I make most of my sales through the CafePress Marketplace which means that most of the people who buy my products never even see my store. However, I have been having an increased number of sales of my Texas themed products from my actual shop. This has prompted me to redesign it. You can take a look at it by clicking this very SEO friendly link: Texas T-Shirts.

You might a notice that this store is NOT a customization of one of the templates hosted at the CafePress site. Nope, this is a completely original site hosted on my own hosting account and it uses a cgi script to “pull” my products from my CP shop. This nifty little cgi script is call CP Shop and can be purchased here:

http://marty.net/go2/site/view/marty/101

I highly recommend it.

Well, folks, it came in…my first triple digit check from CafePress. Up until this check, I’ve only received checks in the $20.00 to $40.00 range.

The really cool thing is that my current commissions are already up to over $120.00! Here’s the pic of my fabulous CafePress check (click for larger image):

I’ve been thinking about writing an eBook on how to get started with CafePress. It would start with ultra basic info on getting an account set up and then get into the nitty gritty of making profitable designs, SEO, trend marketing research…what do you think? Should I spend the time on that? Let me know!

It’s scheduled to be mailed out on the 15th!   My first commission check from CafePress in the triple digits.   $220 and some change to be sort of exact.   Not bad at all.   A hefty chunk of that came from the shopping rush of the holidays, but I’ll take it!

Hopefully once a few other projects I have going on wrap up or slow down I can add more shirt designs to the shop.

A few weeks ago I was driving around listening to a local morning radio show (the always excellent Dudley & Bob Show here on Austin’s KLBJ FM) and I heard them talking about a video they had seen on the internet called “2 Girls 1 Cup.” They were pretty disgusted by it. You are probably aware of this video by now, but if not, I’m sure as hell not going to enlighten you…it’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen on the internet and I don’t want to be held responsible for you gouging your eyes out after watching it.

At any rate, since it was such a riveting and hilarious topic for them, I got the idea that I ought to make a “2 Girls 1 Cup” t-shirt with my CafePress account and send them one…so I did. I also put my CafePress store’s URL on the back of the shirt. My hope was that they would get the gift, it would remind them of the disgusting “2 Girls 1 Cup” video and they would mention WarehouseLarry on the air.

Did they get the shirt? Yes. Did they mention my shop on air? I don’t know…I don’t listen every day. But what did happen was a little bigger than I had hoped. I had stumbled upon Trend Marketing, which is - as it sounds - marketing to trends. This is common knowledge to marketing people, but to a little guy like me this was big news.

When I created the “2 Girls 1 Cup” shirt for the Dudley & Bob guys, the design was automatically submitted into the CafePress marketplace. And it sold like hotcakes. Disgusting, disturbing hotcakes, but hotcakes none the less. “2 Girls 1 Cup” was a hot trend. The video had gone viral and every drunk ass college kid and radio DJ in the world knew of it’s horrid greatness and, naturally, wanted to wear t-shirts about it! Good for me! The “2 Girls 1 Cup” design accounted for about 80% of my December sales, and I’ve already sold 2 this month!

Lesson learned: Keep an ear to the ground for what trends are hot and market to those. It’s Trend Marketing!

I will write often in this here blog about CafePress. I’ve been a Premium member with CafePress for well over a year now with my t-shirt shop WarehouseLarry. My fist success at making extra income online was through this CafePress shop and it still continues to bring in extra income. In fact, I saw my sales almost double in December because of a trend marketing experiment I did that I will write on a little later. Naturally, some of the sales boost was due in part to the holiday shopping season as well, but sales are sales so I ain’t bitchin’!

For those of you not familiar with CafePress, here’s the scoop: CafePress is an online marketplace that allows you to sell custom designs you create on shirts, coffee mugs, clocks, hats, and several other items. You create the design, upload it to your store, choose what products you want to sell, and CafePress does the rest. You set the price mark-up and when the item sells, that’s what you get. Pretty simple. An added bonus is that your designs are almost instantly available in the CafePress Marketplace, so people don’t even have to find your actual online store, so you don’t have to worry about doing a bunch of SEO on an independent site…not that that’s a bad idea, either. 75% of my sales are made through the CafePress Marketplace.

And don’t fret if you have no creative design skills. CafePress has a built in affiliate program managed through Commission Junction that lets you sell other seller’s designs and take a cut of the sale. You could have an entire CafePress store fully stocked with other people’s products. I’ve done just this with the Movie/TV section of WarehouseLarry as you can see here.   All of those designs are actually from another shop called KaptainMyke.

If you have any interest in graphic design, CafePress is a great way to make an extra buck or two doing something you enjoy!