How to Earn Money with Cafepress

The reality is, earning money on Cafepress is extremely difficult and requires lots of promoting, networking, and luck. Even though you do not have to invest any of your money on Cafepress, you are still investing lots of time and effort into it, without the guarantee of pay.

The following are a list of reasons why I did not make any money on Cafepress:

1) I used a free store. Free stores on Cafepress have strict limits. I could not, for example, put my designs on certain types of clothing. Furthermore, I could not upload my store onto a blog or website and promote the store from there.

2) My niche. I drew anime characters. The problem with this is that you cannot legally draw fanart and sell it on Cafepress, and most fans of anime will not buy original character designs. Furthermore, anime fans also have the option of visiting non-CafePress stores to find official anime t-shirts, which they overwhelmingly prefer.

3) My popularity. I am not a well-known online blogger, artist, or writer. Networking is an excellent way to introduce your products quickly to an audience you are familiar with, who would probably be more willing to spend money on you. However, I did not have the luxury of being well-known to an Internet audience.

4) The competition. There are already some excellent artists out there who were in the same niche (in my case, anime-style art), and came up on the first page of Cafepress searches. The average buyer is not going to look through fifty pages just to find a design (my designs had very, very low page-rank).

So why did I not continue and try to gain prominence as an artist and eventually make money on Cafepress? Because honestly, it took too much of my time and energy, and I did not know whether or not I would profit.

Here are the steps I took to create and sell on Cafepress:

1) Sketch the design.

2) Ink the design.

3) Scan the design.

4) Clean design on Adobe Photoshop.

5) Resize the design for various formats on Cafepress.

6) Add designs to various merchandise (which gets extremely tedious).

The above process took me hours. Even if I worked non-stop, I would probably still only get one design finalized a day. Don't forget that you have to create many, many designs before becoming a half-decent Cafepress store. There was no way I could make so many drawings during the summer without losing my sanity.

Aside from making designs, there were always various methods to increase awareness of your store, including creating a Squidoo page on it, and posting about your store on various Internet forums. That takes even more time.

I eventually came to the conclusion that I was spending too much time on a venture which could take months to properly establish (including having various designs, generating popularity, etc). Even then, there was still not the assurance that I would earn a single cent. Plus, I discovered that writing was lot quicker than anything else I could do, and Associated Content paid upfront.