What I’ve Been Up To This Fall 2015
What I’ve Been Up To
So, I know I said I was going to experiment with my PennyCharmer store on Zazzle to figure out Zazzle‘s whole zRank thing, but when my main store got zRank’d a 2 out of 10, I figured I’d better work on that one first. And that is where I’ve focused all of my online efforts for the past two months.
I got my main store up to a 4 out of 10 but haven’t been able to budge it any higher since then. To get to the 4, I hid about 90% of my products – those that I had created with Quick Create with the same Title, Description and Tags for each item. Since then, I’ve gone through the remaining products and updated each Title, Description and Tag set to make them unique(-ish) and have only a handful more to go before I’m done.
A few weeks ago, Zazzle made some updates to zRank that saw a lot of stores zRank value change, but mine stayed put at 4 (better than going down to a 3!) (:
Recently, I started deleting products instead of just hiding them – it hasn’t resulted in any changes to my zRank, but it has made my store much more manageable without the clutter of the hidden items. I started by deleting items that were out of the marketplace (over 180 days without a view); I look at each item and ask myself “if I accidentally deleted this, would I rather spend my time producing items with my new designs, or recreating this one”. It’s hard to delete stuff – some stuff still sticks around even after failing the above test (:
I’m also trying to up my game – I have a few favorite stores by other designers at Zazzle and they seem to be mostly professional artists and graphic designers. When making a new design these days, I ask myself if my design is up to their standards or if it would stand out as not belonging in a collection made up of these other designers’ works. This query also helps me sometimes when I’m waffling on whether or not to delete something.
I now have about 200 products that are invisible to zRank, with most of them set to “Direct Only”. A large number of these invisible items are Hallowe’en designs that I didn’t want to mess with during Hallowe’en. A handful of these invisible designs are the last of the Quick Create’d items, and the remaining items are wall decals for which I can’t seem to choose a direction (:
What’s Next
The next couple of weeks are going to be all about finishing up my main Zazzle store and pushing the current products into the marketplace one more time; I’m planning to share each product at least once, either directly or in a collection, during the next six months so they will all have had a chance to be seen. If after that they fall out of the marketplace again in six months then I’m thinking it will be time to let them go and delete them.
It all feels very analytical and not very creative so I’ve decided to revamp my PennyCharmer website – I need an outlet from all the analytics and this site could use an update… also, I’m going to delete my Quick Create posts since I’m feeling they’ll be more harmful than helpful with zRank floating about.
So that’s it for now. I’m hoping to see my zRank budge by early December and get back to populating my PennyCharmer store; here’s hoping!
(this article includes affiliate links)