“FREE Jen and Elke’s “150 Trending Zazzle Niches and Designs” Guide”
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 episode 18 of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast, we share the 5 key things you need to focus on in order to only work 5 hours a week building a successful Zazzle store.
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. You can implement these 5 concepts right now to succeed while becoming more efficient while sticking to a 5 hour week.
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 below from podcast episode 18 for our 5 things you must have in place to work only 5 hours a week while building your Zazzle business. For all the details, listen to the ENTIRE episode of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast on your preferred streaming platform!
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. First, 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 over $1,000,000 in product sales through his Zazzle store 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 because he doubted that it would be possible to achieve results with 5 hours a week work.
So he started with a brand new store and monitored the time he worked. Instead of proving our system wrong, he proved that he could work 5 hours a week and achieve his 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.
Brandon 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 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.
When Brandon first started, his goal was to sell $1,000 worth of products and make $100. That goal was aligned with where he was in his Zazzle journey at that time.
He gradually increased his earnings goals as he achieved the previously set goal. 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 becoming 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 more distractions than ever.
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.
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 for when to post. By doing these steps you will reduce the time wasted making products that have less chance of selling.
Next, consider 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, research and prepare a list of 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 10 to 20 products each to end up with 100 products. This is the other reason 5 hours a week is doable. You are not creating 100 original designs. You are working smarter not harder.
After you create the products, it’s time to promote your Zazzle products, whether it be internally on Zazzle or on social media. Use your Zazzle store homepage to strategically showcase your products. For promotion externally, we recommend Pinterest.
Pinterest is not like other social platforms that are focused on the constant social engagement requirement. Pinterest is a search engine similar to Google. 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 promotion. 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 need 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 entire business on Zazzle, not just 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 results every month. Some examples include, what products were purchased, are customers actually making a purchase, or are they just looking (views but no sales)? Then it’s time to analyze the results.
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 products with no views is a great option. If your products have views but 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. KNowing what you need to do each month helps you make the decisions about what to spend your 5 hours a week on effectively.
To recap, we covered the 5 things to help you keep to a 5 hour work week while building your Zazzle store and business, including:
Some students tell us that they find it difficult to keep to 5 hour work weeks if they are to do all of these things we covered in the podcast. So we will help guide you.
We recommend that 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 assessing the results and planning what to do for the rest of the 3 weeks in the months. That way your entire month is strategically planned. We recommend using the remaining 15 hours for production and promotion.
Thank you so much for listening to 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.
