Would you love to have a 5 hour work week? Are you a creative, who is spending many hours on Zazzle but not making the money you want to earn? In this blog post, Jen and I share with you 5 tips on how you can build an online business using your creativity on Zazzle by working only 5 hours a week. We have students in our course, The Profit by Design Academy™, with day jobs who can’t commit to more than 5 hours a week. They use our system and make money on Zazzle. In this article, we cover 5 tips that you can use right now to work 5 hours a week while growing your Zazzle business.
But before we dive right in, let us introduce ourselves in case you are new to The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Blog. Welcome! We’re Jen & Elke Clarke. We are a mother and daughter team that started Zazzle e-commerce businesses over 10 years ago and together we have sold over 15 million dollars-worth and counting of products on Zazzle.
The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur blog is for you, the creative. We share actionable steps that you can take to make money in your e-commerce business. In each post, we will take you one step closer to achieving freedom with your time, location, and finances.
We believe that a profitable e-commerce business is what opens the doors for you to start living your dream life if you work smarter, not harder, use the right tools and follow a proven roadmap. We’re here to give you the tools you need to make your dream life happen. Let’s get started!
In this article, we share 5 tips with you on how to work only 5 hours a week while building your Zazzle business. Check out our insights and tips below that you can implement today to get you closer to making your dream life a reality of making a passive online income using your creativity.
“To minimize time wasted and effective time management of your 5 hours per week, ensure you have a proper set up to work free from distractions…”
Let’s dive right into how you can build a profitable Zazzle business working effectively for 5 hours a week. We recommend you start with mindset and goals. Firstoff, you need to get over any limiting beliefs around the statement “I need to work long hours to get results”. You can either say, “I only have 5 hours, this won’t work”, or you can say, “I have 5 hours a week and I will achieve results.” We want you to be in the mindset of “I have 5 hours a week and I will achieve results.”
One of our students, Brandon, who is now a Gold Pro Zazzle Designer had 5 hours a week available to work on his Zazzle business. He has now made $1,000,000 in total Zazzle sales and earned $100,000 in royalties. He accomplished this goal because he followed the step by step roadmap laid out in The Profit by Design Academy™. This includes working 5 hours a week. When he started The Profit by Design Academy™, he did an experiment. He started with a brand new store to prove that it was not possible to be successful working 5 hours a week. Instead, he proved that you can work 5 hours a week and achieve your Zazzle earnings goal. He started this experiment about two and a half years ago, and he kept track of everything he did as far as hours and products. Click here to read more about his story and get more details.
He always sticks to the 5 hours a week because he has a day job and can’t commit to more hours per week. However, even if he’s had a long week and he’s tired, he still puts in his 5 hours and uses them effectively.
We will discuss the plan you need when you sit down to work in the other points in this blog post, that way when you get down to work you know exactly what you will need to do. Additionally, you will be as productive as possible.
Goal setting is also important. You must set financial goals as well as the hours you put in. The goal you set for yourself has to be realistic. Even though our star student, Brandon, has made $100,000, it took him a few years to get there. You need to be able to be aligned with the goals you are setting. When Brandon first started, his goal was to sell $1,000 worth of products to make $100. That goal was aligned with where he was in his Zazzle business at that time. He gradually increased his goals as he achieved them. If your earnings goal is not aligned with the current state of your business and capabilities as a designer and entrepreneur then you won’t achieve your goal. You will find yourself frustrated and disheartened. To avoid disappointment, it’s important to set realistic goals and increase them as you reach them rather than set a huge goal which you won’t realistically reach for some time.
Jen and I recommend The Pomodoro technique. It’s a simple yet effective way for you to work efficiently in blocks of time. Set a timer for 25 minutes and start working. Then take a break, before starting another 25 minutes. The Pomodoro Method helps because it prompts you to spend that amount of time focused on a specific task, and keeps you accountable to work for the entire 25 minutes.
To minimize time wasted and effective time management of your 5 hours per week, ensure you have a proper set up to work free from distractions. Avoid interruptions from your family and friends or social media notifications. We suggest to our students and community that they create a specifically designated work area just for them, away from daily activities or routine. Especially right now when a lot of us work from home, you might have to work in a common area where your family is. By having a proper area and treating this as your office space, it will help you focus and keep your distractions to a minimum.
Schedule time in your calendar and stick to it. Communicate to your family and friends that this is your time to do work. That way you are the most efficient in the 5 hours that you alot yourself each week.
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To be efficient with your time, you want to ensure that the products you create and post for sale on Zazzle will have the highest chance of selling. The Profit by Design Academy™ course, provides you the specific steps to determine whether it’s worth your time and effort to create a particular product with a specific design on it.
Some key questions to ask yourself as you determine your production schedule are:
Google Trends and the Zazzle marketplace are our go-to sources to find out about product types that are in demand, popular niches, and trending designs in the niches. For the most effective time to post a product, we recommend to our students to post products for sale 2-3 months before the products will be in demand on the Zazzle Marketplace. For example, 2-3 months before Christmas start making Christmas related products. For non-seasonal products, research Google Trends. By doing these steps you will reduce the time wasted making products that have less chance of selling.
The next thing you need to consider is the time it will take you to produce each of your products. You may need to train yourself to be more efficient using the Zazzle design tool and faster at developing new designs to post. Also, prepare keywords ahead of time so that you can post your products quickly with optimized titles, tags and descriptions.
We recommend creating 100 products per month. Focus on creating at least 5-10 really good designs per month and use these designs to add to 100 products. This is the other reason 5 hours a week is doable.
After you create the products, it’s time to promote your products. Whether it be internally on Zazzle or on social media. When you promote on Zazzle, you will utilize your store homefront to strategically place products. As far as external promotion and social media, we love Pinterest. Pinterest is not like other social platforms that are focused on the social aspect. Pinterest is a search engine similar to Google where you’re able to pin things on Pinterest and have them be there forever and be searchable. We recommend Pinterest as a go-to for your Zazzle product promotions. We love Pinterest because you pin your product once and you get promotion all the time, it’s passive promotion.
Just like production, you don’t want to be wasting your time. You want a strategic promotion plan that gets you results. Branding is a crucial part of your promotion strategy. You can learn more about how to set up your brand in Episode 6 of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast.
Another option is The Profit by Design Academy™ course, which helps you set up your brand through step by step video training. Once your branding is in place and there is consistency between your Zazzle store and Pinterest, you can focus on pinning your products to Pinterest.
It is so important to analyze your Zazzle store data every month. Look at what products were purchased, are customers actually making a purchase, or are they just looking? Look at the data (sales and product views) and ask yourself what may be happening. If you have no views, your product is not being found. Editing your titles and tags for these is a great option. If you have views and no sales, you can look into why. Maybe you are not providing a design that customers want to buy. If you have sales, you can assess why these products sold and not others. Then take all this information and create a tailored production plan that you will follow in the next month.
To recap, the 5 tips to help you work a 5 hour work week on Zazzle while building your Zazzle business, we started by talking about the importance of the proper mindset and alignment with your earnings goal. We also covered how a workspace, scheduled time and The Pomodoro Technique will help you work efficiently. Then we covered tips on how you can be most productive at production and promotion of your Zazzle products to maximize sales. Lastly, we covered the key steps to take when you assess your Zazzle store’s monthly progress so that you can plan for the weeks ahead.
Some students tell us that they find it difficult to spend their 5 hour work weeks covering all these tasks each week. Instead, we recommend you split up the tasks the way you work best. Many students like our suggestion to use the 5 hours in the first week of the month to focus only on assessment. That way your entire month is strategically planned. Then you can use the following weeks for production and promotion. Use the information in this blog post to help you get to a 5 hour work week building your Zazzle business.
Thank you so much for reading! We hope this blog post has given you actionable steps to start and scale your Zazzle business so that your passive online income can give you the location and time freedom to live your dream life.
Love to learn on the go?
Check out The Creative & Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast
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In this post, we have a very special guest, one of our own clients. Her name is Wendy. She’s going to be talking to us about her journey through Zazzle…
Jen and Elke Clarke are a mother-daughter duo that empowers women entrepreneurs to make money online. Through courses and coaching, Jen and Elke help women (and men) become successful creative entrepreneurs on Zazzle and e-commerce. Combined Jen and Elke have earned over $1.5 million combined through their businesses on Zazzle. Jen and Elke have influenced and transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide with their free content, paid and private coaching.
They are international, award-winning authors. Click the links to purchase their books through Amazon: Earn Around The World and Create Online and Grow Rich.
Jen and Elke Clarke have been featured in Yahoo Finance as TOP 5 e-commerce coaches in 2020 (June 2020).
If you want to see how Zazzle can change your life, gain more free time, work from anywhere, and have uncapped income potential — join now.
