One of the biggest complaints in the past was that their method of creating products was time consuming and laborious without a bulk creating tool. Well, that changed in December when Zazzle announced that it was releasing a new bulk product creating tool:

Quick Create Up to 100 Products at Once

Now you can create up to 100 products simultaneously from your own template or one of Zazzle’s default templates. We have developed a simple 3-step product creation wizard that saves you a lot of time when you want to apply a single design to multiple products.

Together with the Zazzle Bulk Edit feature on your Public Products page, it keeps getting easier to manage your products. Look for the Quick Product Create tab on your products page or try Zazzle’s new Quick Product Create now.

I have played with the tool a couple times and found it to be a little buggy, creating blank products for some unknown reason, but it certainly helps to get products into the marketplace quicker. That is something that helps not just shopkeepers but Zazzle as well and it certainly makes their site much more friendly to serious entrepreneurs.
—————————————————————–
J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

Launching a website takes a lot of time and energy and, in some cases, money. Every for-profit site owner has the dream of being able to reap the rewards of a money-making website to make up for all the blood, sweat, tears poured into it. Whether you are selling products or services or both, it is can be important to have other ways to monetize your site. Finding free ways to bring in money is ideal, and Google Adsense has provided one very popular option to do just that. However, Adsense may not be the best fit for every site. There are pros and cons to consider as you ask yourself, “Should I put Adsense on my website?”

The potential pros to Adsense are relatively clear: you receive payment each time a visitor to your site clicks an Adsense ad. More visitors= more clicks= more money for you. Obviously, many people are making money from this pay-per-click program, because Adsense is indeed everywhere you turn online. It may seem like every website in the world utilizes Google Adsense. Still, it is possible that this program could be more of a deterrent than benefit to certain types of sites.

For example, if a visitor comes to your site and clicks on a Google ad, there is a chance they will move on to where the ad takes them without returning to your site. Although you made a few pennies from the ad click, the visitor will no longer be purchasing from you.

There is plenty of competition out there for your site; so it would seem an advertisement placed on your site competing with your own products might not be the most lucrative situation.

Perhaps the best use of Google Adsense is for sites that are simply informational. In this way, there is no product competition-only an ad to enhance your informational articles and give your site credibility. What is the best way to determine if Google Adsense is for you? Consider the goals for your site and decide whether the pay-per-click ads will add to your site while adding to your income, or if it will only redirect your potential customers, leaving you with some pocket change from the click as well as the loss of a sale.

If you have found that all of your efforts to bring visitors and sales to your website have failed, there are some steps you can take to improve things -sometimes dramatically. In your efforts to make your website fantastic and appealing to your visitors, has it become too flashy? Are there too many distracting aspects of your website? Are you missing some important components? If so, here are some helpful tips to increase your website’s sales.

Simple Does It

One thing you want to remember when designing any business-related website is to make it simple. Your visitors want and expect a website that is easy to navigate and find exactly what they are looking for. The more complex a website is, the less likely your visitors are to start buying.

Can Your Visitors Reach You?

If you do not list your contact information, you are basically telling your customers to not bother buying from you. It is important to be sure that you list all of your contact information. This includes your telephone number, address, email address, and even your fax number. Your visitors want to make sure that they are able to contact you if there is a problem with their order, and essentially want to make sure that you are indeed a real business.

Post Shipping Costs

Make sure that your shipping costs are disclosed upfront and are readily available. Your checkout page should include your shipping costs and you should also provide a separate shipping page that displays not only the costs, but your policies as well.

Your Policies Are Important

When writing your policies, make sure that they are easy to understand and very simple. You do not need to use a lot of big and legal words to get your point across. In fact, the more simple you make your terms of service and other policies, the easier they are to understand and the more likely your customers are to trust you.

If You Offer a Guarantee, Post It

Your customer wants to know about your guarantees. Generally these should be displayed right on the home page of your website and throughout as well. A guarantee tells your customers that you back your products and are willing to say so.

How Do You Accept Payment?

Accepting multiple forms of payment is always a great thing. Many users do not have credit cards or do not trust using one on the internet, and who can really blame them? This is why you should offer a wide variety of different payment options. This might include not only credit cards, but debit cards, electronic checks, money order, checks, and even Pay Pal or the like. The more ways to pay you offer, the more likely the prospective buyer will be able to pay.

Sales and Incentives Pay Off

If you are lacking in sales, you want to offer your potential customers a reason to buy. For example, offer incentives. Buy one get one free, free shipping, discounts, and specials go a long way in enticing customers to buy. If they get something extra out of their purchase, they are much more likely to start buying.

Remember, visitors to your website are looking for you to give them an enjoyable shopping experience. This includes being open about your contact information, guarantees, incentives and the different ways they can make a purchase. They wouldn’t visit your website if they didn’t already have some intention to buy. Give them the proper experience and you will see your revenues rise.

1. What is your sole aim if you are an online supplier or a manufacturer of products? Obviously, it is to make the visitor to your website turn into a potential customer which is one of the toughest tasks to perform on the web. However, the goal is achievable if you are successful in gaining the faith of your targeted customers while they are exploring your site. Here, creating an ecommerce website serves as an asset in meeting your online business objectives. Ecommerce is another name for ‘doing business online’.

2. For an effective ecommerce website design, it is imperative to take care of key factors so as to mark the footsteps of your online store on the forefront of the World Wide Web. Such ecommerce conceptual aspects include:
a) To professionally build the site which gives an answer to the question – Why should the customer approach you rather than your competitors?
b) To structure the online catalog in a planned way, so that customers can locate the required products among the long list of the available products.
c) To make the website design engaging and easily navigable.
d) To provide sufficient information about products so as to persuade the targeted customers. e) To provide an easy online shopping process.
f) To make the site search engine optimized.

3. Convenience and user-friendliness are the two key elements that should be kept in mind before creating a website. An ecommerce website works on the same principles. Attaining ecommerce solution means providing security assurance for the online purchase and offering multiple payment options.

4. Only a memorable customer experience can open those doors for companies which ensure repeat business and ecommerce web development takes care of all such aspects. An ecommerce website facilitates in increasing the clientele by giving options to expand business and take it to far off places too.

5. A well planned ecommerce web design includes features like auto responders, email notification, multiple payment modes and credit card payment processing. To ensure the secure processing of credit card transactions, such sites need to be encrypted. Ecommerce websites provide an option of ecommerce shopping cart which allow the users to collect the desired items while exploring the online catalogue. An effective ecommerce web site development means equipping the site with all the tools necessary to ensure a happy and reliable shopping experience for the user.

6. On the whole, a successful ecommerce website design should answer a simple question – Does your website make an online purchase a good experience for the user? If your answer is no, you need to seek the services of a company that has expertise as well as updated knowledge regarding online selling principles for your business on the web. 117WebSource has years of expertise in providing affordable ecommerce solutions which will be in line with your need to:
a) Promote your online business, and
b) Ensure that the customer comes back to you and again and again.

7. Many technical aspects are related to ecommerce designs, and that’s why most business owners are unaware of which web site design development ecommerce is suitable for their online store.

-Online databases (including server-side scripts (CGI, ASP)

-Ecommerce applications

-Sophisticated features for websites, such as maintaining interactive sites and so forth.

Hiring our ecommerce solutions means giving your online store a professional ecommerce website look. In other words, we will offer you a perfect combination of site architecture and along with it, take care of customers’ security requirements while doing business with you.

Sometimes other things take priority over this blog.

I do have a couple of items to post and will hopefully be doing that over the next week or so.  Also there are some interesting articles that I have come across which I will be sharing with you.  So hang in there!

–About–
Charles Fairmont has been involved in website design and marketing for many years and currently operates his own consulting business.Site:http://myacetemplates.net/.
Source: ArticleTrader.com

If you can’t grab your prospective customer’s attention within a couple of seconds after they land on your page, you might as well not have a web site. Think about it… When you first hit a web site, don’t you make the decision whether to stay or hit the back button within seconds?

Your web site content determines whether your prospective customers stay on your web site or click away immediately. They have to see right away that your site will provide the information, product, or service they are looking for or they’ll be gone.

Search engines love content-rich web sites, too. The better of a job a search engine does at helping searchers find the web site content they are looking for, the more people use that search engine and the more advertisers want to advertise on that search engine.

What does that tell you? It tells you that whatever changes Google and other search engines may make in the future, the
sites with the best web site content for any given keywords will always tend to dominate in the search engine results. Because the Internet is a content driven medium, the web site with the most focused content in a specific niche will always win.

But how can you quickly create web site content that will be search engine-friendly and people-friendly?

The first thing you need to do is to create a keyword list. Think about what keywords (single words and phrases) people will enter into a search engine when searching for a web site like yours, then start using tools on the web to find out how many hits those keywords get, how much competition each has in the search engines, etc.

Once you have your list of keywords, you need to either create or acquire web site content that contains those keywords and phrases. Be sure to use those keywords in your meta tags, file names, and text links (on-site links and off-site links) also.

By now, you are probably thinking, “But where do I get the content?” For some people, that’s not an issue – writing is natural. But many people are not natural writers. If you don’t want to write the web site content yourself, there are two
common ways to easily get web site content:

1. Hire a ghostwriter. There are many advantages to outsourcing your web site content development. Just be sure that your web content provider has proven experience writing content for the web, not just for print.

2. Purchase private label rights articles and eBooks or join a membership site that provides private label rights articles or eBooks monthly. Be sure the private label rights on any eBooks that you acquire will allow you to break the books up into articles, as that is a great way to get content for web sites.

Keep continually adding keyword-targeted web site content and your web site will attract both visitors and search engines. Your web site will continually grow and it will be highly focused in your niche and be more interesting to those who visit. In addition, your web site content will begin to pull in more and more free search engine traffic.

About the author:
Mike Adams is the owner of PLR-Content.com. Stop struggling with what to say! Get free pre-written
xhref=”http://www.electrictext.com” mce_href=”http://www.electrictext.com”>web site content with private label rights for your web site, blog, or newsletter at: http://www.plr-content.com/

Are you making the t-shirts yourself and carrying a stock? Or are you using a site like Cafepress or Printfection for one off, on demand production? Because depending on your business model and strategy it makes a huge difference.

When you are carrying your own stock and making your own products it is probably a good idea to limit the items that you carry in stock to only the products you can actually sell. Carrying designs that you sell one of a year or a month can be a huge drain on your finances especially if you have a couple hundred designs with only a few hot sellers.

This means constantly evaluating whether the money you spend on stock is worth it and you are probably much more likely to eliminate older designs and designs that just simply are not moving. But if you are a t-shirt entrepreneur that is just creating designs and using third party sites to on demand print t-shirts as they are ordered you have less to worry about.

I council people that are in this later category to never get rid of any design unless there is a huge problem with it (i.e. misspelling, major design flaws, etc.) or unless you are being charge by the gigabyte for storage. Why do I say this? Because there is no reason to get rid of designs that are old, outdated or otherwise just slow selling because there is no financial expense incurred by you or your business.

One never knows what the future holds. And if there is no financial reason to remove a design I would personally never do it. You never know when someone might come along that finds the design, likes it, and buys it. Sure you might make only a couple bucks compared to your hot selling designs but for most entrepreneurs a few bucks here and a few bucks there is usually welcome and can certainly add up.

But this does not mean that you should keep these designs which have low potential in prominent places on your online site. Outdated designs not selling like they once did (such as designs for a specific event that has long since past) should definitely be considered for a move to the bottom of a page or even to their own section. Label it “discontinued designs” or something like that, but there is no need to take up valuable space at the top of a page that could be better used promoting hot items.

—————————————————————–

J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

1. 800×600 is the minimum resolution offered on most PCs and notebooks. 800×600 is also the
preferred viewing option for 14% of internet users.

2 The most popular resolutions used by approximately 60% of online users is 1024 x 768, followed
by 1280×1024 and other resolutions, with 26% of internet users.

It is essential to design your website that is compatible with all the resolutions. The process of designing for all resolutions involves using a �lowest-to-highest� resolution technique is important to set your working area or table width to a resolution within 800 x 600 in whichever web building tool you are using. A suitable area that is recommended for best viewing in a web browser on a 800 x 600 screen resolution is 770 x 560 . Having the recommended area will keep your pages user friendly and easy to read and also will alleviate horizontal page scrolling.

If a website is designed using the liquid design technique, then the web page adjusts to the size of the browser window and different screen resolutions automatically. All the web page elements rearrange themselves to suit the browser window or user�s screen resolution, if done correctly. If the web page is designed with fixed width and height, it will not adjust to the visitor�s browser window or screen resolution. If your website design is too wide for the visitor�s browser window a horizontal scroll bar will appear at the bottom of the browser window.

It’s always better to design the web pages in such a way that they are compatible with all resolutions, they will attract and keep visitors for a longer period of time on your website. The websites that are easy to use and read are more likely to attract customers. A website with a poor design and structure with horizontal scrolling drive away the visitors and potential buyers.

–About–
Dallin Horneby is a design professional for a New York Web Design company. He has has helped to establish many successful online Web Design businesses over the past 10 years.
Source: ArticleTrader.com

Speaking of charitable for the holidays, we’ve just changed our non- profit discount policy.

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Non-profit_Discount

(Niiiice segue, Jones! Thanks, Josh! No problem, you rock. No, you do.)

We used to give you half off any hosting plan as a non-profit, forever.

Well, we decided to change all that. If you’re a US-based 501(c)(3) non- profit, you now get a COMPLETELY FREE Strictly Business plan, NSA (_not_ the sex type of NSA), FOREVER!!! ! ! ! !

Spontaneous outburst of outrageous generosity? Cynical ploy, carefully calculated to generate a bigger tax deduction? YOU BE THE JUDGE.

Don’t worry, non-profits already getting half off… all your plans have already been upgraded to Strictly Business and set to be free forever!

And even if you’re not a non-profit, you can still get in the holiday spirit by donating to one of the current DreamHost charities via:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.charity

So far we’ve got 20 donations for a total of $445.24 to Santa’s Helpers and 24 donations for $552.20 to DefectiveByDesign.org. These charities will be up until the end of the year but we’re going to pay out the Santa one early (in time for holiday) so ya better watch out, you better not shout, you better act fast if you want your cash matched, DreamyHost is running out of time…