February 22nd, 2007 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: CafePress.

Announced in a community chat today, CafePress says they will soon offer Women’s Plus size shirts. Two different styles. They will be new products so we will have to add them to our shops ourselves.

The new print area allowed will be 12″ x 12″.
Kids dark and new light colors are also coming. Infant / toddler and Kids shirts. Dark shirts will be a new product to add.
Predicted date, for all of this, “March”.

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Google’s New Link Reporting Tools

Posted on February 8th, 2007 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: Google, Website Tips.

So, thanks to a tip off from reading this article, I delved further into Google website tool land.

First, you need a Google Webmaster account, this is easy enough, if you have a Google account (for instance, you made one for a Gmail account) then you can sign up for this program as well.

To access the new information you will need to verify your website. Fortunately Google allows you to do this one of two ways. The first way is a common method that sites like Sitemeter and other link trackers use, you embed a bit of code into your home page. The second way, which I really appreciate, is that you create an html file and upload it to your website’s server. Google then checks to make sure it is there under the name it gives you. I appreciated this method because it is one less bit of code to clutter up my home page.

Now, on to the new tools.

You may or not be familiar with Google’s already existing shortcut. You simply type “link:www.yoursiteurlhere.com” into the normal Google Search bar and it brings back results for sites linking to that url.

The trick is that it only shows you some of the sites.

With this new tool, you can see much more.

Why is this interesting? Well, it helps to see how well your word of mouth campaign is doing, and it helps uncover places that link to you that you didn’t know about before. In general, it is also just good sense to know as much as you can about who is reaching you and what they are saying about you.

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It is what it is - A reminder today of why I love CafePress

Posted on February 1st, 2007 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: CafePress.

So yesterday I started getting back to back sales on a particular design of mine that I put up a long time ago in a Basic Shop. The design is “It is what it is“. I thought it was just coincidence and got busy doing other things.

Today I went on a mountain bike ride with two friends of mine, we started at the beach then went up into the mountains and back again. It was a pretty day and a great ride.

I came home and checked my sales. More sales for that same design, but in particular, for the design on the Women’s Long Sleeve Dark shirt.

I had done some preliminary searches earlier to see if I had any links coming in, but no, I didn’t find them, of course it takes a while to show up in Google. Searches for just the phrase brought up a variety of results, it is, after all, pretty common.

Finally though I found an article which I think explains it… Olivia Newton John apparently wore my shirt as a guest judge on American Idol! I only saw a tiny picture of the group of judges but it sure looked like my brown shirt! I couldn’t believe it.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t believe it. I found a post that says Olivia’s shirt was from a different website. I looked and they have a very similar shirt to mine but it’s not exactly the same. Their version costs $52!

Frankly, in the small picture I saw, the shirt does not seem to perfectly match my shirt or their shirt but I think Olivia’s microphone pulled the shirt a little out of shape making it hard to see. But hey, I’m not complaining, I put up a design in a basic shop, it made sales, I let it sit for the most part but I kept it up to date.

Now the phrase gets renewed interest because it’s worn by a celebrity.

I go on a mountain bike ride.

I come back and discover my sales have been higher than usual and it seems like this design is what is causing this unusual spike.

I still haven’t found a direct link to the shop, if there isn’t one then I have an increased respect for the power of the CafePress Marketplace because that would mean that when I only had my basic shop (I have since included the products in one of my premium shops) then shoppers were finding the shirt on their own, most likely just searching for it using the Marketplace search function.

I believe the term for the phenomenon demonstrated here is “passive income”, I call it, “I’m glad I found CafePress!”.

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CafeTool Box Now Free - Create a Feed for Google Base

Posted on January 22nd, 2007 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: Marketing, Google, CafePress.

CafePress Premium Shopowners, you now have another free option for creating a Google Base product feed, CafeTool Box.
Previously the only free option was Adam’s Instant Cafe Feeder.

I’ve not used CafeTool Box yet but the word is that it works great. I have made feeds with Instant Cafe Feeder and was quite pleased with it, especially on how it handled my largest shop.

If you’re not sure about what these tools are for, they are for creating feeds to submit to Google Base, Google’s shopping and user submitted information website. You can get a great response if you have items titled well and on topics that folks often search for. You can read more about Google Base here.

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99 Tips for Poor Web StartUps from Aviva Directory

Posted on January 11th, 2007 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: Marketing.

This a lengthy article so you might want to read it in spurts. I haven’t finished reading it all myself but there is some good solid advice here. I noticed Text Link Ads, which I had mentioned in a recent post is also in there.
Tip o’ the Hat to my friend Jean for sharing this bit.

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The Structure of Man - Video Tutorial on Drawing

Posted on December 20th, 2006 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: Design.

This blog contains a series of videos on drawing the human body from your mind (versus from models).

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I’m Trying out Text Link Ads

Posted on December 4th, 2006 by thetshirtnexus.
Categories: Advertising, Website Tips.

Text Link Ads

So, I was doing my usual surfing today and found a blog which I would love to get some exposure on, so I checked out their equivalent of an “Advertise with us” link and discovered a new text link ad system.

As you probably have guessed from this post’s graphic, I also found out they have a $100 credit for new accounts so I jumped on that and got ads with three sites for a month (including the one I wanted in the first place) and only paid $30.

Now why did I jump on this deal? Well, Text Link Ads makes a good point. You buy text links and basically will not only get traffic from folks clicking on the links, but you will also get a link that will count towards SEO — that right there is the angle that many of us can benefit from. To me it’s going to be worth the $30 and then some if it works. You can even get away with it for $25 really since the promotion is for a $100 credit on a buy of $125 or more, and it is applied right away to your ad buy.

Cons: Because it is an html link that you are buying, there isn’t a fancy tracking system on their end of things. That’s the catch with being able to benefit SEO wise from this type of link. You will get the benefit from being linked to from an “authority” in the field you are interested in, but it’s not a fancy java link with tracking.

I’m optimistic about this though so we’ll see.

Disclaimer: The graphic and the link to Text Link Ads on this page contain my referral link. Thank you for your support should you choose to use them.

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