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“FREE Jen and Elke’s “150 Trending Zazzle Niches and Designs” Guide”
Establish Your Business and Zazzle Skills: In this episode of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast, we’re really excited to be bringing you this 5 part series. This series is all about going over the 5 Strategies™ we’ve implemented into our Zazzle businesses and it’s what has helped us sell over 15 million dollars-worth of Zazzle products combined. This is part 1, so be sure to tune into the full episode as well as the next 4. It’s key to take all 5 Strategies™ and implement them into your Zazzle business if you want to see real growth and success.
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 have 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!
And today, we’re talking about part 1 of our ultimate strategies for success on Zazzle, and that is establishing your business and Zazzle skills.
For all the details, listen to the ENTIRE episode of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast on your preferred streaming platform.
This is for you, creatives! Anyone who wants to start on the Zazzle platform or maybe has already started and isn’t seeing the results they’d like, this strategy is for you. For anyone who’s brand new, you’re definitely in the right spot. You will hear all this information and learn a bunch of key takeaways we wish we knew in the beginning.
This strategy is also for you, Zazzle designers who are struggling to earn consistent $5K months. If you’re not at $5K a month, which means $5,000 a month in earnings on Zazzle, you definitely have not put this strategy into practice yet.
Maybe you’re making a couple of hundred dollars, but if you aren’t making at least $60K a year on Zazzle, you aren’t taking full advantage of this strategy. It’s important to understand if you implement strategy #1 correctly, hopefully you move forward into the momentum to be earning $5K a month.
Of course, we can’t claim that for you, we can’t make income claim statements. We want to remind you that Zazzle is a long term business opportunity, therefore, you have to put in the time and correct action steps. What we can say is that our clients are seeing this level of income, and we’ve achieved it as well, so we know it’s possible for you.
We also speak from experience here and solely teach you what worked for us. When we first started our Zazzle journey, we did not implement this strategy. I (Elke) made $90 in my first year and I thought I was doing everything possible at the time for my Zazzle business. On the other side, Jen also struggled at first and recalls her store being set up in such a disorganized manner with no branding. As we reflect back on this, we can see how crucial this strategy is now. It’s the small things that really make the big difference.
When you implement this strategy into your Zazzle business, the first benefit is that you have a store that looks professional, branded, and it’s easy to navigate. You’ve probably stumbled across other Zazzle stores that look extremely professional while others don’t even have a store banner or profile picture, yet they have products.
When you are in those stores, you’re almost skeptical or wary of purchasing the products, even if it’s the same one offered as the professional store. Potential customers will shy away from stores if they don’t look professional. Next to that, if you don’t have your store organized properly, it won’t be easy for your customer to navigate and they’ll go shop elsewhere.
When you do establish your store properly, this allows you to establish a know, like and trust with the customer. They have to know who you are, how your store is branded, and feel comfortable to make purchases.
The second benefit is establishing your Zazzle skills sets. This allows you to compete in the marketplace and actually get sales. We tend to come onto the Zazzle marketplace and assume that as long as we have great art, our products will sell quickly. What we want to make you aware of is that it’s also important to have the right Zazzle skills in place. For example, creating proper products with designs on it that are needed for a particular niche. You don’t have to be an incredibly good designer, but you do have to be attentive and listen to what the market is currently needing.
A few other Zazzle skills we want to mention are leveraging your collections so that you can sell more than one item to the same customer and store categories. It’s great when you can get your Zazzle store to a place where you’re selling multiple products to one customer, but that won’t come easily if you don’t have skill sets when it comes to organizing your store categories. The customer utilizes this feature to navigate Zazzle but it’s also a helpful feature for you to stay accountable and organized.
To Establish your Zazzle store, there’s a certain set of things you have to do. The first one being to choose a proper store name. This may sound simple but it’s an important aspect for your store that is often overlooked. Once you do pick a store name, your URL for your store will always remain the same.
Once you’ve done this, you want to create branding for your store. Think about what you’d like to present to your customer, what colors would you like to use in your store banner? What fonts would you like to be using? These are key questions to determine the cohesive look and feel of your Zazzle store. This will include your store banner and store logo as well. You want to make sure you have an aligned brand for your overall store that clearly communicates who you are and what you sell to your customer.
When you have your branding set up, it’s time to optimize your profile and about section. Your about section is a piece of text displayed on your profile where you can indicate what you sell, what you offer, and really build a connection with the customer who’s on your page. Your entire profile is so important, Zazzle is currently encouraging all designers to put their faces as their profile pictures. This allows the customer to connect with you much deeper as an artist. All of this is something the customer sees instantly when they click onto your Zazzle store so it’s important to make a really good first impression.
The next important piece of incorporating this strategy is utilizing the store categories. This shows right under your banner and again, it’s something the customer sees right away when clicking onto your Zazzle store. It’s important to understand that right now with social media and all of the instant gratification that comes with it, you have less than a couple of seconds to build a connection and resonate with your potential customer.
Once you’ve established this strategy for your store itself, you need to now establish it for your Zazzle skill sets. The first Zazzle skill set being the design tool. The design tool is a comprehensive interactive tool on Zazzle that’s incredibly powerful. You can create beautiful products using this tool by uploading pictures and using text. This also has a feature where you can use shapes to create your own graphic designs. Learning how to use this tool and all the different features is really important. This can be leveraged to help you create high-quality designs, and if you don’t know how to use this design tool properly, then you won’t drive in those customers and sales.
The next Zazzle skill set you should be developing is how to research and choose a niche. It’s important to make sure you’re researching the niches popular within the Zazzle platform specifically. Once you do decide on some niches, you will want to create a skill set and build knowledge behind what the customers within that niche want. Then, determine how you will deliver that product to them.
Leveraging your art, photos, surface patterns with or without text templates to create desirable products is another crucial skill set. You can absolutely sell your own artwork, people assume you have to create the next trending product on the Zazzle homepage and while that’s a successful avenue too, there are a lot of Zazzle designers who sell their artwork or graphic patterns. The reason they found success here is because they have made sure it’s a desirable product that people want.
Titles and tags is another aspect to your Zazzle store that’s easily overlooked and yet again, a very important skill set to build upon. In order to promote effectively, titles and tags are your new best friend. Every product has to have a specific title and specific tag, this requires research. If you fail to set up the titles and tags properly a few things happen, your product probably won’t be found in the marketplace but you also will diminish chances of your product showing up on external websites like Google or other search engines. This all results in losing out on potential customers and sales – which we don’t want. We recommend doing your research and searching up words on the Zazzle marketplace before you use them in your title. Overall, this will be a matter of A/B testing.
Another feature within Zazzle that we highly recommend taking advantage of is collections. You can use collections to cross-sell your products. Collections are a great way to put a certain number of products together in a group and let the customer see them displayed together. Here’s an example of a group of products you could utilize for a collection, let’s say you have business cards, notepaper, a desk sign, and post-it notes. These all coordinate really well together and would be a fantastic collection. We see a lot of designers use this feature ineffectively, but keep in mind this is a powerful tool in which you can really increase sales if used properly.
Our last point is learning how to leverage Pinterest for effective promotion. If you promote your products externally and it sells, you actually earn 35% more on top of your royalty. We talk about Pinterest specifically because it’s a search engine based social media platform. It’s not the same as Instagram or YouTube where you have to keep updating content, instead, it has a longer shelf life which is great for Zazzle product promotion. With Pinterest, it’s not as easy as just posting a picture of your product, you also need to do research to set up effective titles, tags, as well as a good design.
We hope you can see how important Strategy #1: Establish is, it truly affects all aspects of your Zazzle business and getting sales. We’re really excited to help you gain a better understanding of this powerful strategy, if you find that you need some step-by-step guidance to get all of this set up properly, you can find us at The Profit by Design Academy™️ Coaching Program – THE must-have training and coaching program for you if you want to reach your first $5K month of earnings and beyond on Zazzle.
To hear about Part 1 of the Ultimate Strategies for Success on Zazzle: Establish Your Business and Zazzle Skills tune in to episode 51 of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast! AND Mark your calendar to listen to the next 4 episodes of the podcast (Episodes 52 to 55) where we dive deeper into each of The 5 Strategies™ – one per episode – in our 5 part series.
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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.
