Everyone knows the saying about putting all of one’s eggs in one basket. With changes that have gone on over at Cafepress in the past year many shopkeepers got a hard lesson in how true that saying is. What is very important if you are going to rely on third parties to do a lot of your heavy lifting in the world of selling t-shirts online, is that you have to minimize your risk. You minimize your risk by hatching more eggs.

Land of the Free Studios, Inc., my company, relies heavily on online t-shirt and gift sales to keep going strong. But we do not use just Cafepress. We have products at other sites too such as Printfection and Zazzle. While Printfection has the versatility of CP when it comes to ease of designing a store and Zazzle does not, Zazzle outperforms Printfection for the products we have available on those site. Those revenues have also been growing while receipts from CP have shrank in large part to new pricing and bonus structures. Sure, the economy has something to do with that too but with growth at other sites it is hard to see that CP could not be doing things better on their end.

Another tool we use to generate revenues if Google Adsense. Many of the sites we operate are monetarized to generate revenue from ads that Google serves. This revenue stream has also been grown in the last year to help take some of the sting away from changes at Cafepress and further illustrates how being diverse in your revenue streams can keep you afloat when changes that are not of your own doing come a calling.

As each egg you hatch grows and matures it will slowly replace revenue lost to another source.

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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.