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In episode 16 of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast, we are going to share 4 key action steps and Zazzle selling tips with you so that you can make 2021 your best year ever on Zazzle. Prepare for 2021 now as we wrap up 2020 and you will be happy that you did.
We know this year has brought on a fair amount of challenges in terms of the Covid-19 pandemic. But students of ours who were prepared in 2020 and had the right mindset did extremely well this year despite the challenges.
So 2021, whether Covid-19 is around or not, it’s time to plan and prepare so that 2021 can be your best year ever.
But before we dive right in, let us introduce ourselves in case this is your first visit. Welcome to The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast. We’re your hosts, Jen and Elke Clarke. We are a mother and daughter team that started Zazzle e-commerce businesses over 10 years ago and has sold over 15 million dollars-worth and counting of products on Zazzle.
The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast is for you, the creative. We share actionable steps that you can take to make money in your e-commerce business. In each episode, 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 the proven roadmap. We’re here to give you the tools you need to make your dream life happen. Let’s get started!
Check out the highlights from podcast episode 16 below for insight into our 4 action steps on how you can make 2021 your best year ever on Zazzle! For all the details, listen to the ENTIRE episode of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast on your preferred streaming platform!
First amongst Zazzle Selling Tips, set your earnings goals for 2021. This may seem overwhelming. Don’t get wrapped up in this thought process, instead, go ALL in and have fun.
To set your goal use our ERSD goal setting technique. ERSD stands for Easy, Reasonable, Stretch, Dream. This technique, which we developed, has helped us and our students with mindset issues around reaching goals.
We are confident it will work for you too. The entire concept behind the ERSD goal setting technique is to help you set different levels for the same goal, an easy goal, a reasonable goal, a stretch goal, and a dream goal.
This way, it’s inevitable that you will achieve at least one of them and it will take the pressure off of achieving the goal and make it fun to reach the dream goal.
Second, shift your mindset. Mindset is crucial and it’s the best thing you can focus on right now if you want to grow your Zazzle business.
The reality is that if your mindset isn’t where it needs to be, you will find it much more difficult to implement the action steps necessary to take your Zazzle business to the next level.
Especially during this time with the Covid-19 pandemic, if your mindset is not solid, you will feel the effects in all aspects of your business.
If you find yourself in a negative headspace and viewing everything that happened this year as a bad thing, catch yourself and do everything you can to shift to a positive space. Being in a positive mindset will encourage you to problem solve better and set up an effective road map for success.
When the pandemic first occurred, we had no idea what to expect. Some of us figured it would go away, and that’s not been the case. Now, we need to work with it rather than against it. So make the mindset shift to show up in your business with your A-game, no matter what.
Students of ours who showed up in their Zazzle business with their A-game in 2020 reached their dream goals. These goals were big and the results were even bigger.
Our students reached $10K, $25K, $40K, $50K, $88K, and over $100K in lifetime earnings. Imagine reaching your lifetime earnings dream goal on Zazzle!
First, create a production plan for the entire year. It can always be changed, but having a plan for the whole year is key to building a robust product inventory.
If you are in the retail or online e-commerce space, you have to have your products ready for sale 2 – 3 months ahead of each season. Jen recalls a time when she posted Christmas cards for sale in her Zazzle store a few days before Christmas.
She was disappointed when nobody purchased them from her Zazzle store and then realized the error in her timing. There must be time for customers to order the Christmas cards, receive them and then send them out to family members before Christmas.
Plan to post your products for sale with consideration to the peak times in which they will be sought out by the customer.
Second, create a customer focused product production plan. It seems simple, but as creatives we forget that customers may not want every creative design we ever made just because we love our stuff. Instead, always have the customer in mind. What are they going through? What do they need?
When started Covid-19, things changed. For example, weddings were postponed. Suddenly brides had to change their Save the Date cards to Change the Date cards.
You also must remember you are selling world-wide. Not everyone is in lock down. One set of customers may be out of lockdown and can resume life as normal. The other set of customers may still be in lockdown facing Covid-19 restrictions.
With that in mind, you can enter 2021 as prepared as possible to serve both sets of customers. We recommend you always prepare your products at least 3 months before selling it in the Zazzle marketplace, this will give you plenty of time to accurately design the products you know will serve your customers.
When investing in the future grow of your Zazzle store, there are two sides you must consider. Investment in building the Zazzle store itself, and improving the skills of the person running it, you.
You are the CEO behind all the moving parts to your Zazzle store, therefore it’s important to have the skill sets necessary to thrive in the Zazzle marketplace and run your business profitably.
This includes knowing what to design, how to design, and how to help your customers achieve an incredible buying experience.
This doesn’t come easy, even though we may feel that we are creative and customers will love our products as it is. We want to encourage you to develop Zazzle skill sets that will take your original creativity but leverage it in a way to increase Zazzle sales. We teach these skills inside The Profit by Design Academy# Bootcamp.
We also go deeper and more hands on in our zSupercharger™. Program. In addition to design skills, using proper titles and tags for SEO, and determining where and how you will promote your products is essential. You want to ensure that you build up your business in a reputable and professional manner. These Zazzle skills are very important and very specific to the Zazzle platform, so make sure you get the right training from Zazzle experts.
When we manage our Zazzle business, it’s tempting to blame Zazzle first if you don’t see sales rolling in. We suggest you take ownership of the outcomes of your business. Get the training in business management. The Creative CEO Mastermind™, which is a six-month coaching program we offer, helps you step into your CEO role and take ownership of your Zazzle business. The students who come out of this 6-month mastermind know what it takes to run a 6-figure Zazzle business.
Invest in yourself if you want to see future growth personally and in your Zazzle business by considering one or all of these three options shown here. Given the changing times we live in, it’s incredibly valuable to have the expertise and guidance from people who have been through times of change in the past and have succeeded despite the odds.
We’ve both been on Zazzle for 13 years and certainly have seen a fair amount of changes. When we are mentoring and providing guidance to our students, we make sure that we’re there to help them navigate those changes as well.
Oftentimes, when Zazzle designers don’t achieve the results they want from their Zazzle stores, they can’t pinpoint an exact problem. They know something is off, but they don’t know what it is. It’s important to analyze what is happening in your Zazzle store. There are pisces of valuable information that help increase your sales if you learn about them and do something about them.
Another huge misconception we see is that people compare running a Zazzle business to a 9-5 job. Your Zazzle business is not equivalent to clocking in for 8 hours a day and getting an hourly wage. You are 100% responsible for your Zazzle store, the work you do, the outcomes you have. The best part of this is that if you properly set things up, you will find that you can work a lot less but make a lot more money.
By incorporating The 5 Strategies: Establish, Create, Announce, Align, Analyze™, we work less and work smarter in our Zazzle businesses. Make sure you understand that hours don’t equate to money in this business. It’s about the actions you intentionally take to get the results you want. There are two things you can do here, check your numbers and listen to your intuition. You do want to make sure you’re monitoring your hours so that you can see exactly how productive you are. Also monitor how your products are doing.
A lot of Zazzle designers assume they need thousands of products to make sales. This is not true, we recommend posting 100 products a month in your Zazzle store to build a consistent stream of sales throughout the year. By offering 100 new products a month, you can test out the marketplace and see which performs better than others. This product production strategy is shown to you step by step in The Profit by Design Academy™.
The other important part of this is assessing your earnings. If you are putting in the hours and making products, but not getting the money in return, you have to determine if your current actions are effective. By analyzing your earnings and the time you put in, you can tailor and tweak your action product production plan accordingly. We recommend analyzing your numbers at least once a month.
The last thing we want you to use when it comes to determining what isn’t working for your Zazzle business is your intuition. If your intuition tells you that you aren’t too crazy about promoting your products, or you feel incredibly frustrated when it comes to titles and tags, listen to your intuition. By paying attention to your intuition, you can pinpoint where you are lacking and need support or training.
Remember, just because you find that you are lacking skills for something doesn’t mean you are bad at them. All it means is that you need some support and guidance. One of our students, Brandon, is a prime example of this. Before Brandon sought out our expertise, he only made $500 a year on Zazzle for 5 years. After taking The Profit by Design Academy™, Brandon made over $1,000 within 3 months! He has gone on to make over $100,000 in lifetime earnings in 2.5 years. What a difference! This goes to show that he wasn’t a poor Zazzle designer, he just needed the right training in his skill sets to thrive on Zazzle.
To recap, in this episode we talk about the 4 key action steps you must take to make 2021 your best year ever on Zazzle, despite the Covid-19 pandemic. We dove into how to set your 2021 earnings goal and do the necessary mindset work. Then, we talked about how to create a customer-focused production plan for all of 2021.
The third step we discussed is the importance of investing in future growth of your Zazzle business through training to run your business and improvement of your Zazzle skill sets. The final step that we covered is to stop doing what isn’t working for your Zazzle business. Do these 4 key action steps so that you will be set up for success in 2021!
Thank you so much for checking out The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast! We hope this episode has given you actionable steps to start and scale your Zazzle business so your passive online income can give you the location and time freedom to live your dream life.
If you enjoyed this episode please take a minute to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Each review helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs like you working to create a profitable e-commerce business.
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@msjenclarke and @elkeclarke
We’d love to hear your biggest takeaways from the episode. See you back here next week!
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 sold over 15 million dollars-worth of products, and 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.
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