The 5 Zazzle Strategies Jen and Elke Clarke Use to Run Their Million Dollar Zazzle Businesses
In today’s blog post, we’re going to talk to you about the 5 Zazzle strategies we’ve created to have a profitable business on Zazzle. These 5 Zazzle strategies have helped us make 15 million dollars worth of sales 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 Blog. We’re Jen & Elke Clarke. We are a mother and daughter team that started Zazzle e-commerce businesses over 10 years ago and together we have sold over 15 million dollars worth and counting of products on Zazzle.
The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur blog 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 you can have anything you dream of as long as you work smarter, not harder. We’re here to give you the tools you need to make your dreams happen. Let’s get started!
So read the points below to gain more insight into the 5 Zazzle Strategies: Establish, Create, Announce, Align, Analyze™ that you should implement to increase the success of your online Zazzle business.
Creating a Million Dollar Zazzle Business Strategy #1: Establish
Establishing is very important, to begin with, this is where you as a designer figure out what you’re all about. Evaluate your vision, brand, your niche, where you want to go, and what is your avatar. You are creating a business that will be with you for a long period of time. So when it comes to the core values of your business, you want to make sure you’re establishing it properly.
Ensure you figure out your niche and the area, out of all the possibilities, you are going to target. Usually, you pick this based on what you are most familiar with and comfortable with.
Generally speaking, picking a niche you are familiar with already will allow you to bring in a lot of your own research and customer research with it so that you can be very clear and know exactly what you need to provide the customer to start making sales as soon as possible.
For example, if we were going to go into the niche of martial arts we would be totally lost. It would require that we invest many hours researching before we could ever move on. We would also probably never get it right because we’re not into martial arts, whereas someone who is interested in this would already have great foundational information and be able to know what customers want.
Zazzle is truly an amazing platform that gives designers opportunities to be in whatever niche they want! You don’t have to do a lot of extra work to be successful in something that you are not comfortable with and don’t know what the demand is.
You can create anything from a blank canvas while using your excitement and passion to create a business you love.
Customers come to Zazzle because it offers products that you as a designer make that are unique, original, and customizable. If you keep your core values in mind you can then choose a niche you feel you have the most contribution to while also having the highest chance of selling.
The next part of “Establish” is creating your brand.
Branding is such an important element to your million-dollar Zazzle business strategy because it will help to establish customer satisfaction and trust. You want your branding to make your customer avatar feel comfortable in your storefront and know very quickly that they are in the right place.
If we go back to the martial arts example and a customer was shopping around in a martial arts store that also had unrelated wedding invitations the customer would be confused and wonder if they are in the right place.
We always want to avoid this by narrowing in on our Niche and making our platform cohesive. This is a very fun part of creating a million-dollar Zazzle business!
Another important element of “Establish” is making sure that your storefront is set up properly on Zazzle.
There are some components that are really required in order for you to be properly set up on Zazzle. If you are interested in making life easy, just like so many of our students have done, then you can directly follow the videos that we have in our step-by-step training course. The training course will ensure that you can get set up correctly and quickly.
Honestly, it can be a pain to do all of these things but they are extremely necessary for creating a Zazzle store that looks professional.
The last part of “Establish”, which we always leave at the end but is actually the most important, is to establish yourself as a business owner.
“Many creatives forget that creativity is not enough.” Jen and Elke Clarke
You have to know the business side of things in order for you to even get your newly designed product in front of the eyeballs of people who actually want it.
You need to evaluate your capabilities, your abilities, and understand what it is going to take from a mindset and physical doing point of view. You must learn what it is going to take to run your million-dollar Zazzle business and take the action steps to get there.
We see a lot of creatives really struggle with treating their Zazzle business like a business, and believe they lack the business savvy to make it work for them. That is where we have seen our coaching and courses really come in to help creatives understand the business side of things and be able to implement the business action steps required.
There are quite a lot of elements that go into establishing but it is the most important of the 5 Zazzle strategies, which is why it is number one. Do you currently feel well-established in your Zazzle business?
Creating a Million Dollar Zazzle Business Strategy #2: Create
As for “Create Strategy”, this is where you create everything you will be selling in your Zazzle store. You will need to create products and designs to put up for sale, this is obvious but important. Some of our students say they have so many products but don’t even make a sale.
The truth is it’s not about making a ton of products, it is about creating with intention. Sometimes the product needs to be tweaked or adjusted to be more interesting to the customer and encourage them to purchase it.
It’s more than just posting a product for sale, there is the business aspect to posting in proper categories, titles for SEO, and design elements that you want to make sure look good to the customer but are also trending and in demand.
We have had many students who have created hundreds or thousands of products, before meeting us and going through our coaching and training, that had been on Zazzle for years without a single sale. Creating goes far beyond what the actual item for purchase looks like and involves creating them properly & posting them for sale properly.
Sometimes you don’t realize when first starting Zazzle that creating products in the right categories or properly titling and tagging them for SEO is so important. When we talk about intentional creation it is important to remember that it is not about the intention that you as a designer put into the products…it is about the intention behind the product to actually sell it.
Creating a Million Dollar Zazzle Business Strategy #3: Announce
Strategy #3 “Announce” is fun. It’s all about promotion. Sometimes our students, or Zazzle designers in general, are afraid of promotion and coming across as sales. The reason this is one of our Zazzle strategies is that you need promotion. Whether that is an external promotion on social media, in emails, or anything outside of the platform or internal promotion on Zazzle you have to have it. Thankfully we have a strategy that doesn’t come across as too salesy or icky feeling.
Over the years, we developed a great strategy even big corporations use. These corporations show social proof and you suddenly want to buy the product, rather than being bombarded with in-your-face promotions.
For example, Coca-Cola doesn’t create promotions or advertisements that say, “Buy this coke”! Instead, they market their product through experiences. They show someone drinking coke and having a good time. This is the kind of powerful marketing you can use, which is why we teach this more in The Profit by Design Academy™.
It is also important to note that promotions and advertisements like this work because it is creating a connection with their avatar. When you use this in your Zazzle business you are able to create connections based on your own life and experiences. Whether that is a common pet like a cat or dog, something that you have both done, a hobby or another type of commonality.
You can sell your products in a way that helps your customer, educated them, or entertains them. It is how we were able to earn 1.5 million dollars worth of earnings and have sold 15 million dollars worth of Zazzle products without having to be “Salesy” with promotion.
Creating a Million Dollar Zazzle Business Strategy #4: Align
The “Align” Strategy is extremely important when it comes to creating your million-dollar Zazzle business. You need to be in alignment with yourself as to what you want as a Zazzle designer and with how you want your business to be to make your dream life happen AND the actions you take to get there.
We feel strongly that you, as a student of ours, set your goals and work towards achieving them.
If you want to achieve success on Zazzle, you need to be aligned with your goal, put in the proper strategies for that goal, and keep focused on the vision that you have.
All of these 5 Zazzle strategies are interconnected with each other. In order to align with your business and goals, you need to be checked up on your progress. If your progress isn’t what you expected keep assessing what’s happening. which we will get to in the next strategy.
You have to make sure that you are in alignment with your goals, really push your boundaries, and realize if you are actually able to achieve this goal. Dreaming is fun but you have to realize if can you actually get there and do you currently even have the strategies in place to get there.
That is why alignment is such an important piece of the Zazzle strategies for creating a million-dollar Zazzle business. If you don’t align all of the strategies together and get in the right headspace where you know that you’re going to do all of this human nature can kick in.
You self-sabotage or don’t allow yourself to believe that certain things are possible for you because your upbringing or environment makes it feel impossible.
That is why I, Elke, created The ERSD Goal Setting Technique™ that our students have been loving for the past two years. It is a really great tool to set goals that are in alignment and keep you from getting defeated. You want to reach those big goals but not be constantly overwhelmed by them.
Creating a Million Dollar Zazzle Business Strategy #5: Analyze
Strategy #5: “Analyze” is the last of The 5 Zazzle Strategies to help you create your profitable Zazzle business. It can be a little scary to some people but it’s the most important because it will tell you whether your Zazzle store is working for you. This helps you understand what’s working, and not working, and gets you to dive deep into how you can move forward based on the information you find.
If something is not working, you have to go back and figure out why it’s not working.
If you aren’t checking to see why something isn’t working, then your business won’t move forward. You have to hone in on the nitty-gritty details. That’s usually the case. You can overlook small details and without time to reflect, then you can’t investigate to see what could be the cause behind it. You want to make sure you recognize those minor mistakes before or after the fact and go back to fix them. Going the extra mile to analyze and adjust is the key to not just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something will work.
If you kept working, and working, and working on Zazzle but didn’t take the time to analyze each piece, you are going to keep repeating the same mistakes and not sell anything. You shouldn’t be frustrated and not make sales. Instead, you should be improving, testing, and tweaking the strategy to really hone in on what will make you successful.
We have personally created products thinking everything was perfect. All of my templates were right, titles and tags were great, then we realized that we had made a spelling mistake or some other mistake in the design. If we had not taken the time to analyze what was happening we would not have been able to fix the mistakes and then achieve sales.
We could have just left it however, we took the time to go back correct the mistake then repost. It would have also been very possible that we could have gotten frustrated that our designs weren’t selling because we didn’t realize there was a design flaw. But instead, it was caught during the time we took to regularly analyze.
Sales are obviously the biggest and easiest thing to measure if you are doing well or not but there are so many other things that you need to analyze in order for you to really understand your sales.
If you think of your Zazzle business and all the different elements that make up your business it makes this much easier to evaluate.By analyzing your productivity and what actions you decide to take ensure that they are leading to more sales and thus more money you can take home as income.
Analyzing key things like; titles, text, design, color, font choice about design…and so many other things that we go into farther inside our courses …is the key to being able to have the power to improve.
The Bottom Line:
Each one of The 5 Zazzle Strategies works together to create an overall cohesive million-dollar Zazzle business strategy. They are all equally important and one doesn’t function without the other. We developed The 5 Zazzle Strategies over many years of trial and error. These are the exact 5 Zazzle Strategies that we used to become successful on Zazzle and still use to maintain our Zazzle businesses today. The 5 Zazzle Strategies are how our students are doing well open Zazzle too.
We’ve done the work over the years so that you don’t have to keep guessing your way to a profitable Zazzle business. If you want to dive deeper into this be sure to join The Profit by DesignAcademy™! We would love to help you master The 5 Zazzle Strategies to create your own million-dollar Zazzle business.
See you back here next week!
This Week’s Blog Post is Sponsored by zSUPERCHARGER™
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About the Authors:
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 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 courses, 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 the TOP 5 e-commerce coaches in 2020 (June 2020).
