Tips to Create Your Special Zazzle Gallery

Many of you are talented in arts and crafts. Why not show the world your talent and even make a profit of it? There are print-on-demand websites like Zazzle and CafePress that provide you a space on the Internet to showcase your art graphic works. And, if people like them, they can order from a variety of products or gift items (e.g. T-shirts, mugs) with your works printed on them. You don't need to worry about printing and shipping. All this is well taken care of by those websites. As a talented artist, all you have to do is to produce your artworks, load them up, create the products for your own gallery.

In this post, I'll show you how to open your own Zazzle gallery, create your own products, and promote them. I'll share with you some of the lessons I've learned, so you can do this effectively and efficiently.

Set up your Zazzle gallery and create your products
Setting up your Zazzle gallery is easy.

1. Simply go to http://zazzle.com and sign up an account for free. It's import to pick a nice user name for your new account, because it'll become part of the URL used to access your gallery.
   
2. Once done, you'll go straight to MyZazzle to create your own gallery by choosing its appearance and filling out some basic information.
3. Assuming you've got your artwork (e.g. photos, graphics, drawings) on your computer, you can click on the Products tab and start creating your products. Zazzle allows you to create a wide variety of products ranging from T-shirts, mugs, postcards, to buttons of your choice. Creating each individual products one at a time is a repetitive process that could take away too much precious time of an artist. So, I strongly recommend you take advantages of the quick product builder. Click on "quick create many products" at the top left corner, which brings up a 3-step wizard to speed up the process.
4. Note that you don't have to create all products for each of your artwork. Choose the right products for the right design. For example, if you have a design of a political figure, you may not want to put it on infant's creepers. You should avoid placing politically controversial designs on postage stamps.
   
5. For each product you decide to create, make proper customization and adjustments. For example, you may want to make sure your design looks as expected on the dark apparels. I also recommend you check the flag to grant your customers the privileges to further customize based on their personal preference. This does not mean you should leave all customization to your customers. Keep in mind that not everyone is familiar with the customization tool.
   
6. One cool thing about Zazzle is that you can decide how much you want to charge your royalties. The royalties are added on top of the basic cost that Zazzle charges. Check the prices of other products to figure out the right percentages that reward your hard work and at the same time keep your products competitive in the marketplace.
   
7. Organize your products using product lines and sub-product lines and offer your customers easy navigation and better shopping experience. You can always reorganize your products using the batch operation "Edit Selected" at the Products page of MyZazzle later.
   

Promoting Your Gallery and Products
Once you have your gallery and products created, you'll want to get the words out and start promoting them. There are several ways:

1. The first step is to carefully choose right keywords suitable for your products. I recommend you use more specific keywords instead of general ones. The general keywords typically result in tens of thousands of products and give very little chance for your products to appear in front of the shopper.
2. Use as many promotion tools from Zazzle to promote your gallery and products on your own websites, blogs, and social networking sites. Zazzle offers many tools ranging from a simple link to your gallery using zBar or Zazzle star to hosting your gallery as part of your own websites depending on the level of your effort and your skills. Click on the Gallery tab under MyZazzle and look for links under Link Building and Serious Tools at your left. In Serious Tools, Zazzle also provides you the promotion tools specifically for MySpace and Facebook. Create a Zazzle gallery showcase lens at Squidoo, too.
3. Max your profit by becoming a Zazzle associate and earn extra on every sale referred by your promotion widgets. Once signing up as a member and creating a gallery, you'll automatically assigned an associate id. You can find your associate id by clicking on the Gallery tab under MyZazzle. Look for Associate Center under Associate Account at the navigation panel at your left. Click on the Associate Center link and you'll see your associate id at the top of the main content section of the page. The promotion links or widgets you create in the previous step automatically include your associate id to track the referral transactions.
4. Join the Zazzle community, make comments and friends, and participate in the forum. Integrate your blog with your Zazzle gallery, which unfortunately does not support Blogger at the moment.
   

As an example, you can take a look at the Cartoosh gallery at http://zazzle.com/cartoosh* (yes, with the aster sign.)

(Click to see the full sized picture.)

Press Release: Cartoosh Has Arrived

Hello World! I'm glad to announce that our long waited cartoon blog - Cartoosh™ has finally arrived. What is Cartoosh™ about?

• Cartoosh™ expresses a casual view of our lives through cartoons. I hope these cartoons bring some giggles to your hard working days. After all, life can't be so serious with cartoons.

I hope you all enjoy Cartoosh™ and don't forget to give us feedback and comments. Thank you for your continuous support.

Note: Problem with Flash Player 10 on Vista x64

I'd like to give you a heads-up that you need the Flash Player 10 plug-in for your browser in order to see our blogs properly. The upgrade to Flash Player 10 is necessary due to the slide show widget from Amazon that displays the selected items I would recommend to you. The upgrade is normally painless except Flash 10 does not work with the 64-bit version of Internet Explore (IE7) on Windows Vista x64. To work around the problem, you can switch to run the 32-bit version of IE7 by following these steps:

1. Create a new shortcut on your desktop and set the Target field to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" instead of "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"
2. You should consider giving a different name to the new shortcut to differentiate from existing ones that point to the 64-bit version.
3. Use the new shortcut to launch the 32-bit IE7.
4. The upgrade to Flash Player 10 for the 32-bit IE7 should be very easy and smooth.
   
5. You can drag and drop the new shortcut to the Quick Launch list or the doc, if necessary.

Sorry for any inconvenience. If you still have problems, don't hesitate to drop me a note or send me an email. Otherwise, enjoy your reading...

Earn Money by Advertising with AdBrite

AdBrite was founded by Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise in 2002. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California and backed by venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Mitsui Ventures. AdBrite runs an ad marketplace that includes more than 85,000 websites, making it second in size only to Google. AdBrite is the fifth-largest ad network by page views (ComScore, October 2008). AdBrite was recently named the #34 fastest-growing private companies in the United States, and the third-fasted growing advertising company, by Inc Magazine's annual Inc 5,000 survey.

AdBrite offers products similar to Google AdWords and AdSense but with some bright ideas. One of the differentiators is better transparency between the advertisers and the publishers. Take the cost-per-click (CPC) text ads as an example. The publishers are allowed to provide up to 50 keywords to help filter the ads. They can also disapprove advertisers and remove ads that are in conflicts with the publisher's interest or that don't fit well in the publisher's website.

In addition to the CPC text ads, AdBrite offers ads in other formats, such as, picture, banner image, in-text, and full-page ads. AdBrite’s unique BritePic format allows you to monetize photos on your site with interactive text ads. Captions slide out, when the surfer hovers over the image. A menu is added at the lower left corner for the surfer to interact with the photo.

AdBrite added CPC based banner ads to its offering in November, 2008. The CPC model is much preferred by the advertisers thanks to its lower risk and better return of investment (ROI). The traditional cost-per-impression (CPM) banner ads incur potentially higher costs for the advertisers who pay for page impressions that have no guarantee of the surfer's interest in their products or services.

AdBrite's in-text ads are similar to Kontera's. I found many of AdBrite's in-text ads annoying due to their low relevance to the page content, though. In contrast, Kontera has done much better analysis of the page content and served ads that are contextually relevant.

AdBrite's full-page ads may be intrusive from the surfer's point of view. I heard there are places banning sites that use AdBrite due to their full page ads. It is reported that AdBrite is also listed on SpywareBlaster's blacklist. If you use SpywareBlaster, you will have to manually disable the blocking of AdBrite cookies.

This post is also available on HubPages.

Press Release: Sports Sentry and The World of Horses and Ponies

Hello World! I am so glad to announce that Project BKO: Online Business Incomes has added two new blogs to its family.

• Sports Sentry covers many of the latest developments in all kinds of sports including baseball, football, and more. The author shares with everyone his in-depth knowledge and insights on the most interesting subjects and events on the sports scene.
• The World of Horses and Ponies tells you everything you possibly need to know about horses and ponies. The author shares her love for horses and ponies, and gives interesting facts and stories, from different breeds of horses, to English and Western Riding.
  

We as the editors of the Project BKO blogs are committed to sharing with you our best knowledge, honest opinions, and interesting stories. Go ahead and bring a cup of hot chocolate now. Take a comfortable seat and check out our two new blogs. As always, don't forget to give us your valuable feedback. Enjoy reading...

Celebrate 2009 New Year with PageRank 2/10

I wish all of you have a wonderful holiday break. It's still not too late to enjoy the quiet and peaceful time with your family over the next couple of days, before you head back to the office and the schools start.

First of all... a good news and a great gift I'd like to share with all of you - Project BKO is currently ranked 2 out of 10 by Google PageRank. This is an incredible accomplishment, given that Project BKO has done no advertisement and little in search engine optimization (SEO). Although I have some experiments with keywords and back links, I attribute the PageRank result primarily to readership. For that, my kids and I are truly thankful to have you visiting our blog and giving feedback to our posts.

The two month old Project BKO currently has two sister blogs - Fishtarian for health diet and lifestyle for wellness and Online Business Review that aims to provide the best reviews and recommendations to online business starters and Internet entrepreneurs. Over the next few weeks, we plan to launch an exciting blog featuring series of cartoons that hopefully bring some fun to you and your family. We also plan to launch our online printing business in Spring. We are committed to making our blogs valuable and useful to your own online business, your personal health and daily life. We look forward to having your continuous support in growing Project BKO to the next level.

Lastly, let me propose a toast to... our health, prosperity, and success in 2009. Happy New year to you all.

[picture source: www.californiawinehikes.com]

Earn Extra Holiday Cash from eHow

Happy Holidays! Just want to pass on good money making opportunities to everyone. eHow is offering a special promotion and extra cash during this holiday season. If you'd like to learn more about eHow and online-publishing, read my post regarding how to make more profit from eHow, Squidoo, and HubPages.

Here is the detail from eHow:

The holidays are a time for giving-- not only is eHow extending the holiday promotion, but we are DOUBLING the money we are giving away!

We are extending our holiday promotion until 12/29/2008. Contribute your original articles now and have a chance to win $200 or more by being featured on the eHow homepage. Articles must be featured on any day from Monday to Friday and be in one of the following areas: Today's Top How To, Featured How Tos, or the eHow of the Day. You will receive $100 if your articles are featured on Today's Top How To and Featured How Tos, and $200 if your articles are featured on the eHow of the Day. We will deposit all winnings in PayPal accounts on December 31^st, 2008.

Want to start earning money for your articles, but aren't currently a member of the eHow Writer Compensation Program? It's easy, just click here to fill out your information and start earning more money today!

Press Release: Online Business Review

Hello World! To help online business starters speed up the development of their websites or web services, I've put together a new blog - Online Business Review. The blog aims to be the best and most comprehensive resource for online business starters who look for the best choice of products and services to support their business development. I hope you find Online Business Review useful and keep it as your business companion.

How Much Money Can You Make From Google AdSense?

[Updated: 12/18/08]

There are a lot of people on the Internet claiming that they have made a good fortune out of Google AdSense from their websites. Some of them go even further to show the checks they've received as a proof. Few people would remain untouched, after seeing those checks. They all want you to believe in their claims, so that they can continue on selling you their secrets for success. As an engineer, I am usually skeptical of those claims. I never believe in quick fortune, not because no one has done that - in fact, some have, but because I've also seen lot of "what comes fast goes fast."

Let's not let my personal beliefs stay in your path to success on the Internet. Let's look at only numbers and the facts to see what fortune one could possibly make out of Google AdSense. To keep it simple, I'll focus only on the contextual-targeted ads of Google AdSense which is Pay-Per-Click (PPC)-based advertising. That is, the ad publisher gets paid a portion of the advertising revenue, when the visitor clicks the ads. In this context, the key factors that directly determine how much revenue the publisher makes are the click-through rate (CTR) and the average cost per click (CPC).

What is Click-Through Rate (CTR)?
Before explaining how the CTR is calculated, we have to talk about page impressions. Briefly speaking, the term "page impression" refers to the number of times the visitor arrives at a page in which the ads are displayed. It is not related to how many ads are displayed. Behind the scene, there is a piece of JavaScript embedded in the web page that displays the ads provided by Google and redirects the visitor to the advertiser's website, when an ad is clicked. Google keeps track of both the number of times the script has requested to display the ads and the number of times when an ad is clicked. The CTR is then calculated by formula (1):

CTR = Number of Clicks on the Ads / Page Impressions (1)

What is Cost-per-click (CPC)?
CPC represents the cost that the AdWords advertiser pays for the keywords related to your websites or the clicks on the displayed ads. CPC varies primarily based on business competition among the advertisers. It can also be seasonal and related to the formats of the ad, such as, text, image, or video. In the context of this discussion, CPC refers to the portion of the advertising cost that Google passes on to the publisher, when the visitor clicks on the ad.

The revenue formula and examples
Given CTR and CPC, the ad revenue is calculated using the following formulas:

Revenue = CPC * Number of Clicks (2)
Revenue = CPC * CTR * Page Impressions (contextual) (3)

So, what's the average CPC and CTR? There are no clear references. Many sources have posted different numbers, which vastly depend on their sampling websites and the approach used. Most of the CTR numbers fall in between 1% and 5%. I'll use a couple of numbers for the average CPC just to get some sense about the kind of ad revenue we would expect. Keep in mind that you could equip your websites with multiple streams of advertising income, such as, placement-targeted ads or affiliate sales. Also, note that I did not qualify these data with a time frame.

Table 1: Ad Revenue Examples

CPC	CTR	Page Impressions	Revenue
$0.10	2%	1,000	$2
$0.10	5%	1,000	$5
$0.10	5%	10,000	$50
$0.25	2%	1,000	$5
$0.25	5%	1,000	$12.5
$0.25	5%	10,000	$125
$0.25	5%	1,000,000	$12,500

What do we learn from the above examples?
Looking at this table, you probably are not impressed by the amount of ad revenues you could make. The problem with those Internet marketers showing off their big checks is not that it can't be done, but that they make it sound so easy and quick. They tell you that you can build a content rich website with high paying keywords in ten minutes and start making money right away. (Watch out for plagiarism!) I have also seen many low-quality websites that simply pull the content from all over the places like article directories or some mail archives only to see if I happen to click one of those ads. Upon arriving at one of those sites, I typically say "Oops!" to myself, click on the Back button, and run away. Just for fun, you may notice that many of those sites don't even update their copyright notice at the bottom of the page. Or, they don't even have one.

I recall that I came across a personal blog site that had PageRank at 6/10."I didn't intend to make money, when I first started building this website. I focused on producing the right content and the services valuable to my visitors. The traffic just took off after two years." said the author. That's the attitude that creates a long running business and hence a sustainable income.

In any case, one thing is clear: We, the ad publisher, don't have much control over the CPC. But, we have some control over CTR and a lot to do about increasing page impressions. The most effective way to raise CTR is perhaps to make sure that the ads Google provides are relevant to what your visitors are looking for. This can be achieved by implementing domain focused and specific content for your websites or blogs are very domain specific.

I'm not talking about using key words or artificially repeating the key words all over the place in your web pages. The search engine has grown very sophisticated as to determine how relevant your content is relevant to a specific subject and how creditable your website is. Your content shall naturally incorporate the right key words or relevant phrases, if it is written about a specific topic and readable by human. Although I agree it's important to research the market using key words, I would not recommend you to build a website or start a blog with sole intention to focus on the high paying key words.

Rather, I'm talking about maintaining a clear theme to the content you published on a particular site. For example, it is better for you to create separate blogs to discuss dogs, investments, and your other favorite topics than all in one single blog. Mixed content makes it difficult for the search engine to determine which ads are best to display for the visitors to your website.

Obviously, the page impression or the site traffic is what we all should be working on. One can invest in marketing programs to promote his or her sites or in search engine optimization (SEO) to improve the page ranks. Without the credible content or service, though, it would be hard to have your visitors stay on or come back. Without the sense of trust, the visitors wouldn't even try to poke around your site and read your content, needless to say that many of them have gradually become "ad blind." So, spend time producing unique content, goods, or services, before investing in any serious marketing campaigns or SEO.

I've learned a lot from some of those books listed under On-line Advertising at your right; such as, Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies, Google AdSense for Dummies, and Google AdWords for Dummies. You may want to check them out, too.

Boost Site Traffic via Article Marketing?

[Updated 12/12/08]

After spending lot of effort in producing content for your blogs or designing your web sites, you start wondering how to bring in visitors. There are many marketing mechanisms ranging from search engine advertising like Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing to off-line medias. One of the popular marketing approaches has been Article Marketing.

What is Article Marketing?
As the term has suggested, article marketing promotes a product, service, or web site via articles. Article marketing is really nothing new. Many companies have written up and give away so-called white papers to the prospects who want to do a bitof research of their own, before they initiate the conversation with any potential vendors about their business problems. The white paper typically starts with a discussion that demonstrates the company's understanding of the business problems, before presenting their product.

Article promotion works the same way. An article typically consists of three parts: the title, the body, and the resource box. The article body is a short-form of a white paper that seeks to establish the author's credentials in the reader's mind. The resource box at the end of the article is the bio about the author, which is perhaps the whole reason why the article is written. The resource box briefly describes the author's expertise followed by a couple of links that help direct the article readers to the author's blogs or web sites.

How and where to distribute your articles?
Once you've written up a nice piece of article, how do you distribute it to people who may be of interest in the products or services you're trying sell? There are many so-called article directories happy to do the distribution job for you. Here is how it works: You register with an article directory as an author and submit your articles. Once accepted, the article directory will start distributing your articles to thousands of publishers through various means; for example, e-newsletters, e-zines, RSS subscriptions, or syndication. Or, your articles may be viewed or picked up by opt-in readers who visit the directory. The basic requirement for the publishers to freely reprint the articles is to retain the entire article and the resource box intact.

For your convenience, I have included a few article directories as follows:

• Ezine Articles (PageRank 6/10) is the industry leader that emphasizes on "quality" by accepting only articles that meets certain criteria.
• Search Warp (PageRank 4/10)
  
• Go Articles (PageRank 6/10)
• Other article directories include Article City, A1 Articles, iSnare, Idea Marketers, Free Article Zone, Article Bin, Article Marketer, Amazines, etc.

Most of these sites offer free services to the authors and the publishers. Some of them impose fees, when you submit more than a certain number of articles. You as an author may pay premiums to place your articles at the home page of the directory or the first page of a particular category to increase the exposure. Some directory sites offer proofreading service at a fee or even produce the article for you. Others sell you software that would "automatically" submit your articles over thousands publisher sites. I have no experience with any of those software. If you do, feel free to let me know how they are useful to you.

Does article marketing really work?
Submitting your articles to the directories should in general improve the ranking of your web sites or pages in the search results thanks to the increased number of back links. That statement is yet to be proven, though. The search engine determines the weight of each link based on various factors including the credibility of the publisher site that reprints your article. Unfortunately, many article publishers pulling content from the directories are those sites whose sole purpose is to make money from the ads all around your article.

On the other hand, read a few submitted articles in the directories and you'll find that most of them rush to direct you to their "single page web sites" that either promise you easy income or sell you secrets to make quick bucks. If you're somehow interested in any of those marketing schemes, I'd urge you to reconsider that decision and save that money for better uses. There are effective ways to start or grow your Internet business, but no shortcuts to success. To see for yourself, simply click on the links from whichever articles you stumble on that were published a while back. You'll find many of those pointed sites no longer exist, barely functional, or very out-dated. The sites that are still fully functional are those that run a serious business via hard work.

Still, article marketing could work for you. If you are able to produce a lot of high quality articles, chances are some of them may show up in reputable web sites. Not only do those articles improve your search result ranking, but will also help direct quality traffic to your web site. You have to be persistent and tenacious in both quality and quantity for article marketing to work. To tract the progress of article syndication, use the "intitle:" operator (case-sensitive) in the Google search box; for example:

• intitle:"The Title of My Syndicated Article" to look for all the articles with the given phrase in the their title. You should replace it with your own article title.
  
• intitle:"The Title of My Syndicated Article" +source +ezinearticles.com to look for the articles with the given phrase in their title and 'source' and 'ezinearticles.com' in the page. This assumes that you submitted your article to ezinearticles.com and its name is included as part of the article. You should replace it with the directory you use.
  

If you are determined to go that far, you should consider publishing your articles to reputable sites like eHow, HubPages, and Squidoo. They are very different from article syndication and are operated under different terms, though. Read my post about how to make money by publishing to eHow, HubPages, and Squidoo.