Coupon Corner

For those of you that always want to offer some sort of a deal to your visitors to entice them to spend, rejoice! Many of you may already know that CafePress will send you a coupon to send to your friends (virtual or otherwise) when you make a purchase. Some of these coupons get posted on the internet and you can use them to boost sales at your own shop. The question may arise as to whether or not using these promotions is ethical or not. For me the verdict is out on this one, I asked Angela at CP a while ago if this was okay to use these posted coupons for our own shops' sales and she said while CP doesn't really condone the use of these coupons there are no measures in place to prevent people from posting and using them. Do a search on Google for "CafePress Coupons" and you'll find a number of sites that post current coupons ranging from the formally announced sales by CP to the send us 5 emails coupons that CP does after each sale. Pay attention to the expiration dates however, you don't want to post a coupon on your site or send them to your mailing lists if the coupon is expired. All this will do is to serve your customers with an unprofessional appearance and could hinder sales rather than help them.

Also, feel free to post your favorite CP coupon sites and feeds in the comments section of this post.

Good luck!
Andy

Hiatus over...

Okay, well I wasn't really on hiatus, but I wasn't around. I took an eleven day trip and before I went I was enthusiastic and sure that I would be regularly updating my blog. Well, as you can see if you look at the gap between posts, that didn't really materialize the way I thought it would. But I'm back and looking to re-establish my blog as being one that's useful and at least semi-regularly updated. So for all of you who checked back while I was gone and were disappointed to see nothing new, well, despair not! New posts are on the way!

Track Your Business Cards

Successfull business people will always tell you to take a stack of business cards with you where ever you go. After all, you never know when you'll have an opportunity to talk about your business. Cafe Press is no exception to this rule. One of the first business expenses you should consider incurring (after you decide to go to premium) is the tried and true business card. Then, when you are out and about, pass them out like there's no tomorrow. Post them in grocery stores on the bulletin boards, in the bakery, drop them in the deli fishbowl, hand them out to people who comment on your CP tee, in short, give them out or post them whenever you can.

One of the drawbacks of traditional print advertising (which we should consider the biz card to be a part of, is that it's tough to track the success. Or so you might think. Afterall you can track links easily enough in Statcounter or another tracking device, so ads you place on the web are pretty easy to track the success of. It's much harder with print advertising, but it is possible.

So should we create a business card tracking system? Okay! Lets!

Step 1: You are going to need a business card naturally enough. Consider when you make your business cards, that these business cards are a little different in purpose than your normal business cards. How so? Well, normally business cards advertise the person handing them out in a manner of speaking. We want to advertise your shop. Make it a little mini ad. Don't get too over the top, you don't want it to be garbled, but you can have a nice little plug on your card if you like or a photo of a design or two from your shop. Printing For Less is a good place to look for business cards, they are pretty inexpensive for high quality printing, at the time of this entry it was $49.95 for 500 cards. But this option is for the graphically capable. You'll need to understand how to set up your files and send them through the internet, if you don't have at least a passing knowledge of how to do this you should go with an all services provided option. Also check out Kinko's, Sir Speedy, Office Depot, Staples or "copies plus" businesses, they may be able to do smaller runs of cards and will probably be able to hold your hand through the process if necessary.

Matte or Glossy Finish?
If you haven't already ordered your business cards this is something you'll need to consider. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Matte Finish: Usually a matte finished business card is very traditional in its style and presentation. You will get your name, telephone number, address and url on the card. It will probably be one sided and will follow a very standard format. These are poor qualities if what we want to make is a sort of "mini flyer". The advantage is that you can easily write on them with a pencil or ball point pen, they also tend to be cheaper and are offered by more companies since it's easy to do. These also tend to be easily done and you don't need to be a graphics whiz to have your order placed.

Glossy Finish: Glossy cards tend to be whatever you want them to be. You essentially get a certain amount of space to work in to create whatever you like. You can use color and pictures and your text doesn't have to be formatted in a specific way, they are very open to whatever ideas you have in your head. By far and away they are more attractive for someone wanting to use them as a mini advertisement. You will need to be graphically proficient to set them up in most cases since you'll be uploading your own graphic file (a .tif, jpg, eps or pdf) to just be printed on the card. The drawback is that they are hard to write on (you'll need a sharpie marker or blank labels that you can stick on the back of the card that can be written on).

Whichever you go with, it's better to get a one sided business card, it allows you to write on the back. That is essential for our little plan.

Step 2: Set up a section of your shop with a design or two (or however many) and hide it. Offer a discount of a dollar or two which you advertise on your business card to attract your customers (either handwritten or printed by the company that prints your cards). Copy down the URL. You can duplicate designs if you like or create brand new ones it doesn't really matter. Be careful if you duplicate a section though, Google is finicky and I have heard that Google treats exactly identical sections as search engine spam. Do a little research on this (because I don't know if this is true or not) before duplicating an entire section rather than just a design or two.

Step 3: Take your business cards and write the hidden URL on the back of the card. Do it for 100 cards (or however many you would like to use in your test). Then take the cards and hand them out. You can do different sections for different events, for example if you have a site geared towards classic cars then put one URL on one batch of cards that you hand out at the Pasadena Auto Show and another on the cards that you post in auto parts stores in your area.

Step 4: Regularly check your shops statcounter and see if the hidden URLs have been accessed. If they have then you know someone who you gave a business card to or who saw your business card posted somewhere is being pulled in by your card. Not a bad little trick aye?

Follow this basic idea with any kind of print advertising and you'll be able to track how effective your cards (or other printed matter) are in attracting customers.

Christmas in July

Christmas my friends, is just around the corner! Okay, it's July, it's not really just around the corner so much, it's more like down the street, turn left at the Shell station, go two blocks, make a right at the old church and it's right after the blue house with the pink flamingos in the front yard. But! It's never too soon to start planning.

Christmas is Cafe Press's coup de gras of sales! It's when you can expect to do your best business of the year assuming you don't have an otherwise seasonal business that links you to summer or something dreadful for Christmas sales. For shops that have been languishing in sales or have just started up this is a good way to get you motivated or motivated again. You can boost those sales if you offer designs that are geared towards the season but having just one or two designs for Christmas isn't really capitalizing on the season. Add a Christmas section if you can. A number of designs will more likely land you sales than if you only have a single Christmas design. Think cards, think gifts, think whatever you like, but having Christmas designs can be a boon to your shop. You don't have to start thinking about it today or tomorrow but remember when you are planning for Christmas sales you are not planning for December 25th, most shopping will be done between the end of Thanksgiving (November 23rd) and (for CP shoppers) December 22nd (we must account for shipping time afterall) or so. So your real target date to get those designs up should be November 24th. But hold it a minute! Ever notice how shortly after Halloween (or even before Halloween for some businesses) you'll start to see a couple displays of Christmas goods up and raring to go in your local department store? Stores put these out this early for one reason. They sell. If you are an early bird and start getting your Christmas gear together early you have the advantage of being one of the first shops to have Christmas stuff out and you'll be part of a smaller pool for those early Christmas shoppers (of which there are many). Another thing you'll do is you'll get your stuff seen and people may remember you when they decide to do their Christmas shopping rather than just happening upon your shop if you have your stuff out closer to Christmas time.

Something to think about when deciding whether or not to get started on your Christmas section is that the list of presents people will buy for Christmas is finite. What I mean is this, once someone buys their gift for dad they don't need to buy another one for dad, once your sister's present is purchased, zap, that present is off the list too. Yeah, so? Well, my point is, if you have a wonderful little gift that fits for dad in your shop but your shopper has already purchased a gift for dad, well, then you probably won't get that sale. That's why it's good to have your stuff up earlier. That way your shop visitors' list is more likely to be wide open and anything that fits for one of their loved ones is much more likely to get the sale because that person hasn't been shopped for yet. Early design posting is more likely to attract potential sales than late. Capitalize on the entire season my friend and you can expect the best return. Now with that being said, follow the lead of the department stores. Don't put stuff out TOO early. People may not buy if you put the stuff out TOO early (I would stay away from putting anything up before November personally) and if they visit multiple times the products may eventually sort of fade into the backround and go invisible because people have seen them for so long. They should be NEW when your customers are likely to shop or JUST ABOUT to start shopping.

I would also recommend against (despite the title of this post) naming your section "Christmas Section" unless you plan to also have a "Hanukkah Section" or "Kwanza Section" unless of course you are only going for people who are purchasing "Christmas" items. If you title something "Christmas" you have positioned yourself for a Christmas shopper but you have eliminated the other holidays and the people who aren't terribly religious. Go for the more generic "Holiday" unless of course you are a religious themed store and Christmas is the only section that's really important. If you are a general store or one that doesn't rely on people of one religion vs. another it's just easier to keep a more "masses friendly" section like "holiday". Within the section of course, go nutso! Have Christmas cards, Hanukkah cards, Kwanza cards even generic Holiday cards and you'll stand the best chance of making sales.

Note on Hanukkah: If you are selling hanukkah designs for pete's sake spell it right! Hanukkah is the most widely accepted spelling at this time, you can also go with the more traditional chanukah if you like but bear this in mind. A search for the word "hanukkah" on google returns 13 million results, searching for "chanukah" returns just under 4 million. Cater to the masses for the best success, go with hanukkah unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise. A really industrious person may offer both a "hanukkah" design and a "chanukah" design, but I would think that's more confusing than anything. Probably best to stick with just one spelling unless you can determine ahead of time that you'll realize more sales from offering both. Of course a wise business person WOULD include both spellings into their product description. ;)

So that's it. Christmas IS coming. It's never too soon to start planning. It may seem incredibly early to start thinking about it, but don't forget it's going to take you a while to hammer out all those designs too. It really is never too early to start planning for the cash cow of the year.

One last note on Christmas. If you decide to make some designs that require a lot of time invested in them consider omitting the year or making the year something that's easy to swap out. Don't focus a long and ornate design just around "Merry Christmas 2006!" or something unless you can change that year pretty easily, that way you can use the same design next year.

Stainless Steel Mugs!

I rarely check the merchandise forum at CP but it looks like a juicy tidbit of info was there, maybe I should check more often. Stainless steel travel mugs are on their way according to Angela! It's not official yet and I've seen things be forecast by CP and not materialize, but if it does come to pass then it'll be another product that we can add to our stores. Mugs aren't a huge seller for me but I do sell some here and there. It would be nice to have a new product to work my designs on. Anyways, it's welcome news! And Angela says we may be able to expect them within the next few months! Now if they would only reintroduce those metal lunchboxes again I would be a happy camper!

TOTD #2: Searchable Descriptions

For anyone that's read my Crash Course post in the forums it may seem like this post is basically repeating the same old stuff. I think however that this truly is a huge part of your shop's success and having effective keyworded descriptions is really the key to getting you your early sales, it is not A key, it is THE key. Effective descriptions do two things, one major thing and one minor thing, the major thing is that they give the search engines something to find when a searcher is looking for something. The minor thing is that it gives a potential customer something to read about your product when they are considering buying.

You doubtlessly spend a good amount of time coming up with a design for your shop, you may have agonized over it, I wouldn't be surprised if you even thought about it in a lot of detail, brainstorming, tweaking, refining before you actually sat down to create it. Even a shop with mostly text designs should be clever and being clever takes brain power so even those text based design shops probably labored over their designs before they actually put them together. Afterall, a good design is one that's been effectively planned and put together rather than just created off the seat of your pants. That doesn't mean you can't come up with good "seat of your pants" type designs, it's just more likely that the better ones will be the ones you plan out more. While I wouldn't suggest that you agonize over your descriptions for your products I would suggest you take some time and think about your strategy before you put them on your product. It's funny really when you consider this; you spend a lot of time, perhaps even days or weeks on one design, if it's an elaborate one, then when you finish it you are almost in a rush to get it in your shop. You upload it, slap it on some products, title and describe it and then it goes live. The problem with that is this. You may have a great design but if you don't take the time to write an effective description then no one will get to your shop to see it. The search engines NEED to know about your design so take some time to give the search engine the best possible description you can because a better description will give you more potential customers which is definitely a good thing.

So...

I was reading a post today where Michigal (a fellow shopkeeper) was advising Honie (another fellow shopkeeper) to rewrite her descriptions for some zodiac products she had in her shop. So let's analyze what Michigal already identified as the problem, ineffective descriptions!

Honie has a raglan for virgos here here in her shop. Her description for this raglan (at the time of my post)

"Virgoans are pure and kind hearted people.Go for this raglan if you're one of the millions of virgoans in the world."

Michigal pointed out in the forums that "virgoans" may not be the best term to use for this description as it's unlikely to be searched and probably not even a word. Don't waste your description space. Keep in mind your description is almost useless if you aren't using keywords in your description that a customer may use in Google, Yahoo!, MSN or any other search engine. So use the keywords that your potential customer would use. THINK LIKE YOU WERE THE CUSTOMER and you were on the Google search page and you wanted your item, how would YOU search for it. In this case the word "virgo" is definitely our most important word but we also need to put in other words like "astrology" and "zodiac" another important thing to put in is probably "apparel" or "shirt" or even "gift". You need to remember that your potential customer is probably not going to JUST search for "virgo" you have to consider the whole search. They will probably type in "virgo shirt" or "virgo apparel" or something like that, so get the PRODUCT name in there too. Putting in "raglan" may not be necessary. Afterall, raglan is an apparel design but is probably known by that name mostly to people in the clothing business or by CP shopkeepers. You can keep it in, but it's not as critical as "shirt" or "apparel" would be.

Now let's break down Honie's description and see what keywords she's got that people might search for.

BEFORE:
"Virgoans are pure and kind hearted people.Go for this raglan if you're one of the millions of virgoans in the world."

EEEK! Zero. Unless someone comes along and searches for "virogans" which is highly unlikely, she's not going to get search engine traffic based on that description. Fortunately her title takes a bit of the stress off, but not a lot. She does at least have "Virgo" in the title. Let's rewrite this description!

AFTER:
"Are you an astrology buff? Looking for some groovy zodiac apparel for your virgo? Why not pick up this virgo shirt as a gift for that kind hearted soul. Birthday between September 1 and 23."

Okay, now we've got something to work with. It's not Shakespeare but it gets us in the keyword game at least. Now instead of having nothing for the search engines we have "astrology", "zodiac", "apparel", "virgo", "shirt", "gift", "birthday", "september"

So we have those people searching for "september birthday gift" covered, as well as "virgo apparel" or "zodiac shirts" or whatever other combination you can think of of those words. Go to town! Make up your descriptions thinking of more than just one word, think of combinations of words and you'll be on top of the game. Put as many relevant keywords in your descriptions and you'll be off to a good start. Rewrite your descriptions when you need to, remember, a good description is worth as much as your good design in actuality, because without a good description, you won't get anybody to see that good design of yours.

Apply the same theory to the titles of your items and you'll be in good shape!

Good luck!
Andy

TOTD #1: Statcounter

I have decided that an easy way to keep a blog fresh may be to make sure I'm posting a lot of information that I already know (or at least already have an opinion on). Blogging a new tip of the day (or TOTD) should be one way I can do that. I'll try and blog different types of tips from the very basic (for our new shopkeepers) to things that it took me a long time to figure out or that someone has generously imparted to me in their wisdom.

So without further adieu... tip #1

Statcounter is a tool you'll probably hear a lot about as you learn about setting up your own shop. What it is is a little piece of code that a premium shopkeeper (sorry, basic shop owners, you are out of luck on this one) can inbed in their code it allows you to track where your hits are coming from and how many you are getting. It also allows you to track exactly what they are viewing in addition to juicy little tidbits like what country the hits are arriving from (or city or state) as well as how long they stay, etc. It's a very invaluable tool and something you can waste a lot of time just analyzing the results of. One of the things about Statcounter is that it's free in it's basic format, so putting it in your shop really is a no brainer. I used the free version for more than a year before recently upgrading to the paid version. The price is modest (a monthly fee that differs depending on the upgrade you choose) but may be too much if you really don't want to invest any money into your shop, but I would fully recommend upgrading when you do get the chance. You'll realize if you do upgrade that the information that 1000 hits or more provides you is much more useful than the 100 provided with the free plan. You can truly wile away hours just analyzing the data these stats provide. It's interesting to see which designs are your most viewed versus most sold. If you see that one of your items is often viewed but not often sold it may clue you in that your design SOUNDS appealing but is lacking something to convert the sales. In this case, maybe a tweak or two to your design can turn an oft viewed, seldom sold design into a best seller. It's these little things that can be very valuable to the CP shopkeeper. And no, I'm not getting a kickback from Statcounter. :P

I Greet Thee!

Well, hello there! I'm Andy your host for this evening... well, for this afternoon maybe, or morning, or whatever time of day you are reading this. I'm a shopkeeper at Cafe Press. If you regularly cruise the the forums at CP you've probably seen some of my posts. I typically take part in the CP boards hoping to glean some useful tidbits of information to improve the sales at my own shop shop. It's not always easy though, and that's the basis for me creating this blog.

I figured that as much as I cruise the forums at CP (and I still plan to do so just as often as before) I find that I am reading the same information over and over again. I may spend an hour or so going through those forums and find nothing other than tips I've heard dozens of times before, people complaining about how they aren't getting any sales (or not enough) immediately followed by people cheering about how many sales they ARE getting, questions about froogle, google and yahoo, and various other things that don't really contribute to my overall improvement of MY store because I've heard it all many times before.

Now don't get me wrong, it may sound like I'm down on the forums at CP. But nothing could be farther from the truth. There are a lot of really good pieces of information in the forums at CP but you will have to search for them, but that can take a long time... emphasis on LONG. In fact it may take weeks to come across one really useful bit of insight that will propel your store forward even if you visit the forums regularly. It all depends on how long you've been learning.

Another thing you may notice about the forums is that you'll get many people who post who really know what they are talking about and a good deal who don't. You may get advice like "make sure you submit your site to google" followed up with "submitting to google is a waste of time" so for someone really needing an answer it's hard to know what to believe. With this blog you will have the foreknowledge that I am NOT AN EXPERT in SEO I am NOT AN EXPERT on Cafe Press and I am NOT AN EXPERT on marketing, press releases, blogging, the affiliate program, brain surgery or any other aspect of CP (okay I threw brain surgery into that equation). So why listen to me or read my blog? Because you will know ahead of time, that I'm just a regular store keeper like you. I will post what I do know and what I believe and you will have an idea of how much weight to put on those posts because eventually you will know who I am and how much I know and how much to trust that what I say I have either fiddled with or found through reliable and or multiple sources or gotten through a way that has proven it's worth in some way to me. I also hope that this blog will compel me to learn more about my shop and what can make it more successful. I hope to get comments from shopkeepers that will help us all learn together.

So is this blog my attempt at a CP Utopia? In a way, yes. I want to learn more about how to be successful and I think this may just help me do that. Hopefully it will help you too. I plan to post regularly (though that may not mean daily) so check back often if you want to delve into shop success together, comment on my posts, contribute, send me email (info@zapgraphix.com) give me suggestions on what to cover and maybe we can all improve our knowledge and success together.

I love the forums at CP, I'm just hoping to consolidate that knowledge and keep it from being redundant while at the same time bringing new things to light. It may seem almost counterproductive to share secrets on a blog. And there may end up being a couple things I keep to myself, I don't know yet, I'm not a saint afterall. But! I truly believe that knowledge is power and sharing knowledge may make others powerful in return and may make competing CP shops better and that may seem like a bad idea from my stand point. But the web is large. CP alone has over 2.5 million shopkeepers, so if I help 100 or even 1000 other shopkeepers be more successful, even in my niche, I still feel like I'm going to be okay and not have to worry about losing more business than I'll be gaining through this blog.

So that's my introductory spiel. I hope to see you visit often and share your pearls of wisdom as I will try and share mine. Hopefully together, we can all find more success for our cherished shops!

Til next time!
Andy