I'm a bronze seller and have found that my Zazzle income is nicely increasing so it was a bit of a shock to me the other day when I realized that I only had just over 1200 products available across all of my Zazzle stores (over 1,000 of them in my main Zazzle store).   If I want to see this income increase even more than I'd better start making more products!

I have set myself a target of having 2,500 products on Zazzle by the end of March which means I need to make 50 products a day this month.   I started on the 2nd so I'm down a day already - Friday and Saturday I managed to make 50, but Sunday I only managed 25 - oops!   I still think it's very achievable and I've just got to be a little more organized.   I'm not using QC at the moment, but I'm thinking that I might use that on future weekends or days when I have a lot on.

Along with increasing my products on Zazzle I'm also looking at doing more promotion.   I already make quite a few referral sales on Squidoo, although that's usually other people's designs that I've been promoting - there's so many talented designers on Zazzle!

Wizzley is an area I've decided to promote my own Zazzle products on a bit more this year and I'm doing this in a couple of ways.   Firstly I'm writing about my actual shops like these two articles -

Looking Back in Time Zazzle Store

Seagull Prints, Cards & Gifts

With these I am basically creating backlinks to my stores and hoping that people find them and spread the word.   One of my fellow writers on Wizzley actually stumbled my Looking Back in Time article which resulted in quite a few visitors to my store.

The other way I'm using Wizzley to promote my stores is with this type of article -

Cleveland, Australia

Waterfalls of Mount Tamborine

These articles aren't about my stores, but are travel articles.   The Cleveland one links to my Postcards From store while the Waterfalls of Mount Tamborine article links to my Chasing Waterfalls store.

Another area where I need to focus is actually on Zazzle and I'm planning to go through all of my products and check descriptions and tags on all of them to make sure they're optimized because I really don't think they are at the moment!   I'm probably going to leave that until April when I'll be using a keyword tool as well so that I can try and get my products easily found by Google.

Why this push for Zazzle?   Well my plan is to double my Zazzle earnings this year, although it would be great if I could increase it by more than that :D

What's your Zazzle plan at the moment?

If your child loves the Backyardigans then I have a cool holiday activity for them - coloring in!   It's an age old favorite winter past time of children and you don't even have to have a Backyardigan's coloring book - although I'm sure they'd love one for Christmas!

If you have a printer then all you need to do is pop over to this website to get a plethora of different and free Backyardigan's coloring pages - simply click on the ones you want and print them out - you'll get some time to do your chores.........or have a quite cup of tea or coffee - and your child will be happy too.

I think that free, printable coloring pages are one of the best things about the internet as a mom - rainy days, sick children - there's always a reason to have some coloring in time.   The Backyardigan's Coloring Pages are the first sort I actually printed off for my dd, but don't tell her I told you that because she's so not into the Backyardigans these days (they grow up way too fast!).

I should mention that there really is not reason why you can't color in one of the pages as well, enjoying activities like this can be a great way of spending quality time with your children.   I also find that coloring in can be a very relaxing activity and a great way to destress after a hard day at work. 

Time to revisit my personal tier challenge on Squidoo, now to be honest I haven't really spent a lot of time working on this, but here's the latest anyways.

I did some work on my How To Earn Money on Squidoo lens on 7 November - which basically consisted of adding a link to my Zazzle Journey (an article I wrote on Wizzley) as well as updating a couple of featured lenses making them links from a text module ie do follow.

I have also done some work on my Mocktails lens.   On 8 November I added a link to a google doc for some of the recipes in a printable document and on 9 November I added another link for a few more of the recipes that I've created in a google doc.

I also changed the link list that I had - lots of people were clicking onto the different links I offered to various sites, but I hadn't updated it in a while and I have several articles at different places myself now.   I want to keep the clicks to stay on my work so I changed the links to all of my different articles (won't help the challenge as such, but could help my overall income).

On 9 November I had some exciting news as both of these lenses were in tier one - Mocktails was 1,722 and How To Earn Money on Squidoo was 1,984.   Unfortunately they were back in the second tier on the 10th, but it was an exciting time nonetheless.

Now to find time to work my magic on some of the other lenses while also updating and working on my Christmas lenses and trying to get my Valentines Day pages ready for the post Christmas push as I’ll be away from home for a lot of December and some of Jan.

On a side note a lens I wrote to help promote my Disney Princess Posters lens is on the cusp between tier 2 and tier 3  which is pretty amazing considering the traffic is really quite low on it and it just confirms to me how important the clickthrough factor is.   Why do I say that?   The click through rate on the new lens is 93% which I think might explain some of the low traffic lenses that are in tiers one and two.   The question is how to get a high traffic lens with a click through rate that high.

Have you ever wanted to say I Love You in a different language?   Well if you do here's a webpage that I know you'll love - How to Say I Love You in 24 Languages - what's not to love about that webpage?

Which language is this in?

JE T'AIME - I LOVE YOU (French) by gunjan_k30
View other T'aime Postcards

Why it's French of course, the romantic language of love. Of course you could just get a card that says I love you in 30 different languages if you don't fancy trotting the other's out occasionally!

I Love You (30 Languages) by Holiday_Gear
Shop for a card with zazzle.com

Well life has a knack of getting in the way and I haven't managed to do much about this challenge over the last few days, however I have noticed that at least one of my lenses is heading the right way!

I have discovered that I forgot to do one major thing at the beginning of this challenge and that was to record the ranks of all of the lenses I mentioned - doh!   All my notes are pretty useless without knowing where I started, so I'm going to list all of the lenses I mentioned in my original post, along with their rank today and we'll take it from there.

In five weeks I'm off overseas to spend Christmas with family and I don't know how long I'll be away or how much computer access I'll be able to have so this is going to get even more challenging - here's the list and present ranks for you -

Tier One Potentials

Top Ten Michael Jackson Songs - 4,275

Mocktails - 4,153

Disney Princess Poster Store - 5,610

Lady Gaga - 10,722

Baileys Irish Cream Shots and Shooters - 23,829

Baileys Cocktails - 35,329

Lady Gaga Sunglasses - 15,316

How to Earn Money on Squidoo - 2,798

Batman iPhone Cases - 6,947

Supeman iPhone Cases - 10,382

Unique iPhone Cases - 13,770

Phineas and Ferb Posters - 13,248

Marilyn Monroe Posters - 8,434

Tier Two Potentials

Lady Gaga T Shirts - 16,253

Katy Perry T Shirts - 29,170

Howard Wolowitz Belt Buckles - 17,385

Chocolate Cocktails - 19,417

Gifts That Say I Love You - 16,934

Celebrity Rubber Duckies - 25,308

What is 80s Music? - 29,256

Spongebob Posters and Wall Decals - 38,869

Lou's Cocktail Lounge - 95,418

The Best Christmas Gifts for 2011 - 83,911

Well I can hear the words to a certain song in my head and it goes a little like this..."dream, dream, dream dream..."

The stats overall look far worse to me then when I first picked these lenses to work on!

A positive is that How to Earn Money on Squidoo is getting close and that was one of two that I had the rank written down for so it's gone from 11,190 to 2,798 - I think that's a success and I'm sure we can push it the rest of the way.

The other lens that we focused on was my Mocktails lens and although I still have a lot of things to do (promoting clickouts being a main one) it has risen from 6,213 to 4,153 - not quite as dramatic, but it's moving in the right direction.

I also have a number of Christmas lenses working their way up in rank and as it's that season I'm having to spend a bit of time on these so that has affected this challenge, but we'll check out our progress this time next week overall and I'll try and keep you updated on here with all of our little tweaks as we do them.

Marilyn Monroe is a classic sex symbol, it's hard to believe that she's been dead for nearly 50 years as she is instantly recognisable by everyone - even my 10 year old daughter recognises Marilyn's pictures.

It's hardly a surprise that Marilyn Monroe posters continue to be popular seeing as she lingers in our memories still.   I find it amazing that she died before I was even a twinkle in my parent's eyes and yet I know so much about it, talk about a queen of pop culture.

Marilyn Monroe posters are just as popular these days as they ever were and I have seen them hanging up in a range of different places, my tween would actually like one of Marilyn in her ballerina dress to go on her wall and I think that is one of the keys to her popularity.   Male and female alike we're all under Marilyn's spell and would love to hang her posters up in our homes and/or workspaces.

I looked at this lens in more detail on an earlier post and I'm really happy to report that today the lens is ranked at 3,665 which is a great improvement on where it was, although I still have that last push to go.

Today I have changed another of the featured lenses modules over to a text module which only leaves a couple of them to be changed.

I have also updated the links list with my last tier one challenge blog post.

Upon reading the lens I realized I still had a few lines of squidcasting which can no longer be done so I took these out and updated the following paragraph as well because that has changed slightly.

Published and pinged and we'll see how it goes in the next update.

I will update the remaining two featured lenses modules over the next couple of days and then will leave the lens alone for a while and see how it goes.

I'm also going to change my side modules, at the moment I have one Amazon spotlight, an rss module and a feature lens module.   I'm going to update the featured lens module with a book on html which hopefully someone will be interested in.

I have published a mocktail article for Hubpages which links back to my Mocktails page as well as creating a few more backlinks.

The rank is at the moment 4,211 which is an improvement although I still have a way to go.   

I have added a links module near the top of the page which links to Christmas mocktails - I'll be changing this over to embrace other seasonal mocktails which will be a great way of also keeping it updated.

Published and pinged

I think that my How to Earn Money on Squidoo is a really good lens and it has been a good tier two lens for a while, but it's now in tier three.   I want it to get into tier one - it doesn't sell anything, I only get tier payments for it so it needs to pay it's way!

This lens is in the Top 100 of the Squidoo Community lenses and so gets steady traffic, it has a purple star as well.   The surprise to me is that the majority of the traffic comes from Google (I had assumed it would be more internal traffic.

I have 752 backlinks for this lens so I don't think backlinking is the problem, the problem appears to be a low click through rate so my first challenge is to increase this.

Day One - Lensrank 11,190

What I Did

I added a link to my personal Squidoo tier challenge post and then I decided to change over a couple of the featured lenses modules.   Now the featured lenses modules are no follow now so have no seo value, however I have a lot of people click on them because they're appealing.

Not only do the featured lenses modules have no seo value they also do not appear to count as click throughs.   The solution is brought through fellow lensmaster Greekgeek who gives us the code needed to recreate our own featured lens modules which means we still have the look we're after, BUT the links are do follow as well as the click through's will count - YEA!

Following the directions from Greekgeek on how to build a better featured lenses module I changed a couple of the existing featured lens modules over.

I added a blackbox and a link module to talk about my tier challenge and added links from my blog posts detailing how I'm trying to get lenses into tier one.

Published and pinged.

Result

Day Two - Lensrank 11,011

Well it's a little better!   Today I submitted this lens to a bookmarking site that I like.

I used the method above to change over a few more of the featured lenses modules over, published and pinged.

Are you looking for some Disney Princess Coloring Pages?   It seems that thousands of people are and as a mum that's not at all surprising to me.

I've compiled a page of free printable Disney Princess coloring pages at the link above and they include different combinations of the princesses together as well as all of Disney's stable of princesses on their own.

If you have children of your own they you'll know that coloring in pages can be really, really helpful for keeping your stress levels under control.   When my daughter was a toddler I let her watch 30 minutes of television in the morning which gave me a chance to do the morning dishes, check emails and grab a cuppa.

During the day you need to find time to relax as well and you have to find little ways of creating this time especially on the days when the children are cranky or you were up half the night with them and this morning they're as fresh as a daisy while you feel like a zombie!   Coloring books or pages are a great way to give yourself a chance to sit down with a cup of tea or coffee and relax knowing that they are learning independant play and (usually) are quiet as it takes a lot of concentration to color in.

I used to buy a number of coloring books so that I had them on hand and they were always very popular, but the costs can soon mount up which is why I am so grateful to the friend of mine who told me you could get free printable coloring pages online.   You can get nearly all of your child's favorites online if you look hard enough.

Let's face it most little girls go through a stage of loving the Disney Princesses so this page should help you with those coloring pages and when they like something else I'm sure you'll have no problem googling "Phineas and Ferb Coloring Pages" for example.