Video SEO Clips

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Cafepress Plans for 2007: Executive Chat Notes

So what's in store for Cafepress in 2007? Read on for a sneak peek of what's in the works. Maternity clothes, dark apparel for kids, new product photos, new tools and talk of a Cafepress Community Council are just a few topics that were touched on in the Cafepress Executive Chat on Thursday Jan. 25th.

There's a lot of info touched on here and a big thanks to Kristen from Great Gear for putting this together for those of us who couldn't make it to the chat!

Please keep in mind the following was compiled by a third party...not from Cafepress or it's employees, so nothing is "set in stone" and should not be mistaken as official announcements from Cafepress. Enjoy!

Here's who participated in the chat, along with over 100 shopkeepers...

Fred Durham
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Maheesh Jain
Co-Founder and Vice President of Business Development

Jill Kulick
Vice President of Human Resources

Mehdi Maghsoodnia
Vice President of Products and Site Operations

Angela
Our Cafepress Community Advocate

Britta
(Sorry, Britta...I don't know your title!)

---------------------------
Thu Jan 25, 2007
Chat Notes - Executive Chat
---------------------------
CP Plans for 2007

Brief agenda for the chat:
- Fred will start with an intro and pass the baton to Jill and Mehdi.
Then we'll go into the Q&A portion that you all love so much.

Fred
- Happy 2007 Everyone!

- Thanks to SKs (Shopkeepers) for being a part of CP (Cafepress) and helping make 2006 a big success. Did a great job promoting and marketing your shops in 2006, esp. the holidays - sales far above projections.

- Recap 2006: Production expansion to Kentucky is complete (now have 5x the capacity we had before we moved). Improved Shipping system and average order sizes have increased. Launched beta 2.0 for black shirts and are fine tuning the process. Hosted inaugural CPConnect in October. Launched dynamic color swatches for new shirt colors, new colors too. Sig. increase in shirt sales in Nov-Dec.

- Just got back from 3 weeks in India and just catching up. :-)

Jill
- Calling 2007, informally, 'the year of new merchandise' around the office.

- At CPConnect, SKs added to 'the list' on the wall. Guess what? Most
were requests for new merchandise. Planning to launch a lot of it this
year and the rest is still being researched.

- In addition, this year one of our major focuses will be on community
involvement. "The List" is a perfect example of how great suggestions
can be a reality in the CP system.

- Based on these great results we are in the process of developing a
Community Council program - to be rolled out this year. Details are
being ironed out, but the council will be to help us develop and review
major programs, features, services that impact the community.

Mehdi
- We continue to invest in our site infrastructure, which will increase
its performance, but also allow us to handle our rapid growth. We are
working on our shop infrastructure to handle the demand and also
maintain high performance in the face of load. Working on image
services to handle the growth and maintain high level of performance.

Various
- Transparencies will be available only for apparel products with the
next release. No plans to offer trans. on other products.

- Printing on the back of dark garments is a favorite request. Looking
into requirements for this - stay tuned.

- Political categories - working on updating them for the 2008
presidential election - looking at later next week.

- Have plus size apparel on our launch schedule for new merchandise. Hoping to have plus-size apparel before Fall. Taking some time because most of the off the shelf blank plus size garments aren't very nice and we are designing our own products.

- Book Questions: Plan on serving SKs who are currently selling books to gain feedback on paper preference this year (Q about cream colored paper).

- Looking at San Francisco again for the 2007 conference.

- Looking into premium shop templates and will be using the Community Council to help us determine how to best satisfy the needs of our community.

- New merchandise announced recently will be available in early February.

- Will Click shirt become part of the SK's toolbox in 2007? May not be
offered on the main Cafepress site but it could possibly be made
available as a third party plug in. (click-shirt.com - third party
program using CP API.)

- Have product additions planned throughout most of 2007 - spaced out
during the year. Of course we will give you a break over Holidays
because you will be so busy with orders.

- New products in 2007? (previously posted - first wave of new shirts)
Apparel in more colors and more styles. Can't spill all secrets yet.

- Currently evaluating various ways to improve the buyer and seller
experience outside the US - includes how the site works, currency
management, customer support, etc. In planning mode - no time line yet.

- Still working out how Community Council will be chosen.

- Dark shirts will be a part of the kid's collection for this year!

- Bulk tiers and shipping options are being evaluated - will be asking
the Community Council to help us with this.

- Transparencies for all apparel in February.

- cafepressdn.com and contact team for API for bulk adding of products.

- Getting non-apparel stuff too.

- Working on improving edge detection (white outline) on dark technology.

- API (application programming interface) considered successful so far. Working on growing our developer community to build more unique tools around it.

- Probably not getting into domain hosting right now. Use godaddy.com
and other places for that and redirect to shop.

- Finalizing maternity clothes right now while we chat! Very specialized product that requires custom specs. This year sometime.

- CP does advertise online mostly. Increasing marketing spend by 50% in 2007 to drive more traffic to MP.

- Subdomains like shopid.cafepress.com instead of cafepress.com/shopid? Introduces security risk and complexity to DNS. Some people do it but at this sort of scale and traffic, it's an idea that scares us, and since reliability is important, we hate to do things that scare even us.

- Looking how to add a designer like at click-shirt.com to the overall flow of the site.

- White will still be clear on light shirts when using transparent images.

- Modding intentionally inappropriate image tagging? Want feedback and ideas about this! Most everyone said yes - help get rid of tagging spam, etc. Some won't use topicads because of bad tagging. People say it has become real problem. AVDC2007 is a good example. Tricky area overall.

- Pet products this year? Looking into it - stay tuned! Rapid growth category!

- Love to see more stuff like the Snakes on a Plane thing? Working on it! Maheesh's crystal ball says some fun stuff will happen in 2007.

- When is XML feed version coming out and how to best provide feedback for next version. Mehdi says 30-60 days?? dn@cafepress.com

- Fred leaves 15 minutes early - says bye and happy new year.

- Larger print area? Working on this solution right now to offer larger print area on apparel - no definite timeline at this time - stay tuned of course.

- Be able to export sales and order data into a format such as CSV or XLS for accounting purposes? Will put it on the list - send more suggestions like this to dn@cafepress.com

- Products featured in CP emails and on the CP homepage are selected by the Online Marketing Team, from the Marketplace, that are appropriate for the public, fit the theme and displays well (tiny images don't).

- Want to work with Community Council on issue that sections are getting really LONG because of the long list of available products - want to find good solution for this.

- Have a whole year of great chat workshops and are looking into switching chat software that supports visuals.

- Close to taking dark shirts out of beta. Continue to perfect it. Lesson we have learned is not to release beta on new products going forward. Our community and customers made it clear that quality is important. How do SKs feel about beta - let us know. (Most answered with 'quality' replies. Maybe beta to SKs only - not to public. Maybe lower priced for beta.)

- CP-produced garments is a way for us to control the quality, color, and size.

- Going to be taking new photos of the products - will be able to see this in the next release.

- Had over 100 Shopkeepers in chat - many questions missed - cpchat@cafepress.com

- People made suggestions for various charity shops.

--------------

So that about sums it up!

ModPillows as Art Prints: Expanding to ImageKind

I wanted to offer my ModPillows designs as fine art prints with custom framing available, so I decided to open up a few galleries over at ImageKind.com and see how they do.

ImageKind's specialty is print-on-demand fine art prints. Their selection of frames, artwork, sizes, paper, and canvas materials is amazing and their web site has a nice "upscale" feel about it. And from what I've heard from other Cafepress shopkeepers, the quality of their printing is impressive.


It's quite easy to set up a gallery. The only draw back is you can only upload one image at a time. But there are other ways to get multiple images to them via FTP or by mailing ImageKind a CD of your artwork.

Rearranging art in your gallery is a cinch with a drag and drop feature. Like opening any online venture, you do need to market it so people can find you. ImageKind does pay for Google Ads and I've noticed when I Google myself now, I get ImageKind ads with my name, linking right to my galleries, so that's pretty cool.

If anything, it's another way for me to market my designs on two different sites by offering products that coordinate. They compliment each other nicely.

What has your experience been with ImageKind so far? Any input or tips you want to share?

99 tips for branding on the cheap: Excellent article on the Aviva Directory

This gem of an article is quite lengthy, but worth the read. I've already added it to the learning resources section at the right for future reference.

The author covers a whole host of ideas for getting your website off the ground. Some conventional, some more creative & some just plain different ideas I hadn't heard of before, like branding free email accounts so others don't "steal" your company name and water down your brand or paying someone to walk around with your logo "tattooed" to their forehead.

But most of it's practical advice and can be applied especially well to Cafepress shopkeepers who are starting out and are not sure how to market their products on a small budget.

Categories covered in the article:

• Branding in the Blogosphere

• SEO and Reputation Management

• Social Media/ Bookmarking/ Wikis/ E-Profiles

• Additional Linkbuilding

• Usability, Accessibility and Design

• Personal Communication

• Going Viral to Develop Your Brand

• More Unconventional Ideas - Online

• Unconventional Ideas - Offline

• Resources + References

Thanks to Fricka from Tips and Tricks for T-shirt Entrepreneurs for posting about this!

Goodstorm's "Create a T-shirt" Tutorial on YouTube

I just love this use of YouTube. Goodstorm, a print on demand company where you can create and sell your own shirts, has created a great overview of their service with a little video tutorial on YouTube and also imbedded it in their site. What a great way to kill two birds with one stone. Throw it out there to the YouTube community as marketing, and put it on the web site to walk potential customers through the steps of making a T-shirt with them. Brilliant, simple and cheap!

Have you ever created a video to promote your T-shirts?

Plea for help! Will someone offer a print-on-demand throw pillow with no black border?

To continue on with my ModPillows story, I have to address the obvious...the big black borders!

So what about those black borders?

So far the only downside to my new pillow store, is, unfortunately, the pillows themselves! Don't get me wrong, they are great soft pillows, they're a good size, they feel nice, the printing is nice, and I have some at home right now. I just am not a fan of the big black border I'm stuck with designing within. I'm doing my best to come up with designs that will look good within the confines of bold black borders, and I see my store as a starting point. But eventually I need to be able to expand my designs beyond these borders.

From my experiences with pillows and Cafepress, I've come to these conclusions:

1. Cafepress is the only place I've found where I can print and sell my own pillows on-demand.

2. They currently offer ONE style of pillow with black borders.

3. I'm guessing they aren't a huge seller for Cafepress (due to CP's lack of interest in my request for new pillow styles), and I know T-shirts are their biggest selling product. It is what they specialize in.

4. They may not sell well because Cafepress doesn't appeal to textile designers, and CP's pillows are best suited for printing T-shirt phrases and photographs (which don't typically sell well on pillows).

From these conclusions all I can say is that there needs to be another way. Another pillow design. More shapes, more styles, no borders. There is a market for this stuff! So I'll throw this business idea out there to any young, ambitious entrepreneurs:

If someone out there would create a print-on-demand website and service that focused on textile design, curtains, throw pillows, pillow cases, reversable pillow coverings, and maybe even sheets, placemats and cloth or paper napkins, you'd have me signing up before you can say "beta!" And I bet you'd attract a different type of designer.

Does anyone know of another print on demand pillow available? Is anyone out there willing to add them to their current line?

Designing Backwards: Start with the market

I'm working on a little business experiment and thought I'd share.

It may not seem backwards to marketing people start with the market, but in the Cafepress community of designers, there seems to be a common school of thought regarding design:

1. Think up a clever design.
2. Put it on a T-shirt.
3. Promote it and sell it.

This is not a bad formula and works well with cartoon characters, clever text phrases, and funny comic strip art which all work well on T-shirts, mugs, aprons, or caps. I even use the above formula for my T-shirts and do quite well. And most Cafepress shopkeepers, for that matter, design something clever, put it on a shirt, and then either wait to see if it sells, or maybe pay for a little advertising.


Cafepress' throw pillow

But what about pillows?

Cafepress sells them, you know. I'm not sure how big of a seller they are, as most of what I see in the marketplace on their pillows are cartoons, T-shirt phrases (which work best on T-shirts), some fine art and photography (which usually work best on framed prints or posters). And speaking from personal experience with BusyBodies I rarely sell pillows. I feature them "just in case" but I know my stick figures don't lend themselves well to home décor as well as they do to T-shirts. I did not design BusyBodies with pillows in mind.

Now to think backwards...

I thought I'd open up a new Cafepress Premium shop from a different angle, appeal to a different market, and design with a new perspective:

1. Determine my market and figure out places and ways I will promote my products.
2. Consider one product family to feature.
3. Design specifically for this one product and market segment.
THEN promote (see step one)

It's a fresh way to approach designing for Cafepress and so far so good. The market I've been wanting to tap into for a while is that of modern home interior & product design (step #1), and people who appreciate a bargain.

But to narrow it to a product (step #2), I was specifically interested in decorative throw pillows. I LOVE throw pillows but am usually disappointed at the price tag. Sure, it's often worth it as many of these great pillows are made of things like hand printed silk or embroidered wool (and I admit to having some throw pillows custom-made to match our livingroom a few years back), but sometimes I just like the pattern on a pillow and want it on my couch for under $110. Heck, under $20 would sure be nice, especially since trends are always changing, and my pillow addiction has already costed me a bundle.

That was the "ah-ha" moment. Why not come up with my own modern pillow designs? Then sell them for under $20 through Cafepress, and market them to the IKEA shoppers of the world who appreciate good design but don't want to pay an arm and a leg for it.

And ModPillows was born.




OK there really are more than three steps to all of this. Somewhere after "step 1" I bought a domain, reserved a Cafepress shop name (by opening a basic shop for free), decided on a color pallette for my first few collections, completed several designs (222 to be exact!), created a logo for my shop, created graphics for the web site, uploaded and tagged all of my images, upgraded my shop to a premium shop, customized my shop, ordered pillows to photograph, and put the shop together piece by piece and it continues to grow.

Now time to start spreading the word, which is where I'm at right now. Being that I thought this through at the very beginning, I have some ideas of how I'll go about it. I will keep you updated on my progress. It will take some trial and error and I'll continue to massage the look of my site and it's designs and marketing methods, but it's a good start and I'm excited to see what comes of it.

Do you have a unique method or approach to designing for Cafepress?

Search Engines

Search Engine is a information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a coomputer system. it help to find out which you want. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently.Without further qualification, search engine usually refers to a Web search engine, which searches for information on the public Web.Other kinds of search engine are enterprise search engines, which search on intranets, personal search engines, and mobile search engines.

The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was Archie. [1] The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of filenames; however, Archie could not search by file contents.

Time to Time many Search Engines are come. But three main search engines are in use. These are :-






If you want to get success in seo field, You must be know about these search engine algorithm. For any help contact me.

Friday Inspiration: Illustration Mundo

Just a little visual stimulation for Friday afternoon. I stumbled across Illustration Mundo when visiting Prickie today.

Described as "a place where illustration gets all the love," Illustration Mundo is a site dedicated only to illustration.

If you're looking for some great random images to get the creative juices flowing, try out the "100" section of the site that features 100 random images from illustrators' submissions. Every time you refresh, you'll see 100 more random images. I think I like the patchwork look of them all together more than I like the images by themselves.

You can also submit your own art for free (as long as it's quality work) and discuss illustration related topics in their forum.

Can you feel the love?

DNA StyleLab now in Beta: Make shirts with other artists' art

I found DNA Sylelab today & thought it was a pretty cool concept. Because it's still in beta, you can try it out and order shirts now for 15% off.

The basic idea is that they have artists with work uploaded on the site. You can choose the art you like, choose the shirt you want, size and rotate the art how you want it on your shirt, and then buy your shirt. For now, they have a select number of artists and later on it looks like visitors will get to vote on artists. When a visitor buys a shirt, the artist gets paid a commission.

It's a unique concept that's combining some familiar elements:

1. Giving artist an outlet for selling their work (like Cafepress, Printfection and other similar print on demand sites)

2. Giving choice to the customer to choose the shirt and art they want, without having to create the art (similar to Click-Shirt)

3. Creating a social network in a "club-like" atmosphere of selected artists as well as passionate customers who show off their shirts in a gallery (much like Threadless)

4. And using print-on-demand technology on dark colored shirts (again, like Cafepress and Printfection).

The site looks nice and so does the art. I think they have a lot of potential and I may submit some designs and see what happens. The interface is pretty cool and easy to use, too.

Who is behind DNA Stylelab? I found a little more at MySpace.

I look forward to watching DNA Stylelab work it's way out of beta, grow and change. Be sure to visit DNAStylelab and try it out for yourself!

Forms made easy...finally!

Once upon a time I used to have my email address posted on my websites. For a while it worked just fine.

Then, of course, I started getting spam. Ack!

Then I started looking all over the internet and asking people how I could make a contact form for my Cafepress store and blog and anything else I do online.

Someone suggested a service that I tried to sign up for. I got lost in the part where I had to put info into a database.

Then I learned how hard it was to make forms. I never did get it and didn't have the patience to learn. I'd rather pay someone else at this point I was so frustrated.

Then one day when David Miles was working on my new store design we got talking about forms. I said I really wanted one & begged him to make me one.

To my delight, he suggested Wufoo. A site that makes making your own forms easy, fast, and (believe it or not) fun!

No really, it's fun! Even for me. So David told me about it and I made some forms. Just like that. They have a free service for a basic form and other paid packages if you want more forms or image uploading capability. You can design your form, then get a simple chunk of HTML to paste wherever you like, including your Cafepress store.

And as if they weren't cool enough, they sent me a holiday card thanking me for my business. Awww. They are by far one of the most useful, well-designed, easy, and affordable web services I've ever used.

And so, I lived happily ever after.

One, two, three cheers for Wufoo!

Oh, and if you want to see some of my shiny new forms in action, here ya go:

Contact BusyBodies
Contact ModPillows
Contact Creative Gumption
Join the iPose Club!

Japanese T-shirt Folding

OK, I know this has been floating around the internet for a little while now, but it's just so crazy, I had to post it. I wonder if this is how they do it at Cafepress?

Lessons Learned from the Cafepress conference: say "no" to spalsh pages

Now that I've made these changes to my Cafepress shop, I wanted to share with you a valuable tip I learned from shopkeepers at the Cafepress Conference.

I was fortunate to have my shop critiqued by a few pros during one of the "Pimp my shop" sessions where shopkeepers could volunteer their shop to be viewed in front of everyone on the big screen and be critiqued by the pros. The first bit of constructive criticism I got was: "Get rid of your splash page...it's a kiss of death with search engines."

Wow...that's exactly the kind of information I needed to hear! I was given some tips, then later chatted with another shopkeeper for details on how he integrated his Cafepress shop into his own URL without a splash page.

What is a splash page?
A splash page (or portal page, intro page, or landing page...it has a lot of names), is like a front door to your site. A door that people have to click onto enter your site. It's often a flash animation, a graphic, or in my case, it was my store logo with a button that said "enter site." It's a page with no other purpose than to make the visitor click something or watch something before they can enter your site.

In the old days (in internet land, that's about a year ago, I think), a splash page wasn't seen as a bad thing. As search engines have matured, however, they now recognize splash pages as void of content, and so, don't index them as high as they used to.

There are other pros and cons to splash pages, but there are more cons, in my opinion, to having one for a business site. There's no gurantee your visitor will click your "enter site" button. They may never see your products. Many people find them annoying and a waste of time. They can be good for portfolio sites when the webmaster is wanting to show off his or her skills with a flashy splash page, but other than that, I, too can no longer see a good use for them, especially for a retail site.

Why was I using a splash page?
Being that I have limited web design knowledge, a splash page was the easiest way for me to have a "real web address" instead of relying on www.cafepress.com/(my store name) for all my promotional material. I wanted a simple URL that people could remember. So I made a simple splash page on www.ibusybodies.com that lead into my Cafepress store.

How I fixed the problem:

Now, if you visit my store by typing in: http://www.cafepress.com/busybodies, you'll see it automatically redirects you to my URL, http://www.ibusybodies.com whenever you go to the store home page.

Here are the steps I took to make my shop store front redirect to my own URL:

1. Copied the source code from my Cafepress shop and pasted it elsewhere where I could edit it.

2. In that code I altered the Cafepress white header bar (OK to do since it's not on their domain anymore), fixed all my links so they linked properly to my store sections (very important!), removed nested sub-sections, and placed alt tags on my images so they have text attached to them (search engines only see text, as do applications for the bind to navigate the web). This step takes some fiddling around, but if you know basic HTML, you can probably figure it out.

3. Copied and pasted the new edited code into my HTML editor on my website (ibusybodies.com). You could also FTP the file to your index page.

4. Finally, I pasted a redirect snippet of code into my "shop description" section in the "customize my shop" (custom HTML) section of my Cafepress shop account. So now, whenever a visitor clicks on the "breadcrumbs" in my store, or my store home page, it redirects to my URL. It's important to put this code (check out W3schools or other sites for a redirect code or meta "refresh" code).

Here's what it looks like in the custom HTML section of my Cafepress account, where the code is placed:



Why doing all this should help my store's usability and findability:

• It eliminates the splash page! Customers will instantly see my products and home page.

• Google and other search engines will now recognize my URL (www.ibusybodies.com) as being a website with content and links, seeing it as more valuable.

• Every single page in my store (hundreds of pages) with the Cafepress URL, now link BACK to my URL, also giving it more value in the search engine's eyes.

So after making a few suggested changes, my shop is on it's way to more visibility in search engines.

Do you have any other methods you use for integrating your Cafepress shop into your own web site? Please share!

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