by Silva Payne

Created on: January 10, 2010

Zazzle.com is a web site where individuals can create various items of clothing and home wear with their own artwork or photography. These can then be purchased by the individual, or they can be put up for sale through the web site for anyone else to purchase. The original creator will receive a percentage reward for each item from their Zazzle gallery sold on the site. The concept is very simple, and because of this many thousands of individuals have created items to be sold. If you are thinking of joining the Zazzle clan, you will need to find ways to promote your Zazzle gallery to potential buyers.

Some of the items available for sale on Zazzle sell better than others. It is not necessarily the cheapest items that do best; T-shirts tend to sell well as do postcards and key-fobs. Postage stamps do not sell well commercially because the Zazzle mark-up puts the cost way above what you would pay at the Post Office. The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have a good range of products and designs to display in your gallery.

Once you have your products created, you must choose what age range they are suitable for (based on the content of the images used) and assign the items to at least one category where it can be found under a keyword search. Keep these as broad as possible unless your item is very specific, such as a postcard of the Dallas skyline, which should be placed in the Texas category for example. Sensible keyword tagging will help people you do not know to find your products on Zazzle.

Your gallery is your shop window to the world. You can embed the slide show of all your products in a web page, so make sure you do that with your Facebook, MySpace and any other social networking sites you use. This will give you good exposure to casual viewers as well as your family and friends. You can also send out the url for your gallery to everyone in your email address book, and embed the url into your signature block on your emails.

Twitter is a great place to advertise your gallery. You can tweet the url of your new products to your followers as you make the items for sale, along with a short description of the item. Alternatively, you can set up a secondary Twitter account and use that only for your Zazzle promotion. This will enable you to build up a follower list of people that are likely to be interested in your products rather than you everyday life, and also people who will be willing to re-tweet your url links to a wider audience.

If you like taking photographs of dogs for example, then building up a list on Twitter of people who re-home rescue dogs, sell pet supplies and tweet a lot about their own pet dogs is a great way to market your wares. Do some simple market research among your followers and listen to their feedback. That way you can build up your Zazzle product lines to reflect what your buyers most want.

Remember to put your Zazzle gallery address discretely onto everything you create on the site. This will allow anyone who receives your item as a gift to look up your gallery and find other products that you have made. Use the same image over a range of different items, so that there is something for those who wish to spend just pennies up to things for those who have money to burn.

Promoting your Zazzle gallery could not be easier. Simply dive into the social networking scene and get other people talking about your products.

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