How To Promote Your Zazzle Store

Before you begin to promote a lot from the outside, be sure your store is ready for activity.  Fill it with good products and organize it well.

On this page I list a lot of outside places (outside of the Zazzle site) to use for advertising, but inside your Zazzle store you can do quite a bit to keep customers interested in your items.

One big help is to make items that go together naturally.  A birthday card with a matching envelope.  Add a postage stamp and "Happy Birthday" sticker.  Maybe make a matching thank you card as well.  Give them all a similar name and tags so they will show up on the same page, or add links in the description so customers can easily spot them, if they are interested.

Similar products, to the one being viewed, will show up beneath the item, so be sure you have some made.  When you blog or whatever you do to send customers to the store, they need to see something of interest to buy.

Blogging is where I have succeeded in finding customers while writing about what interests me.  If readers visit my seashell blog or my hydrangea blog, they obviously are interested in those subjects.  It therefore makes sense that they may also be interested in buying related items.

WordPress is my favorite place to blog.

I am not a writer who enjoys writing.  I prefer posting on my blogs as opposed to writing a full page (like this one) because I can get away with posting any amount of text I want.  Sometimes my posts are mostly photos, but I always try to write something worthwhile too. 

What do you love to do?  Are your Zazzle products related to that?  Most likely they are!

* I love to garden and hydrangeas are among my favorite plants.  On my hydrangea blog I show my progress within my own yard and share what I have learned about hydrangea care.  Occasionally I write about a product I have made, and I have a few links to my online Zazzle store.

* I have a seashell collection and lived in Florida for most of my life.  My blog also has links to posters, postcards and sometimes other things that readers may be interested in buying that relate to seashells.

Blogging can help you create products that people are looking for. Updating often leads to increased visitors, and checking on which tag words or phrases have brought the visitors to your blog may give you an indication of what those readers are looking for. Use that info to create new products and then write about them on your blog.

One word of caution when it comes to blogging on a free site.  Don't make your blog all about selling products.  That is not allowed at WordPress unless you pay for your blog.

(Photo credit: Pixabay)

One of the first places I began to write pages, most of which had to do with what I sold in my Zazzle stores, was at Squidoo.  I have over 50 pages at the Squidoo site and I know that many of them have sent customers my way, and still do.  If I updated those pages more often, I'm sure I'd see even more sales.

My newest place to write and promote products is here at Wizzley.  I find that it is a very easy site to use, and the recent updates have made it even more aesthetically pleasing for readers to find subjects that interest them.  The forum is friendly and the article pages are very easy to fill.  There is a Zazzle module to use and as long as you include good content, it's fine to include some Zazzle products.

Adding all your writing pages to Google Analytics will give you the ability to find out where visitors to your store(s) are coming from.

It may take a while - maybe a year or more - for people to begin to read blogs and pages you write that have something to do with your products, but once you can track them from your blog to your store, you will be encouraged to update that blog a lot more often!

I don't know how many of my sales come from my efforts to tweet products, but Twitter is and easy way to get your products out there.  I have set up automatic tweets on Twitterfeed and also tweet products myself, and pages I've written that relate to products, throughout the day at intervals.

Zazzle makes it easy to tweet by providing a Twitter button beneath each of our products. Sometimes I tweet a big sale, but more likely I will tweet a new product I've made or something I come across in one of my stores which I think deserves a look.  I also tweet products made by others.

As with all things, don't overdo it with the sales pitch, and try be personable on the Twitter site.

If you are smart, you will want others to promote your store too.  It helps to get the word out about what you do.  Brand yourself as the one with the [topic here].  Hopefully you will find a unique niche area to build upon. That way you will become known as the person to go to for those items. 

Many online people I hang out with already know that my most popular niches are related to weddings, seashells and hydrangea flowers.  I hope that they will think to link to my products if they need something from those lines.

Because Zazzle offers referral money to anyone who has an account, and brings in sales from outside the site, anyone at all can link to your products.  I have seen my own wedding stationery featured on some very nice sites.  Sometimes the website owners will tell me they have featured my things, but more often they just help themselves to what they need.  The more places around the internet your products show up, the more chances of sales - as long as they are linked correctly and go back to your store!

Writing blogs, articles at Wizzley and Squidoo (and wherever you like), and posting in forums are a few of the ways to get your "brand" known.

Facebook allows anyone to build a storefront page where you can promote your own products and even those of others, as you choose.

I recently opened a "Holiday Store" page where I promote - you guessed it - Christmas stuff.  It is very easy to add a product from my Zazzle store by using the Facebook button under the product.

Share anything on your page such as new products, sales, promotions and product information.  Get Zazzlers and friends to "like" your page and build it as you build your supply of products.

My goal is to eventually have one, nice website where all my best-selling products can be found.  With ten stores at Zazzle, which are filled with a variety of niche items, I find it difficult to promote consistently. 

I have various blogs which relate to certain products, which means I must visit individual blogs and write at each of them as much as possible.  This takes time, and it takes time away from my creating and posting of new items.

The blogs and writing are good, but I'd like to have one place where I could easily link it altogether.  The Zazzle API tool works for this type of thing, as does the Store Builder, and it's a goal of mine to figure out how to use them.

If you want a look at how CartoonizeMyPet has done it, click the link to her helpful (and long) step-by-step process post in the Zazzle forum, and view the Zazzle API page for integration info.

(Pair of Boots artwork by Pam Carter can be found in her Country Wedding store.)

Zazzle wants you to be a successful seller. Whenever you make a sale, they are earning money too.  Even beginners can figure out how to use some of these promotion tools offered at Zazzle. They have a list of options, for you to add to your own blogs and websites, which will drive traffic to the Zazzle website.

Here are a few:

Store Builder - I have never used this, which is for adding products to your website.

Flash Panel - Can't use at free Wordpress blogs (as far as I can tell), but you can use the Blog Panel. I have put this to use on the side panel of my HydrangeasBlue blog (under the heading - "Weddings").

Associate Banners - use these banners, with your referral code added, to promote for holidays or certain products.

To find out more about promoting through Zazzle, go to your "Dashboard" in your Zazzle account and view the links on the right-hand side.

You may be surprised to learn that other people may be very happy to promote your products and / or store.  Because of the referral system at Zazzle, it's possible for others to make some money from sending sales your way.

The Zazzle forum has a section entitled "promoting and generating traffic" where writers of articles and website owners can list what they are looking for to advertise.  If your items fit the bill, just leave them a link to use, or whatever they ask for. 

You may even find generous people in other places who are looking for material to post to their blogs and sites.  Here at Wizzley we have just such a person who runs the Artwork-Craftwork.com website where he will post a blurb with pictures about your Zazzle stores. To make a request, just add a comment at the link asking to be promoted - I have been given permission to say you can make this request (just mention Dustytoes) - I am positive Artwork-Craftwork will oblige.

We have to take advantage of these free advertising opportunities!

I will admit that I am not very good at using my own business cards for advertising, but I do have them and you should too.

Keep your eyes open for opportunities to give out cards and look for bulletin boards where you can pin them. Stores may let you leave them on the counter if you have a holder and the cards relate to what the shop sells. It doesn't hurt to ask.

Zazzle offers discounts on business cards throughout the year, and has special pricing at certain times for it's ProSellers.

Big Flowers business card.