I’ve neglected this blog again. I went to Ireland for a short stay and since I arrived home I’ve just seemed to be so busy all the time.

The good news is that I’ve finally joined Zazzle and started a store. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for about three years. Of course, there’s quite a lot of work to do just to get a store started so it’s very easy to put it off indefinitely – even for as long as three years!

One off-putting thing was reading that a minimum of 100 items for sale in a Zazzle store is really essential if you want to make sales and that you need to update your store everyday to get it indexed by Google. Of course, it makes sense once I stop and think about it. I tried Cafe Press for a while but I never really put my heart into and made a 100 items for sale so I only made about two sales in a year. I don’t think I ever made the minimum amount for payment. I’m going to try very hard not to fall into the same trap with Zazzle.

Of course, putting in a lot of effort to a Zazzle store leaves me less time for my Squidoo lenses – making new ones and updating existing ones. Anyway, here’s my Zazzle store and the products I’ve done so far. There’s no where near 100 yet, in fact I don’t think I’ve even got 20 items but I shall persevere.

make custom gifts at Zazzle

I’ve been checking the stats on my Squidoo pages today and I thought I must share what seems like good news.

Back at the end of March I posted here New Squidoo Widgets – Absolutely Brilliant! I’m really pleased to report that it looks like I was right to be optimistic. After looking at stats and sales on Amazon.com, I’ve had sales of three books that appear in my right hand column Amazon Spotlight widget and several lenses are showing referrals from lenses with the Featured Sites widget, obviously I checked that links to the sites receiving traffic appear in the widgets.

I’ve been a bit lazy about using the Amazon Spotlight widget because I haven’t always wanted to spend time looking for products to appear in it. Now I’ve seen this, I’m definitely going to spend time gradually going through all my pages and putting this widget on and finding really relevant products.

I’ll report again, if and when I have more news.