Introduction
A few weeks ago, in May 2024, Zazzle put out a call for any LGBTQ+ creators to share with them their stores, and their story, in the hopes of getting featured. I made my submission, and now, it has been accepted! My products, face, and quotes are being prominently featured on Zazzle for Pride Month. I am so blessed to have received this honor! This blog post will give other hopeful creators like you useful tips for factors will help get you featured, and what a feature entails.
My Submission to Zazzle
When I made my submission, one of the questions Zazzle asked was, ‘What does pride and equality mean to me?’ I believe my submission was picked because I was very honest, and very detailed, writing out several paragraphs of text. It makes sense that Zazzle would want to display testimonials that are longer and contain more relevant keywords, because it helps their SEO when it comes time to write their blog post.
My advice, make sure your text submissions are a decent length, like a couple of paragraphs, rather than one or two sentences.
I also had to provide a link to my store. And here is the important part – my store already had LGBTQ products that had gotten sales.
I believe this is a big part of why I was selected. For all the talk about celebrating the community, Zazzle does EVERYTHING with the end goal of selling more products. So, they will want to promote creators whose products are gonna sell. And things that have already sold are more likely to sell again, compared to products with no sales.
So, if you want to get promoted in an upcoming Zazzle feature, you need to be working on your products for that niche months in advance, and building up those sale numbers. In fact, all the products above had their sales in 2023, so in my case it was the earlier, the better.
Notified by Zazzle
Today I received an email from Zazzle, letting me know that I was selected to be featured.
As long as you have a current email attached to your Zazzle account, you won’t miss out on knowing if you were selected or not.
Zazzle laid out three landing pages where my store would be featured on their site: the Zazzle homepage, the Creator landing page, and the “trending” sidebar of the homepage. But, they don’t click though and show every instance of your content being featured.
For example, my quote appears on the Honoring Pride Month blog post:
I also found it interesting that the product thumbnail Zazzle chose for me was a product that, while it was made to be appealing to LGBT, was not one that had any sales yet: my Roll With Me Rainbow Skate card. It was, however, an editor’s pick.
This made me wonder, did having editor’s picks make a product more likely to be used as a thumbnail? Seemingly no, because another featured creator, Muerte Art, had their Rainbow Pride Dripping Skull badge design featured, and that was not an editor’s pick.
Make Sure Your Store Is Ready for Visitors!
With your thumbnail being featured on the front page, in the side bar, and more, you will hopefully be getting more clicks onto your store homepage. So you need to ask yourself – are you ready for that?
Do you have cover images on your store categories? Do those cover images go with the theme? For example, my Apparel category uses the trans gamer t-shirt as its thumbnail.
Do you have a nice personal bio? Are you doing anything that might alienate your target audience? For example, if I have people interested in pride month clicking my store, it would be in bad taste to have a Blue Lives Matter banner on my store.
Personally, once I got this feature, I rushed to update my personal bio on my About page, because it was too long and wordy – I was even getting bored by reading it! 😂 Just little fixes to make the page more welcoming.
Conclusion
I hope this blog post has given you some insights into how to appear in Zazzle’s next content feature. For more useful Zazzle tips, check out the Zazzle section of my blog. If you have any questions, or want to share your own feature success story, leave a comment below!
Peace, love & sunshine,
JessicaAmber
