September Earnings
Updated Oct. 1, 2007

Online Shops
CafePress: $0.00

Article Writing
Associated Content: $0.00

Get Paid To Programs
CashCrate: $0.00
TreasureTrooper: $0.00

Internet Marketing
AdSense: $0.00
ClickBank: $0.00
Commission Junction: $0.00
Amazon Associates: $0.00

Total October Earnings: $0.00


Total September Earnings: $688.24

Top Money Maker (Sept): CashCrate - $473.26

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Friday, August 10, 2007
An Accidental Success: My CafePress Shop
Let me admit right off that it was luck. I'd like to say that I researched the market, found a keyword phrase and targeted that phrase till I owned it.

Nope. The reason that I'm making almost $200 dollars a month on CafePress is pretty much dumb luck. But hey, there's no reason we can't duplicate that success and really put it to work for us.

Ok. So what did I do and how did I do it?

I opened a store on CafePress about a year and half ago, and within a few months I was making about $150 dollars a month pretty steadily. Here's a shot of my best selling products:


That goes on for 2 more pages - a bunch of products that I've sold a few of, but about 85% of the "I'm all in...Bitches!" design.


Is the design particularly great? No. But here's what happened. When I uploaded the design into CafePress, I made sure that I tagged it with descriptive keywords and I also wrote detailed descriptions of the design and products for every article of clothing that I offered in the store. And by descriptive I mean I didn't write "This is a poker shirt." I wrote descriptions like "This is a great shirt to wear at the poker table to show the other players you mean business and plan on taking all of their chips. I'm all in bitches!" Silly stuff like that. Soon the search engines picked it up.

Now doing a "gTrends" (google trends) search, you'll see that for the phrase "I'm all in bitches" I own the top spot, and 3 out of the top five spots. So it's likely that I'm catching almost all of the traffic for that phrase. It's not a lot - it's just a few per day, but apparently they're converting at a nice high rate.

A lot of people on Cafe Press forget that people don't search for things by images - and when they upload their designs, they don't describe them. How are the search engines ever going to find your beautiful design? They won't! You have to write about them.

I didn't know any of this stuff when I opened up my store, but because of a little dumb luck, I had some success. This success caused me to start looking at why it happened, and because of the things I'm learning in the 30 Day Challenge - everything is really becoming clear now.

Apply what you know about niche marketing to CafePress and you can turn some simple fun like designing t-shirts into a monthly paycheck.




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posted by HarpersDad @ 2:42 AM  
8 Comments:
  • At August 13, 2007 at 10:29 AM, Blogger Unknown said…

    Reckon I might try this out.

     
  • At August 14, 2007 at 4:05 AM, Blogger HarpersDad said…

    Let me know if I can help in any way.

     
  • At August 14, 2007 at 1:26 PM, Blogger Helen said…

    That's REALLY interesting!
    We have just opened an online shop to sell our new range of eduational resources (BetHarper would LOVE Frog the Dog!)so Iwas fascinated to read your post about keywords and descriptions.
    I needto look at this carefully!
    Maybe i should be putting stuff on cafepress too ?? What do you think?

     
  • At August 14, 2007 at 8:32 PM, Blogger HarpersDad said…

    Bimmy - what's the site? And yeah - if you have some designs to go along with the educational resources - it's a good way to cross promote your products with a cafepress shop. Definitely look into it - it's a neat resource to use.

     
  • At August 15, 2007 at 2:32 PM, Blogger Helen said…

    Youchers, Did I miss an opportunity to mention the frogblogdoglog, or Frog the Dog's wagsite at frogthedog.com ????
    It must have been late at night!
    Do you have any further gems of wisdom key words ?
    Keep working at that goal!
    www.frogblogdoglog.blogspot.com

     
  • At August 20, 2007 at 2:19 PM, Blogger Helen said…

    Hey Harpers Dad,just checked out your stuff on cafe press.
    Can i ask you a couple of things?
    Do you put down your recent success to the slogans you put on your t shirts, or to the fuller descriptions?
    Do you use the keyword tracker?
    I'd like to ask if your shop is the basic or premium, but that seems a bit rude! (But if want to whisper....) Do you think it makes much difference really which you choose??

     
  • At August 20, 2007 at 2:46 PM, Blogger HarpersDad said…

    Bimmy -

    First, my shops are premium shops. With basic shops you're only allowed 1 design - so if you're serious about it, premium is the way to go, gives you many more options.

    No I didn't use keyword tracker when I put it together - simply because at the time I didn't know about it. That's why I say it's an accidental success - at the time I got lucky, but looking back at it, the reason it became successful is because of how keywords were targeted in the descriptions - the same way we are learning to target keywords in 'niche' markets in the 30DC.

    I think the success I had is definitely because of the descriptions and not the designs so much themselves. If I didn't have the descriptions up nobody would have found the designs in the first place.

     
  • At September 4, 2007 at 5:57 AM, Blogger Mister Kwai said…

    You're a real source of inspiration !

    I'm going to try this me too !

     
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Name: HarpersDad
Home: Las Vegas, NV
About Me: I am a new dad (well, Harper is a year old) and I'm already worried about his college education. Mostly because I'm still paying mine off. My plan is simple - create multiple streams of online income so that the overall amount of all of them comes out to 100 dollars a day. So here it is: each step along the way about how to make $100 a day in 100 days...
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