As previously mentioned by here on POD Helper Cafepress have formed a partnership with a website called Sellit that provides widgets that you can use to promote your store in MySpace, Facebook and basically anywhere you you can post HTML code without restrictions. Previously when I checked it was in closed beta so I couldn’t really get a good look at it.

Now I have looked at it I have to admit that I am unimpressed. I think that people new to the web love this type of widget/gadget but the fact is that in general they look very unprofessional. I think they can only look good if they can be can be seamlessly integrated into the design of the website. I have yet to see this happen though.

Actually you are very limited to what you can do with this widget. It seems that you can only use a section which contains products which for most Cafepress shopkeepers means that you can only promote one design at a time. Apart from choosing whether to display one item or a grid there seems to be no customization features. At the moment you can only associate one Cafepress store with your membership too.

Verdict: One good point about this is that the links lead to your store rather than the Cafepress marketplace so you can get the commission you deserve but unless they add some features I recommend that you spend the time you have allotted to marketing your products elsewhere.

This is about the 5th in the Zazzle University series but I will be posting the others when I get time and hopefully the series will continue for a while. In this video Rob rambles on about the fact that you should market your products and while he is right I don’t think this is where to talk about it. Nonetheless this is a pretty good video that shows you two ways to market your items via twitter.

The first way is to manually twitter each item from the Zazzle product page, this is awesome. I tried it and it is simple and fast to use. They even give you some set text just in case you are too lazy to write your own. I think it would have been better if they could pull the title from the shirt though. Be sure to be logged into your account in order to earn referral fees. You can also use this as an affiliate tool.

The second way is to set up your twitter account to automatically tweet your new products. Haven’t done this yet but I think it could get messy with the bulk create tool. I recommend setting up a twitter account specifically for your store if you are going to adding significant numbers of products.

By the way, you can follow me @RudeRetro where I usually tweet about new t-shirts, sales and such like.