Sunday, August 22, 2010

Referral Revolution



Zazzle has a great referral program and the best part about it is that its so easy to jump in and get your piece of the pie. You can get referral commission on your own products or help out your friends by promoting their products. By promoting others products you can earn referral cash and network at the same time. Everyone wins. In this post we will look at some great ways to make referrals on Zazzle.

1. Twitter- The easiest way to make Zazzle referral sales is to start a Twitter account. You can either go to the Zazzle marketplace to find items to promote or do a search on twitter to find zazzlers promoting their own products. Make sure to be logged in to Zazzle so that if you drop a link your referral id is automatically embedded. Of course you can also just put an * at the end of your own shops Zazzle url. ex. http://zazzle.com/yourshopname* Make sure to use hashtags when promoting on Twitter so that Twitter users can find your tweets. Also make sure to keep those conversations up. No one wants to follow someone who is strictly cranking out referral links.

2. Facebook fan page- Of course using Facebook to promote Zazzle items every once in a while is smart. I probably wouldn't promote the item directly on the fan page unless its one of your products though just in case as Facebook frowns on affiliate links. However if you link your fan page to a blog post you wrote about the product then that is a great way to make more referrals and promote your blog. You can of course also setup a Zazzle panel full of your own products or others products to your fan page and display it prominently.

3. Zazzle referral blog- Probably my favorite way to make referrals on Zazzle is to blog about products I like. Go to the Zazzle marketplace and pick maybe ten of your favorite items in any one category. For me since I make funny shirts I like to pick ten funny shirts I find in the marketplace. Then I write some funny witty descriptions about the shirt or just detail why I like it. I then give credit to the original designer and pop out the referral link. You can even tell the original designer that you did a post about them. They will be happy to share it. Of course share the post on Twitter and Facebook as well. If you have more time you can make an even longer list. The possibilities are endless. A Wordpress blog on your own domain is probably the best way to setup a referral blog. If you want to go the free route a Blogger blog would work fine.

4. Squidoo- Creating a Squidoo lens is another cool way to make referrals on Zazzle. Of course you need to provide good quality information on Squidoo and must actually be teaching someone to do something. If you just go to Squidoo with the hopes of just promoting random Zazzle products without adding quality content that teaches the Squidoo community something your lens will be shut down.

5. Build your own custom zazzle shop- Once you are a Zazzle associate you can login to your zazzle account and build your own shop full of products of whatever stuff you want to include, whether it is from your own personal shop or the Zazzle marketplace. This is a great way to get referrals. All you have to do is drive traffic to your shop and hopefully sales will come.

Written by Timothy Fox, Soge Shirts graphic t shirts

2 comments:

  1. You said "If you just go to Squidoo with the hopes of just promoting random Zazzle products without adding quality content that teaches the Squidoo community something your lens will be shut down."

    Are there specific cases you know of where this happened? Because I know a lot of people who have Squidoo lenses on specific CafePress or Zazzle items that are shopping only (not educational...no real other content) and they may not rank well but I haven't heard of any getting banned. In fact, Zazzle and CafePress are two sites which Zazzle allows to people to put more than the normal max of links to in a lens (there's a max on linking to one site too many times...I forget how many...but some sites have exceptions).

    I've had Squidoo lenses up for several years which feature T-shirts from CafePress on specific topics, and one featuring creative business cards just from Zazzle and haven't been shut down...and I know of a lot of other people who do this and haven't been shut down. The card one might be considered informative because it showcases different alternative ways to use business cards. But the others, though on a specific theme, are geared towards shopping, and have no "educational" content.

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  2. @Gale: As you probably know, there was a big to-do at Squidoo because of the tactics used by some affiliate marketers. Google was not too enthused by this and Squidoo had to appease them by limiting affiliate links, banning spam sites, etc.. However, they seem to be more lenient towards lenses that promote their partnerships with vendors like ebay, CafePress and Zazzle.

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