Spelling / grammar - so important to your sales and brand image

Not the grammar police!

This is important only because it can seriously affect your bottom line as a Zazzle (or other POD) storekeeper.

Bad grammar and misspellings can really put people off your store. People will forgive the odd misteak(!) but if they see repeated errors, they will get the impression that you don't care enough to get it right. And then they will go on to think that your "bad" attitude spills over onto your products and customer service.

This could mean that you turn away 10, 20, 30% or even more of your customers... and your bottom line will be reflecting that. By putting it right, that could represent a big boost—if I had a way of boosting my sales by that much, I would jump at the chance!

There's one type of particularly common error that I often see on the Zazzle forums, and even worse than that, actually on storekeepers' products!

What are these mistakes I'm on about? The most common are when someone uses:

• your instead of you're (when they mean "you are")
• their or there instead of they're (when they mean "they are")

If you have any products with such boo-boos on them, folks who know better simply won't buy them and that can't be good for your monthly sales! Worse, they may never come back to your store and you certainly won't get word-of-mouth recommendations!!

So if you struggle with this problem, here's a tip to help. Think how someone might say these words if they were speaking at a posh do. They would pronounce each word separately, rather than running them together like you do in friendly writing or casual speech.


Here's a bigger list that hopefully will reveal a pattern:

• They are—in casual speech/friendly writing becomes they're
• You are—in casual speech/friendly writing becomes you're
• It is—becomes it's
• That is—becomes that's
• You will—becomes you'll
• They have—becomes they've 
• We will—becomes we'll 
  

Do you see the pattern?

When you leave out a letter or two, to give the reader a clue you use that little symbol called an apostrophe. When used in this way, it is given a special name—an apostrophe of omission. Yes, you've (you have) got it, it's (it is) because you're (you are) using it when you have omitted one / some letters.

So next time you're about to use the word "your", double check and see if you can say "you are" in its place. If you can, then it should be you're. Same for "their" or "there"—if you can say "they are" in its place (without changing the meaning), then it should be they're.
 

Another couple of gotchas

While on this subject, a couple of personal bug-bears of mine:

• I should of done that—aaargh!! I should have done that...
  
• mixing up compliment and complement
  I can pay you a complIment by saying something nIce about you; if something looks good nExt to something Else, it complEments it

Remember, this isn't the grammar police, this is a friendly tip to help improve your sales and your bottom line. But for your edification, here is the Grandma Police (hehe!)

The Grandma Police - kids t-shirt by HightonRidley
View other Grandma police T-Shirts

Do you know of or see any other grammar errors on storekeepers' products that might be preventing sales? If so, we'd love you to share them here, so don't be shy, drop off a comment... (no need to link to them, that wouldn't be fair)

comments / feedback not just welcomes but actively encouraged :)

Creating customisable drop shadow text in Zazzle's design tool

Creating a convincing text drop shadow in various graphics tools is relatively straightforward but if you want to use it on customisable text on your products for your Zazzle store, you have to use their design tool to do the drop shadow.

On chunkier or large fonts it's achieved fairly easily but on the finer script fonts or at small sizes it can be really tricky, if not impossible without this workaround.

The difficulty is that the minimum movement you can achieve with the mouse using their tool is sometimes just too much for those fonts and you end up with ugly gaps that make the whole look unconvincing.

The trick is to create the first copy, move it the smallest that you can and then copy and paste the original again. You now have the original plus two copies. The second copy is on top of the original and the first copy where you placed it. You then use the "Arrange->Space selected evenly (horizontally)" tool.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's the starting point and I want a drop shadow on the monogram text, "M & S"

So I copy and paste the text:

In this next shot, you can see that I've shifted into design mode, changed the colour of the pasted text to blue and moved it to the right by the smallest amount possible. The drop shadow is on top of the original text so I still need to move that layer behind the original. I'll do that next (by moving the layer in the "customise it!" so that it's second in the list).

So I've moved that blue text layer down and this is the enlarged view that the tool provides.

To my eye, the gaps are too big, I want the (currently blue) copy to be much closer. But I can't move it any closer because the smallest movement I can achieve would put it back directly under the original.


So back to design mode to prepare to copy and paste the original again, ready for the workaround.

In the next shot you can see I've copied and pasted the original again, giving me the three copies I need. The top two are the original text and its latest copy, both maroon and on top of each other. The third M & S is the moved blue copy.

So I'm now ready for the workaround. I've selected all three copies of the "M & S" monogram text and I'm choosing "Arrange->Space selected evenly (horiz)"

In the next shot, I've changed the latest maroon copy to green and you'll see that its layer is still the topmost of the three.

...and here it is in the tool's magnified view. You can see that the green text (topmost layer) sits between the maroon (original) and blue (first copy taken) and is just the right distance from the maroon.

The next step is to delete the blue copy, and move the green layer in the "Customise it!" section so it's second in the list, under the original maroon:

All that's left to do now is to change the green colour to a dark grey, so it looks like a shadow, and show you the magnified view:

For completeness, here's me making the text customisable. I select both copies and hit the little gears icon. By selecting both, they will be given the same "Product page label" and "url parameter name". This means that the customer will see only one box to type in their monogram but what they type will be applied to both copies.

In conclusion, I hope you've followed and understood the above and that you'll be able to apply drop shadows to your own customisable text, using the workaround when the standard way looks unconvincing.

I've only shown a drop shadow to the right but you can use the same principle to have the drop shadow placed right and down—I'll leave that to you :)

Happy Zazzling!

Comments encouraged and welcomed :)

The Zazzle forum

Where is it?

The Zazzle forum is to be found at http://forum.zazzle.com/

Once beyond pure beginner, the most important forums there are

• Ideas to promote your stuff 
• and Show & Tell

A gotcha

In your posts, you can set text to various colours but unfortunately you can't use orange. If you try the following:

Here's some ordinary text followed by some [color=orange]that is supposed to be orange[/color]

what you'll actually get is:

Some text followed by some range">that is supposed to be orange

This is caused by an overlap with the code for the 'shocked' smiley in the html that gets generated. So avoid using orange text!

Forum: Ideas to promote your stuff

My own estimate / guesstimate is that for every hour spent making, you need to spend three promoting.

Most people are disappointed (in any sphere of selling their art / craft) when they produce great products and find they don't sell. Stuff doesn't sell itself, no matter how brilliant! You have to have potential buyers eyeballing them. And to get those eyeballs on your work means promotion, promotion and more promotion.

So this forum is a great place to start. Many fellow Zazzlers recognise the importance and go out of their way to promote not just their own but also other people's products. And the act of offering to do so does at least four things for them:

1. By posting a thread about their promotion opportunity, they have to put a link to where the promotion is taking place. The search engines will eventually pick up on that link. Bang! One benefit achieved.
2. Of course, they'll be talking in their post what the promotion is about - the search engine spiders love that as it gives context for the link. Bang number two!
3. People will visit the link and there's a good chance that some of them are potential buyers. Bang number three. Good for the promoter (they get referral fees), good for the storekeeper (they get a link to their store / product and royalties)
4. Full time affiliate marketers looking for good designs to promote keep an eye on the Show and Tell forum, especially the "What's the last thing you sold" thread. Bang number four!

Everyone's a winner!

Great current promotions announced there:

• Squidoo Lens: A Taste for Chocolate
• Explorer Designs 
• A Christian Witness 
• Squidoo Lens: Pi and Mandelbrot set 
• Squidoo Lens: Halloween Zazzlers 
• Totes Handbags and Purses  

Forum: Show and Tell

The Show and Tell forum is described as "Looking for feedback about your store or proud of a sale - announce it here!" and that's exactly what folks do.

Again, posting in the forum with a link to your store / product achieves all four bangs.

Other places

Of course, the forums and other folk's promotion opportunities shouldn't be the only places where you promote but it is a great start!

15th Feb 2012 Edit: One last thing to mention, make sure you use the tracker code facility. When you do, Zazzle will put the tracking code that resulted in the referral sale in the first column on your earnings tab under "Referral History".

This way you'll get to know which of your referral activities are working - an absolute must!

The way you use it is to place &tc=MyChoiceOfTrackingCode after your referrer id. Get into the habit and never forget.

Note that neither the Zazzle-provided Blog Panel or Zazzle Panel support tracking codes - but, no sweat, there's a better alternative - my Zazzlit gadget.

Used by many, many Zazzlers, it's a snip to use even for the technically dumbfounded! See the tutorial for adding and using it here.

So, Happy Zazzling to all you serious Zazzle storekeepers. Until next time be safe, be successful :)

Comments / feedback not only welcomed but actively encouraged, so don't be shy!

Zazzle print from Highton Ridley: Desiderata poster

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Zazzle print from Highton Ridley: Desiderata poster The full Desiderata by Max Ehrmann Go placidly amidst the noise and haste... A single pillar stands contemplating new horizons, absorbing the wisdom of the years. This poem has inspired young adults who are coming of age since the 1920's and is as popular today as it ever was. It has been given as a gift by loving parents, grandparents, godparents and aunts and uncles as essential life-wisdom ever since it was written. They've found it to be one of the few ways for such wisdom to get past those raging hormones and support the upcoming generation through their rebellious years and beyond!.	View "Desiderata poster"