How To Promote Your CafePress Shop Free On Xooguru

Create Your Store Page

Your store page is what potential customers will see when they view xooguru.com. The easiest way to add your store, is with the simple form on the website.

Step 1: Register

Registration on xooguru.com is necessary before you can add or edit any pages. Registration is free and you only have to enter a few details. Please enter a valid email address, as you will need this to receive your Xooguru commission. You will not be sent any SPAM and your details will never be shared with any third party.

You can use the name of your shop as your username, although this is not encouraged. If you wish to add a profile page or another shop at a later date, it may be better if your username is something closer to your own name.

To register, go to xooguru.com and click on the Log In/Create Account link on the top menu bar.

Step 2: Go To The Form

On the xooguru.com Home page, or the Virtual Store page click on the “Add A CafePress Store” link. Alternatively go straight to the Simple CafePress Store page.

Step 3: Name Your Store

Enter the name of your store in the text box and click “Add or edit”

Step 4: Fill In Your Store Details

Add the details of your store on this page. All fields are mandatory except for the “CafePress Tag” field. Unless you know how to add a custom CafePress tag, leave this field blank as one will be generated automatically for you.

Spend some time on this page and especially on the “Keywords” field. Try to think like your customers. What would a customer type into a search engine if they were looking for your items. Add some single words as well as some 2, 3 or 4 word phrases. Aim to add about 10 to 20 if you can.

Step 5: View Your Page

Once you have filled in the form, click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page. You should now be taken to your store page.

Please be patient, when your page first loads, all of your item data has to be retrieved from CafePress, this may take a few minutes. If you have a very large number of items and designs, this process may fail and an error message may appear. If this happens, use the Contact Us page and send me a short email with the name of your store. I will then create a custom CafePress tag to fix the problem.

Step 6: Protect Your Page

We recommend that you protect your store page, to prevent others from editing it. Xooguru is a wiki and the concept of a wiki is that people can keep adding to and editing other peoples entries. When it comes to promoting your virtual store however, we know you probably don't want this.

To protect your page, make sure you are logged in and viewing your store page. Then click on the “Protect” link on the top menu bar. Here you can check the 2 boxes to prevent anyone editing or moving the page, then click the button to confirm it.

Promote Your Store Page

Adding your store page is only half of the story. You may have the best designs in the world, but if nobody knows they exist, you wont make any sales. So here are our suggestions for quickly promoting your new Xooguru store page for free.

Social Bookmarking.

If you are not already a member, sign up to a social bookmarking site like Digg or Delicious. Use this to bookmark your new page, you can do this by clicking on the “Share” button near the top of your page. Please also bookmark our Virtual Stores page to let other people know about our service and increase visitors.

So, what are the benefits of bookmarking your page? Adding your page means it will appear quickly in search engines, you have more backlinks, increasing your pages rank in search engines and more links mean people are more likely to find your page.

You may also like to look through some of the other virtual store pages on xooguru.com and bookmark a few you like. This is mostly an altruistic act, but if you do it for other people, hopefully they will do it for you.

Blogs.

If you are a blogger, why not add a link to your Xooguru on your blog and tell people why they should visit your store.

Social Networking

If you use social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, then why not add a link to your page on your profile. You can do this by using the “Share” button on your page, just like social bookmarking.

Submit To The Xooguru Directory

There is a Xooguru Directory of pages which is not actually part of the xooguru.com site. Add your page to this directory in the virtual store section for another link.