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In episode 11 of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast we are talking about how to make $5000 a month online with Zazzle using our 5 Strategies: Establish, Create, Announce, Align, Analyze™, which we have used to make over 15 million in sales.
Zazzle isn’t just an online shopping platform. Zazzle is a way for creative designers to make money online, whether you are a photographer, artist, graphic design, surface pattern artist or creative with great ideas. The problem is that people don’t think it’s possible to consistently make a significant amount of money on Zazzle every month. In this episode we give you insights on what is necessary for you to make $5000 a month online with 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!
Check out the summary of The 5 Strategies that will give you insights on how to make $5000 a month online with Zazzle. For more details on how to use our 5 Strategies: Establish, Create, Announce, Align, Analyze™ to make $5000 a month online with Zazzle listen to ALL of episode 11 of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast on your preferred streaming platform!
NOTE:
We and our students in our courses and coaching packages have had the best success when we have implemented ALL of The 5 Strategies properly. We can’t make any income claim statements, and it is all up to YOU to do the work and get the results, however, some of our students and coaching clients have reached $5000 a month online with Zazzle through our help.
We come into the Zazzle business as creatives and oftentimes assume that just putting our creative work out into the online platform is enough to get sales. However, ultimately, we have to be business owners and increase our skill sets to run a business, to make decisions, and determine what to focus on when it comes to producing a great product suite that will make us passive income. We also have to take into consideration how to monitor and measure our successes as well as our failures. We both realized along our Zazzle journey that it takes certain skills to post and present products to the Zazzle marketplace and customers. Even if you were to have amazing photography of landscapes, unless we knew exactly how to post those images on the products to effectively showcase the work, we may have lost out on sales. To avoid doing all this work and getting nothing in return, you must focus on how the product appears to the customer and how they can find it on the Zazzle marketplace.
You also have to take into consideration marketing, whether you market organically or on social media platforms. The key here is to know those skills need to be developed on your end. We had to go through this as well and constantly work on leveling up our skills. Sometimes, we didn’t change our designs, but we just got better at posting on Zazzle in a way that the customer was also able to locate the product easily. This is why we’ve introduced The zSupercharger™ because this coaching program will help you with that skill set and others needed for success on Zazzle. Whereas our coaching program The Creative CEO Mastermind™ helps with the business aspects of scaling your Zazzle business to 6-figures. You need to develop both the skill sets and the business mindset to implement The 5 Strategies which are taught in The Profit by Design Academy™.
Create means to make something, so we are creating our product inventory that will work for use. If you work backward doing the math, $5000 a month divided by 30 is $167 per day. That is not your sales, this is your royalties and take home. In our case, we set our products at about 10% royalty to make us competitive in the marketplace but not too cheap to where we never make money off our sales. The 10% royalty setting is a sweet spot we’ve found works well for us. That means we have to sell $1,670 per day to earn $167 a day. You may be wondering how you can net $167 a day, and you may find it an intimidating number. What we want to remind you of is that as long as you have a nice mix of product inventory, this is entirely possible.
For example, with occasions, people tend to buy in bulk because of the number of guests coming to the celebration, such as weddings, birthdays, graduations etc… A good sale can come from this and you can easily hit your daily goal of $167 if you also factor in the customer buying additional occasion-related accessories. Another option is to sell smaller things in a bulk but in greater volume. For example selling a t-shirt at 10% royalty, you would make around $2 per sale. You’d just have to sell 100 of them per day. Or, you can sell high priced items like duvet covers, cell phone cases, or canvases. Those items come to about $10-20 royalty payout per sale. In this situation, you only have to find about 10 customers to reach $167 a day. It’s much easier to sell to 10 customers than 200. But when you offer different things and they each sell in a nice combination it becomes possible to get to $167 a day. You could sell some cell phone cases, some duvet covers, rather than selling only one product type. That’s why you need to strategically build up your product inventory so that it works for you to reach the daily goal of $167.
When you make something, you have to tell someone about it for them to even know you’re offering products for sale. This is where we see our students and community feel a bit uncomfortable because they don’t want to sell and make sales pitches. What you need to realize is that you don’t have to be pitching, instead, focus on announcing and promoting organically in a way a customer can find your product on its own merit. There are two ways to do this – SEO and social media.
When it comes to organic promotion, a huge aspect that many overlook is that products they post for sale on Zazzle must be labelled strategically for SEO with title and tags. This is extremely important because if you don’t do this part properly on Zazzle, your product probably won’t be found or placed in the right area on the Zazzle marketplace. Your products’ titles and tags also determine how people find them on Google searches (SEO). If someone searches on Google for that item, the way you set up titles and tags will dictate if your product will show up on that Google search result. This is an easy fix. Plus, you don’t have to pay for ads on Google. Just ensure that your titles and tags are set up properly. It takes skill and practise to know which titles and tags to use. That’s why The zSupercharger is a 6 month coaching program focusing on developing your (SEO) titles and tags skills.
Our next favorite way to announce is through social media. We suggest Pinterest, it’s more of a search engine than a social platform. Therefore it’s less work for you and you don’t have to be active on the platform all the time like you would have to be on FB or Instagram. Anything passive is great, and that’s why we love Pinterest. You can create and post a Pin that’ll last and be searchable on the platform for years. This will only help you in the long run for people to discover your Zazzle products. This is also a great option because you’re not pitching and telling people to buy from you, but you are sharing what you offer and putting it out there for others to save to their Pinterest boards.
Align is such an important strategy to get to those $5000 months. If you don’t align what you want out of your business (goals like earnings, time and location freedom and how your business is run) with your Zazzle production skill sets and your business management skill sets then your business will not be what you want it to be. You have to align your mindset as a designer and as a business owner. Expect money from what you do, but also show up to do the actions required to create that income. Secondly, You must align your business with your lifestyle and the freedoms you want to have. Alignment is sometimes the hardest out of all our strategies because it has to make sense and feel good for you to run this business. You have to take into consideration what you want to get out of Zazzle. It’s not just about making money. Money is a tool you use to live your dream life.
What is your “why”? What do you want out of this business? It’s a matter of removing the monetary aspect of earning income on Zazzle for a moment. Why do you want to create products that serve customers while building your online business? When your why comes from your heart and soul, it’s so much more meaningful and aligned with everything you do moving forward in your Zazzle business. Once you treat your Zazzle store like a business rather than a hobby, and you have your actions, mindset, why and goals aligned, all the decisions you make and all the effort you put in to grow your business will feel so much more rewarding.
You want the freedom along with that passive income from Zazzle, whether it’s more family time, traveling, retiring early, whatever your reason may be. With this business you are building, you have to consider those things, especially during this age of instant gratification. The Zazzle business we want you to create is not instant, it will take work and time to build. When you use that time efficiently and effectively implementing our 5 Strategies, you can make $5000 a month online with Zazzle.
Initially, we both worked very hard on our businesses but weren’t working smart. Now, we focus on teaching our students to avoid our mistakes. They are still working hard but smarter. This way the work pays off. Also, our students get told to try to do everything within 20 hours a month, which is 5 hours a week. A lot of students who go through any of our training see great results from this. We’re confident to say if you do the work and deliver products people want to buy, you should be in a position to sell. The fact that you can do it within 20 hours seems impossible and yet we’ve had a couple of students who’ve gone to the extent of monitoring their hours and sticking to the 20 hours while getting results. One of those students is Brandon, who we featured in a previous podcast episode that you can listen to here. Ironically, he wanted to prove us wrong but he proved us right and profited. He has made over $100,000 in Zazzle earnings. He’s sold over a million dollars worth of Zazzle products. He did this with a full-time job. I want to challenge you to realize it’s possible if you’re determined enough. You just have to align yourself with your business and tell yourself that you’ll make it work.
Analyze will bring us full circle with all The 5 strategies. When you analyze your store, you realize what’s working and not working. This allows you to do a deep dive into store analytics, product views, and sales. You can take this data and take strategic action steps to fix it. Analyzing may seem scary because it makes you vulnerable and accountable. It’s easier to sit back and assume everything is working but when you sit down to analyze things, you open yourself up to action steps and move forward. Remember, it’s okay to make mistakes!
The key is realizing what will work and what you need to adjust to move forward. We have both been there and made our fair share of mistakes. If you keep doing the same actions over and over again, you will never get different results. Take a look at your actions and results at least once a month, that way you can be more in control of the future path for your Zazzle business. There’s always a positive and negative, you may realize something won’t work but it’s positive because you won’t do it anymore. You could also realize something is doing well for you, and continue that.
We both realized a lot of things that didn’t work, but then we’d see a glimmer of hope on what’s working and take that to run with it. By allowing ourselves to face reality, slowly over time we went from 80% of our efforts giving 20% of our income to now 20% effort giving us 80% income. When we realized if we focus on that 20% that was making the 80% of our income, things became more passive.
As you move forward in your Zazzle journey to success, know that it’s a learning experience. You can always get help. We have free training, courses, coaching, and different program options for you. Start with The Profit by Design Academy™ and learn how to make $5000 a month online with Zazzle. In this self-study course you will build the core and foundation of your Zazzle business and implement The 5 Strategies: Establish, Create, Announce, Align, Analyze™. Also take The zSupercharger™, either first or alongside, or after, The Profit by Design Academy™. One is to set up your business the other is to improve your skills. The zSupercharger™ is a 6 month hands on program which is hands on and participatory Part workshop part coaching), where we provide feedback specific to your Zazzle store set up, Zazzle collections, Zazzle designs and the titles and tags of Zazzle products. Improving your skill sets while improving your Zazzle products and store is a win win, especially because you are receiving advice from top Zazzle sellers, us, Jen and Elke Clarke.
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.
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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.
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