Traditional Website Negatives
I went through the traditional steps of creating my own website, then I found an on demand printer to handle the production, printing and shipping of the products that I created. This was a steep learning curve. I started the website in the summer of 2015 and gradually increased my product selection to all types of apparel and other products such as mugs, posters and totes.
Here is a list of the problems with having your own hosted website:
- The holy grail of doing business is traffic, sure you can open an online shop but unlike a traditional brick & mortar shop, your traffic is traveling on the internet. So you must market and use Google Adwords or Bing to place ads and hope that you get the traffic to create the sells to be successful. I found that this is another learning curve that can be expensive. Many times the price/click is over $2.00 or more.
- Facebook and Twitter ads are another method of marketing your store and products, a huh, but here we have some major problems, both social media formats have been flooded with fake bot accounts. I know I ran a campaign on Facebook and over 90 % of the arriving hits were fake consumer bots. The bad news is you still get charged for the fake click on your ad.
- Stopping the hackers, my website was taken down by hackers in September of 2015. I did have a backup from 2 weeks prior to the take down so I had to re-list 100 products. I then purchased CodeGuard backup from HostGator. This allowed me to restore my site from backup in 20 minutes. I also purchased Ninja Firewall to better contain the hackers. Identifying and blocking hackers is time consuming.
- SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization is a constantly evolving method of describing your products to satisfy search engine algorithms to achieve higher page rankings. This is very time consuming.
- Plugin conflicts are another nuisance of having your own website.
- So I have identified some of the issues with having your own discreet website.
Why Did I Choose Zazzle?
After doing my research I decided on Zazzle to create my new online shop. Zazzle has ready made traffic and they have a huge online presence internationally. They have over 250 products that can be fully customized to help you find that particular niche you desire. Zazzle promotes all of the time so your designs will be exposed to many potential consumers. I started my StyleEnvee store in August of 2016. So far I have sold products in many countries, ie, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore. Sales are slow but steadily increasing.
Youtube of course helped me to make my decision. After watching some of the success stories I made my choice. One stories that inspired me was that of Elke Clarke. She is an engineer but wanted to be closer to home with her family. So sometime ago she started on Zazzle and she has been making over $100,000 a year. Sure not everyone is going to achieve this success but I encourage you to follow her story.
How to make six figure income using Zazzle.com!
Elke also has an excellent blog with training courses and recommendations on your Zazzle shop.
So this is my first post. I will try to post a couple of times a week to so please come back and visit.
