Creative tools?

[TShirtfort]

Are there any tools out there to help creative zazzlers get their stuff seen? I am talking about unique artistic colorful creative stuff that doesn't use AI or templates. Tech wise I know photoshop, illustrator, affinity, word, and similar programs the best. Also real world drawing, painting and photography. I signed up for the snuggle hamster but it looks so confusing and I have to find my discord password to even begin to figure it out. I know of RSS but I don't really get it either. Like I used to try to do those rich pins but I wanted a variety of my stuff shown not just one or two designs.

I don't understand anylitics. I tried doing an extension but you had to pay for every useful feature and I can't afford that right now. Trying to just do it on zazzle they are like views 0, clicks 0, etc... Well state why please. As in say that cute retro fun colorful artistic music design is a bad keyword and say exactly why in English while sad grey drab demure is a good keyword even though it has nothing to do with your designs.

I've got a website it also doesn't get views ever. Sigh. If I was super technical I wouldn't be doing this, I just want to make cute and funny designs. 

[LMGildersleeve]

Shannon times have changed for sure. I remember way back in the day "real" art and photography sold on this site. I started here in 09 with my own art and I was doing real well until the bottom dropped out in 2015. I had never used social media until Squidoo came along and then I started earning referral income for the first time.

That Zazzle doesn't exist anymore. If you don't change (using graphics for designs, using social media, learning about trends and catering to those customers) it becomes very, very hard to actually sell something on Z. We now have to become a marketer, advertiser and website developer to make it all work for us. It's a business and that means changing with the times.

Art and photography is everywhere on the web now. Everyone is seen and the entire world can now show off their work. You become a little tiny fish in an ocean of content.

I hear your frustration. 💐

[NigelSutherland]

One of the best things about Zazzle is that it's a marketplace, so you don't HAVE to promote yourselves. Having discoverable niche products by search works for me. I do share on Twitter and Pinterest, but I'm not sure how much that helps...

[Connie]

It depends how small your niche is. In a niche like weddings, with hundreds of thousands of products, even the smaller subniches are buried, so we end up having to do external promotion.

[JimCarnicelli]

Hey there Shannon. I feel you on your frustration. Most Zazzlers are creatives who don't want to spend time dealing with the other aspects of the business. Which of course is why we use Zazzle for most everything else. I agree with @NigelSutherland that Zazzle does promote your stuff in principle. When people ask me what I think the most important thing to focus on beyond solid designs I tell them product name and tags. Zazzle's search mainly uses those texts and not much else. I also believe that most Zazzle sales begin with people going to Zazzle and searching for specific things. It's clear to me that some people are earning more from referrals than from royalties. So clearly there is external marketing that can be done. But nobody makes money if people don't buy stuff from Zazzle.

Is there a reason to do extra marketing beyond Zazzle? I think so. Even if it's marginal for most of us. I'm glad you joined Snuggle Hamster Designs. I see you imported 3 stores but haven't done much else beyond that. But here's some good news. Your pages on SHD have shown up in Google searches 1,698 times so far. Some of those people who saw you in search results clicked over to look at your stuff. You got this benefit for almost zero work and absolutely zero cost.

If you want to increase your visibility there are more things you can do on SHD. You can import your Royalty History data and use all the free sales reports. They're fairly basic but useful. Since you already have a solid sales history I think you'll find you can get a clearer picture of what has worked well for you and maybe which way you might go in your product development and marketing too.

There is the social media route of course. I keep telling people I'm highly skeptical of SM marketing. But SHD does provide some cool tools to make it easier to post your stuff to Pinterest, Facebook, and so forth. That's a Premium feature that requires a paid subscription though. Mark Highton-Ridley ( @HightonRidley ) offers a variety of nice SM tools under his NiftyToolZ brand as well.

I totally sympathize with your frustration about keywords. There's a bunch of tools out there and consultants you can pay for their time to help you with the laborious task of improving how your products show up in search using your texts (name, tags, description). And at SHD we have our Niche Explorer and Niche Analysis tools too. But the truth is that there's no magic answer. Unless you have a lot of money to spend on the best human talent you are going to have to do a lot of research and experimentation yourself for now. I have been doing R&D into how to make SHD more proactive in offering keyword advice using big data and machine learning techniques. But this is still a hard problem and there's a long way to go before you can have a magic machine do this part for you.

Here's some big picture good news though. You probably think about this as a competitive zero sum game. You want your products to be more visible than your competitors' so you can "win". But the truth is that everyone wins if all products are "perfectly" described. The ideal for a customer searching for something is that they see exactly what they searched for right away. And the ideal for you is that exactly the people who would be interested in your products found them and nobody else bothered. That's one reason I'm not too worried about competition as a Zazzler or with SHD. Every small improvement in your product texts and everyone else's ends up increasing sales on Zazzle and on average for all of us.

One other small note. I've been warming more lately to the value of custom cover art. Zazzle's in-situ mockups are amazing technically. But they get repetitive in searches. I originally ignored this feature when Zazzle ramped it up because I thought it would be too much work for people to do good simulations and too expensive for most of us to buy actual products and stage them for photo shoots. But in fact I've seen a lot of amazing mockups done by fellow hamsters on SHD. These are a labor of love of course. But for our Premium customers we offer some tools that help in the creative process including image cutouts and stock images.

It seems to me you've done well so far. You've had the fortitude to get this far. No doubt you'll go farther. Best wishes. Cheers.