$100 a Day in 100 Days: 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.

Technorati Tags: cafepress, 30 day challenge, making money online, money, internet, success, niche

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