Note: This is an old article from a different era. Today, other venues are as popular — and many are far more popular — than Cafe Press.

I’m leaving this online because some people continue to achieve success and financial independence with Cafe Press.

A free Cafe Press shop is one of the easiest ways to build an extra income online. With a few images and half an hour, you can be making money by the time you go to bed tonight.

If you haven’t already set up your free Cafe Press shop, be sure to read my earlier article, Make money: Set Up a FREE Shop at Cafe Press.

If you’ve registered at Cafe Press (it’s free) and started your first free shop, it’s time to stock it with products.

Create your first Cafe Press product

Then, return to Create + Manage or to Products, depending upon which page you’re starting from.

If you’re at your Media Basket (it says My Photos + Images near the top of the page), click on Your Shops (on the left sidebar). Next, click on the link labeled Products, to the right of your shop name. (It’s vastly simpler than this sounds in text.)

Choose a product–such as a tee shirt–and the Cafe Press pages will talk you through the process of placing the image on the shirt, deciding where to put it, resizing it if you like, and then setting your price.

Pricing

The markups at Cafe Press can seem high at first. From my experience, it’s worth it to have them handle the order-taking, production, and shipping. I mark most of my items up only $1 or $2 each, and my income comes from volume, not making very much of individual customers or products. But, that’s up to you, of course.

Make more products, for fun!

Once your item is created, make another. After all, you already have the image in your Media Basket, so why not design more tee-shirts, journals, wall clocks, mousepads, even boxer shorts or a thong with the same design!

If you have other designs that you’d love to use on similar products, open another free shop. You don’t need a new username or password. Cafe Press encourages you to open several shops using the same account.

Once you’ve created one or more shops, it’s time to tell your friends.

Promote your Cafe Press shops

Let your friends know about your new shops! Post the URLs at your website, LiveJournal or blog. Share thumbnail pictures so that they can see the images you’re using. That encourages traffic to your Cafe Press shops.

Use your Cafe Press URL beneath your signature on emails. On every list that I host at Yahoo!Groups, you can always post up to three lines of commercial links or ads, beneath your name on each email.

Get paid

Cafe Press holds your commissions for 45 days, in case someone returns an item. But, once the 45 days has passed, your commission is “cleared” for payment. Cafe Press will mail you a check on the 15th of the month, every month, for all commissions that have cleared to date.

Cafe Press waits until you’ve accumulated at least $25 in commissions before printing a check. You decide that minimum amount ($25, $50, or $100) in your payment preferences at your Cafe Press account.

Some months, I make only a few dollars at some of my Cafe Press shops. (I have a mixture of free shops and my Premium shop, Santa Flamingo.) And, particularly at gift-giving time, Cafe Press shops can provide some extra income.

Cafe Press may not become your primary source of income, but for extra dollars now and then, I’ve had excellent experience with it. And, there are some people who make a living from their Cafe Press shops.

Start right now!

If you already have an image that’s ready to use on products, you can open a Cafe Press account and be selling products within half an hour.

Try a free shop and see how you like it. On another webpage, we’ll talk about Premium shops, which give you more control over how the shop page looks.

In the meantime, experiment with free shops to learn more about how Cafe Press works. Get ideas from others’ shops, too.

Really, it’s very simple to create your shop. Cafe Press will talk you through the process, step by step. Click here to see if Cafe Press is right for you.

Update: This 2007 article reflects the online marketplace at that time.  Today, Cafe Press is just one of many ways you can make money from reproductions of your artwork.

Though I can no longer assure you that you can set up a shop and have an income before you climb into bed, online opportunities are still worth your time & attention.

A free Cafe Press shop is one of the easiest ways to build an extra income online. With a few images and half an hour, you can be making money by the time you go to bed tonight.

You may want to print out this series of articles, to follow as you set up your first Cafe Press shop.

Open a free Cafe Press account

The first thing to do is to set up a free account at Cafe Press. There are no set-up fees, no printing expenses… You need nothing more than an image to use on your designs. If you are an artist or a photographer, you already have images to use. Just upload them to your personal image basket at Cafe Press, and you’re all set!

After choosing a username and password, you’ll be ready to open your own Cafe Press shop, for free.

Next, select a shop name

Choose a name that’s easy to remember. Use your own name if you like! Later, you can upgrade from a free shop to a Premium shop with the same shop name. We’ll talk about Premium shops in another article. When you’re starting out, I recommend creating a free shop while you see how Cafe Press works.

You can have as many free shops as you likeYou can have more than one free shop, with just one Cafe Press account (username/password).

So, if you want a shop that features photos of your dog or cat, you can have one with just those images. You can open a second shop that features photos or drawings of your goldfish.

And so on.

The only restriction on a free shop is this: Your shop can feature different designs on different tee-shirts, but you can’t select just one product design–say, a Jr. Hoodie–and offer it with a variety of different designs in one shop.

In my Premium shop, I can select one product–like a  bumpersticker–and offer it with several different designs.

Choose your first image

If you have an image or photo that you’ve already created, you can put it on a Cafe Press product. Or, if you have a copyright-free images (such as the ones on my image CDs), you can use any of them on your Cafe Press products, too.

You may want to mix an image and a clever quotation or slogan, or the name of your business. (The first Cafe Press product I ever saw was owned by my son. It was a baseball cap with the name of his favorite website.)

When you’re designing the images that you’ll put on your Cafe Press items, you may want to use the templates that Cafe Press provides. If you’re designing a wall clock, this can be handy.

Or, you might prefer to know the precise dimensions of each product, so that you can create a graphic to fit it exactly. These sizes (and links to templates) are listed at http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/help_image_sizes.aspx.

Remember to make your graphic at least 100 pixels/inch, and preferably about 300 pixels/inch. Cafe Press provides some helpful information about images in their Help pages, if you want
more guidance. (Personally, I try to make images that are at least 150 pixels/inch, and I upload them as PNGs or JPGs.)

Once you’ve created an image that you’d like to use on Cafe Press products, upload it into your Media Basket (listed under “Sell Online”).

When eBay sales hit a slump, some artists panic. They don’t realize how normal it is to alternately get lots of bids in a high range, and then have a time when nothing sells, even at absurdly low prices.

The Christmas shopping season is one of those times.

If you haven’t sold through eBay in past years, holiday auctions tend to follow a pattern:

There’s a flurry of holiday shopping that peaks shortly after Thanksgiving.

Then as we get closer to gift-giving, things go flat because people (a) aren’t sure if they’ll be the high bidder, and (b) even if they are, they aren’t sure they’ll receive the item in time.

In some categories, people will continue to shop right through to Christmas, but in many, the shoppers seem to vanish. And, every year those categories change. During Christmas season 2002, I was selling items in the “collectibles” categories right through Dec 23rd, but “art” went flat considerably sooner.

There will be one additional surge just a few days before Christmas if you’re selling something unique and you’ll ship same-day via an Overnight-type delivery service.

So, if you’re going to sell at eBay through the holidays, run lots of three-day auctions that close around the 20th or so, for the last- minute shoppers who’ve given up on the malls. And, plan on shipping instantly, or pretty close to it.

Otherwise, don’t fret if your sales slump now. My current auctions are probably my last until after the holidays, though I’ll continue to make art and put it at my websites. Mostly, I’m planning to stockpile merchandise for the after-Christmas shoppers.

See, people get cash as gifts and then they’ll spend it right after Christmas. So, there can be a nice boom in eBay sales starting around the 27th or 28th (after they’ve been to the post-holiday mall sales).

The only other time of year when eBay seems to do this–besides around big holidays such as July 4th when people are on vacation or otherwise busy–is right before April 15th. The week before people pay their American income taxes, it can be disturbingly quiet at eBay.

But… if you do custom work, even when things hit a slump at eBay, your business can continue to grow. People see my art–especially my faerie doors–at eBay, and contact me for special orders. I rarely accept them, but it’s nice to know that the opportunity is there when I need more income.

I’ve also done well by offering similar items to “second chance” folks at eBay; this is where you can offer to sell an identical or similar item to the people who weren’t successful bidders, but who bid high enough that you’re willing to make more of whatever-it-is, and sell to them at their unsuccessful bid price. (Did that make sense? I hope so. See eBay for details on how this works.)

Many people who have a strong fan following are going to continue to sell, regardless of the calendar. And, that takes months of steady listings, at the very least, to build a network of collectors. Quit for a month or two, and you’ll find yourself back at square one or close to it.

If you’re new to eBay or don’t auction your art there on a steady basis, you’re likely to see dramatic ups & downs in your sales and selling prices, especially at certain times of year.

Don’t take it too personally.

It may be seasonal doldrums at eBay. It happens every year, when holiday shoppers head to the mall instead.

Take a break, enjoy the holidays, and stockpile your art for the start of the new year.

When you begin selling your art at eBay, it’s often just to get a bunch of art out from underfoot in your studio.

Well all do that.  We clear out things that are just sitting on the shelf, to make space (physical and mental) for more creativity. And, at eBay, we know that the art is going to someone who will enjoy it, even if we’re getting well below our usual gallery/shop prices.

But, infrequent bursts of eBay auctions won’t lead to consistently good selling prices. In fact, your art may end up selling for demoralizingly low prices.

If your only goal was to get the old stuff out of your studio, prices may not be an issue. But, if you’re going to use your selling prices as a gauge for deciding if eBay is worthwhile, infrequent auctions are not a good measure.

One big key to eBay is consistency. Putting something in, at least once a week–and in the same category so people see your work regularly–is probably the single most important feature in getting better/higher bids at eBay.

eBay will still be a rollercoaster of bids for a long time. The artists who earn the best money and get fairly consistent bids, have been doing this for at least two years.

That sounds daunting, but if you check the auctions of people who seem to sell art there regularly… your jaw will drop when you see how much some of them are paid for art that isn’t even charming enough to be called “outsider”!

So, even if your art is ho-hum, work on consistency. (Not consistency in quality… at first, you’re simply working for name recognition.)

Just keep placing art in eBay, no matter how low the bids. It all averages out, if you look at what you earn over, say, six months.

(And yes, this is “do as I say, not as I do” advice. I have flurries of auctions at eBay, followed by months when I don’t put anything into the auctions at all. But, having studied what others are doing as well as times when I’ve been consistent with my own auctions, I feel confident in giving this advice. One of these days, I may just follow it myself!)