Hello again, my social networking friend!

Like a cowboy that never killed any indians, received no key’s to the city, or made it’s way into the hearts of profit searching webmasters, Google Referrals is finally riding off into the sunset.  Of course, since Google Referrals never worked for anything, their depart isn’t as dramatic as a cowboy riding off into the sunset.  In fact, I’ve used Google Referrals and despite getting quite a few clicks, that never turned into a cent of profit.  First they had a little red line of text at the top of the adsense control panel, and then they sent out an email to it’s users.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Referrals are, they’re somewhat similar to Clickbank, Click Junction, or Amazon.  You’re supposed to get paid whenever signs up for a product that you refer them to, through google.  Unfortunately for google, that wasn’t working out as they’d planned, and they decided to just shut it down.  Atleast they’re giving us notice, so we have plenty of time to remove the adsense referrals from our sites.

Note: Referrals will be retired during the last week of August 2008.

Luckily I only have 1 unsuccessful page that contains a referral button.  Battle of the Browsers never really saw the light of day anyways though.

First of all, Cafepress is a product merchant which allows you to make money selling your designs. The basic idea is to create a shop, add your designs to the shirts, coffee mugs, or stickers, and cafepress will sell the items for you. The only problem is, most people’s designs never get found because they are marketed poorly. For any product you want the internet’s public to see, you must market effectively.

The great thing about cafepress is the ability to share your designs without having to get your design past some snobby editor. You simply create an image and choose which products to put it on, and then your shop’s visitors can purchase the shirts. Since you’re already studying marketing for your own websites, you have an advantage over other cafepress users. Market your cafepress profile like you’d market a website, and make sure you have quality content in order to sell your products.

Key Notes on Cafepress:

• “For each member you recruit to CafePress, you will earn five percent (5%) of the base price of every sale they make for a period of one year from their join date, excluding self-buys. For example, if you refer a friend and they sell five white t-shirts, you will earn $3.49 (5% of $13.99 x 5 t-shirts).” -directly from their site.
  Cafepress has premade banners which you can use to get people to sign up:
• Go to this Page to find out what size an image should be to work best with a certain product. It’s important to know, because when you size an image wrong it ends up looking too small when it comes out on the shirt.
• Many cafepress users use squidoo pages to hep promote their cafepress shops. You can use your own website, blog, social networking profiles, myspace, or etcetera in order to promote your shop. You should advertise your cafepress shop just as you would advertise your website, minus worrying about pagerank.
• Quality and Quantity mix well: The more shirts you make, the more likely someone is to find your shirt in the marketplace. Though, shelling out crappy designs that you didn’t think out properly will hurt your shop’s reputation just like content on a regular website. Make sure your designs are quality, and you’ve reviewed them numerous times before releasing them to the public.
• Product Descriptions: Just like any other website, keywords and descriptions lead to search engine traffic. Always make sure to add descriptions to your cafepress products, because they will get you more traffic from search engines and the marketplace.
• You can affiliate with other cafepress members by linking to their products from your website. You get a portion of the money made from the sale when you do this.

You can get started selling shirts now by clicking on my referral link Here~ Yes I know, I’m a bit shameless about that sort of thing right? If you have anything against being referred by me, then just go to cafepress.com, but I’m not going to hyperlink that for you :P.

Good luck selling shirts~