I've been wanting to cross link my Cafepress shops to one another for a while now and finally have. Since they've been added, I have already seen an increase in traffic and sales in all of my stores.
What did I do? I made several little footer graphics with my shop logos in it (see above), brought the JPEG images into Dreamweaver, made an image map over it, and copied/pasted the HTML from Dreamweaver into my the footer section of the "custom HTML" section of the shop manager for each shop. I made each shop's graphic a little different so it would be consistent with the look of it's shop.
Why did I do it? Here are three reasons why I put cross links in my shops and why your own self-contained web ring might be a good idea for your Cafepress business:
1. To use a little corporate speak: you're leveraging your traffic
By far, my most successful shop has been BusyBodies. And I have yet to define exactly who my customers are in one, nice little definition. They are scrapbooking women, Dads buying Christmas gifts, cancer survivors, kids on a swim team, surgical technician students, dog lovers...and the list goes on.
Because of this diverse audience, it only makes sense to offer up links to my other shops, in case one of these visitors is interested in T-shirts with geocaching humor, signage for their mother's room at work, a shirt sporting their favorite food, or a stylish, modern pillow for their apartment. Without the cross links at the bottom, none of my BusyBodies customers would know I have other shops with more products to choose from.
2. Objects in the footer are larger than they appear
By putting your cross links in the footer of your store, you're not only ensuring they won't interfere with your store's layout or confuse shoppers, but this will also ensure easy navigation to your other stores, from EVERY PAGE in your store. The same holds true if you put your links in your side bar or any other element that will appear on every page in your shop.
This is important because most people will not enter your store from the home page, they will likely find your shop through the Cafepress marketplace or a search engine search that will dump them in the middle of your store. Hopefully Suzy Shopper will find just what she's looking for, but in the event that she doesn't, a quick glance to other pretty links at the bottom of the page, will gently lead her to browse your other stores before she leaves, all without her having to visit your shop's home page.
3. You're keeping visitors longer
It's a sad fact, but most visitors to your store will glance at it and leave. Web surfers are impatient (I'm one of them!), so every second counts. Think of when you're wandering the mall, walk into a store, browse around, and are on the way out and see some great product near the door that catches your eye. Make your cross links catch the eyes of your visitors and they may stop, click, and browse some more...and, if you're lucky, even buy something!
So why wouldn't you cross link?
There are some instances where you may not want to cross-link your Cafepress shops. For those of you who have an adult-themed shirt shop and a kid clothing shop, cross linking may only offend one group of shoppers, while turning off the other group.
Another reason may be aesthetics. My ModPillows store I try to keep a more "high-end" clean-design look and feel. I don't want the pages cluttered up with anything that looks like an ad, so I deliberately put my cross link section in the "about" section of that store.
If you want to cross link several web sites that are not Cafepress stores, there are theories out there that this could hurt your Google rankings. Say, for example, you had 20 different domains all linked to one another from the same hosting company, this may look bad to Google and have an adverse affect on your rankings. But in Google's eyes, and correct me if I'm wrong, your Cafepress store (or Shop ID) is merely an extension of the Cafepress.com domain, so I can't see cross linking Cafepress stores as having an adverse affect on your Google rankings, and it certainly won't do anything to your Cafepress marketplace rankings.
So use your judgement and don't be afraid to experiment a little. In most cases cross linking your Cafepress premium shops will help your traffic and increase your sales over time. Visits to my Statcounter account and Cafepress sales reports are proof of that.
And if you don't have more than one shop to link together, consider signing up for the Cafepress affiliate program with Commission Junction, link up to a few of your favorite shops and earn money on those sales, too!
