“FREE Jen and Elke’s “150 Trending Zazzle Niches and Designs” Guide”
Welcome back! Today we have a lovely guest sharing his story with us: one of our students from The Profit by Design Academy®, Mark Spivey! He’s gonna be telling us a little bit about his background and his journey to selling on Zazzle.
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!
Welcome, Mark! Why don’t you get started by telling everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got started with selling on Zazzle?
Mark: Greetings from Perth in Western Australia! My name’s Mark, and I’ll be telling you a little bit about myself and my journey to selling on Zazzle.
I discovered Zazzle around 2016, back in the day when they had no facilities to put your own name on the items and you basically had to come up with what to do on your own. I didn’t even have a drawing tablet or anything. For the most part, I was throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck—I did do a design of a chicken, of all things, that still sells—and I think in the first year selling on Zazzle, I made all of $30. For a good while, I didn’t really advance from that, so I thought, “Well, maybe I should try some other things.” I tried blogging and had minimal success with that. It just wasn’t me. You need to find something that works for you, and I just wasn’t able to churn out constant amounts of content to make that work. I tried various other things, but ultimately I went back to selling on Zazzle when they finally set something up to put your name on the product and I started seeing traction. I originally started off with CafePress, but we moved to selling on Zazzle because of pricing and so on.
Soon after, I discovered a couple of Facebook groups—I’d heard of you by that point, and I thought, “Well, I’ll find out more about Elke and Jen and do a bit more research. Then I discovered your courses. I was pretty broke at the time, but I scraped together the coins I had and put it all into this.
The second year selling on Zazzle, I think I made $50. The year after that I made about $150, and then the rest is history. We’re now at $18,500 thousand dollars, and I’m expecting that we might get to Silver Pro by the end of the year based on last year’s sales. The other exciting thing is that my wife hopped on board. Once she saw that I was making about a hundred dollars a month, she said, “Oh, I’ll get ahold of this and I’ll post the items for you. You design, and I’ll post.” So that’s what she does. We’ve set up another small one for my son-in-law over in Indonesia that we manage, which means we can support him, and eventually, it’ll be self-supporting.
The real test was when we were hit really bad by COVID, as a lot of people were. My wife had her own little ironing business, which we started from scratch many years ago, and the income from that plummeted because people weren’t working. They didn’t require any business shirts and so on, so her income almost evaporated. On top of that, we had mandates over here as well that affected a lot of people, myself included. So, we had some real issues there, but our products kept selling on Zazzle. We were able to put food on the table. We were able to sleep at night knowing the money was coming in. So it’s been brilliant. It’s proven to be a wonderful thing for a lot of people.
Now I try and put out a design every week, and that’s uploaded during the week. That’s what’s manageable for us. I am still working for now, but now I’m able to start thinking about I want to be doing in the next five years. Maybe I can eventually move on from what I’m doing now, maybe reduce my hours there and increase my hours selling on Zazzle and try to find that balance.
Mark: What we like to do, when we can, make it a point to give back. My wife comes from a country where poverty is very common; you can have someone down the road that’s living in a mansion, and literally around the corner there’s someone begging on the street. So poverty is very real for her. We also have three sponsored children. We believe that if you do make money if you use it to sow into something that’s worthwhile and help some other people, that’ll come back around. We’ve been able to put a number of kids through school, and they’ve reached 18 and been able to find work and get educated. They’ve found a way out of poverty, and that’s very important to us as well.
The first thing to remember before working toward paying off debt is that when Zazzle money comes in, you have to pay taxes on it. They don’t take it out for you. So you’ll immediately want to calculate how much you have to pay in taxes. Put that aside—that’s utterly untouchable because you don’t want to get into that kind of debt.
Elke: What would you give as a tip to people who are listening or watching from your experience with selling on Zazzle and the Profit by Design Academy®?
Mark: Even if you don’t have a ton of money or anything, at least do the entry-level and see if that works for you…and be prepared to really try it. Don’t just do it for a couple of days and expect it to drop out of the sky. Life doesn’t normally work like that. It’s a long-term goal. Yeah, that would be the main thing. You need to apply the principles, you need to be consistent and you need to be prepared to put the work in.
We hope all of you have been able to resonate with Mark and his wife’s story, and that he’s inspired you in your journey to selling on Zazzle! Whether you’re just starting out or have been trying for a while and can’t seem to get anywhere, don’t give up—don’t be afraid to try a new approach.
Are you ready to turn your Zazzle hobby into a proper e-commerce business? The Profit by Design Academy® Coaching Program is what you need! Get the proper roadmap and hands-on support to accelerate your Zazzle business and make your dream of achieving passive income a reality!
Have you already built a successful 6-figure Zazzle business, but can’t seem to break through the ceiling to 7 figures? If you’ve sold 100K worth of your Zazzle products and want to sell 10X more, take a look at our 7 Figure Seller Mastermind!
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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.
