Aloha! 

We're back from our first big trip of the year - Europe and Russia, so inspiring! We've had our noses to the grindstone ever since. Perhaps you're thinking about creative ways to expand your Zazzle business. Knowing where your business comes from, as well as where it could go, helps with decisions. Check out recent Zazzle work we did for clients in this blog post: Zazzle Stores: Kalypso Island Bar & Grill and Curtis Cabral

 

Have you kept up with all the weekly product additions and updates in the last couple months? We've been updating new products on the Zazzle How2 Facebook page, and we'll continue to do so over there from now on. Read below for additional Zazzle design, production and marketing tips!

 Design

Use the Tiling Function to Expand Image Versatility

 

There was a time when the image tiling function was only available on ties. Now you can find it on virtually every product. And it is a great way to expand your work even with images you have used before.

 

Tiling repeats your image over and over until the printed and safe areas are filled. If the image is large, it fills the space quickly with little or no repeat. If it is small you get a pattern of many rows and columns. To tile an image, click the little gear box and check the tiling option. 

 

We went to the free commercial use clip art site Clker and found a fun skull and tiled that image to make this Halloween Skull Tie. It is best to work in the design view so you can see the overall impact of changing the size of your image. We then fine tuned the pattern in the product view, making sure the point of the tie and the pattern properly match. Using the design tools rather than your mouse works best when tiling.

 

 

 Production
Shortcuts to Create Tiled Products in QC

  

If you have a collection of small images you can create tiled products in QC. 

 

We converted the skull tie above to a template and easily substituted the jack o lantern also from Clker. The new pumpkin pattern matched perfectly.

 

Be sure to leave background space around your design and have it centered. For flexibility, we use a clear background and Zazzle's background picker.

 

You can also find many free or low cost "seamless" images online that have commercial licenses. These are made for tiling and can be quite intricate.

 

Check out more than 2500 attractive and inexpensive seamless images from Creative Market:

 

We are in the process now of setting up a couple of hidden folders just for tiling in QC. Set up a standardized size tiling image to avoid making frequent adjustments in QC.

  
 Marketing
In-depth Tracking Helps You Learn to Get More Clicks

When you measure your marketing, you can expand on what works and avoid or revise what doesn't. 

 

We've never held much value in the link over history on our Associate page. Beyond that, Zazzle gives you a small picture of your linkovers if you use a tracking code. When a sale is made you can see from where. But that is a small piece of the life of your link. The rest of the picture is perhaps more important.

 

If ten people clicked your link and you made one sale, you're selling one out of ten. Pretty good. If there were 5,000 click throughs and one sale, not so much.

 

How many times did that link get clicked before a sale was made? How are people finding that link? Did they click other links?

 

A few weeks back, we began testing a free service that reports to you how many times your Zazzle link was clicked. And if you incorporate it into your web site, many times you can see where the clicker came from and their search terms. 

 

Plus, you can relate all that information directly back to specific sales if you upload your Referral Report from Zazzle. With Zazzle's tracking code system, you can tie a sale to a link. But with ZazzLinks you can track a sale to a specific click of that link.

 

ZazzLinks is an amazing service provided by Ben Steed. He is a Gold Proseller working exclusively on the Associate side. Ben's background as a programmer enabled him to create a very simple tracking system to use.

 

To track the clicks from any of your individual Zazzle links, simply change "Zazzle" to "ZazzLinks" (You must have your referral ID in the link). Works with any kind of Zazzle link. This morning we tested it with a Zazzle Collection we pinned on Pinterest. Worked like a charm. ZazzLinks work on Twitter, too.

 

If you have a web site with Zazzle links (one of ours has several hundred) then you will be very happy to know you can immediately implement the ZazzLinks tracking system on all your Zazzle links. Simply add a snippet of javascript code to the footer of your website and all of your links to Zazzle are automatically converted to ZazzLinks. You won't need to change a single link on your website.

 

 

 

This an early morning run of our ZazzLinks report. Someone from Phoenix visited our Funny Change of Address Cards web page. They found us by searching Google on their phone using the terms "funny moving postcards".  They clicked two links. Alas, no sales from Phoenix. But I did learn something from the links clicked. The first link is at the top of the page, but the second clicked link is near the bottom of the page. It appears this person looked through the whole page. It is good to know people are engaged with the page.

 

We've learned many other things from our ZazzLinks Reports. Most importantly, that our tracking code system is simplistic. For Pinterest we use Pin, For Twitter we use TWT, for our web site we use NTPO. If a referral is made, which of the hundreds of Pins, Tweets or Links did someone click?

 

ZazzLinks solves this by attaching a unique tracking code to the click. We can still see our original tracking code but we now know which-what-where and when clicks and referrals were made.

 

ZazzLinks provide the average Zazzler with the information the big Associates use to increase their referrals. 

 

We now use the free version for all our links. Free comes with one caveat, you share every 10th click by having your Associate ID replaced with Ben's. We found that extremely fair for us considering all we're learning. ZazzLinks has a paid option which eliminates sharing the 10th click.

 

Learn more and create an account. We've given ZazzLinks a permanent link on our Zazzle How2 Acceleration page

 Thank You!
Sask River Closeup

 

We believe the keys to happiness are found in travel, simplicity and freedom. Since 2008, we've blogged about incorporating these values into a rewarding lifestyle at PassingThru. Partnering with Zazzle has played an enormous role in our "business of independence plan" and we hope you'll find the information we have to share helpful and inspiring, too! Thanks for coming along!

 
Betsy and Pete Wuebker | PassingThru | Zazzle How2
 
 
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