A free Cafe Press shop is one of the easiest ways to build an extra income online. With a few images and half an hour, you can be making money by the time you go to bed tonight.

If you haven’t already set up your free Cafe Press shop, be sure to read my earlier article, Make money: Set Up a FREE Shop at Cafe Press.

If you’ve registered at Cafe Press (it’s free) and started your first free shop, it’s time to stock it with products.

Create your first Cafe Press product

Then, return to Create + Manage or to Products, depending upon which page you’re starting from.

If you’re at your Media Basket (it says My Photos + Images near the top of the page), click on Your Shops (on the left sidebar). Next, click on the link labeled Products, to the right of your shop name. (It’s vastly simpler than this sounds in text.)

Choose a product–such as a tee shirt–and the Cafe Press pages will talk you through the process of placing the image on the shirt, deciding where to put it, resizing it if you like, and then setting your price.

Pricing

The markups at Cafe Press can seem high at first. From my experience, it’s worth it to have them handle the order-taking, production, and shipping. I mark most of my items up only $1 or $2 each, and my income comes from volume, not making very much of individual customers or products. But, that’s up to you, of course.

Make more products, for fun!

Once your item is created, make another. After all, you already have the image in your Media Basket, so why not design more tee-shirts, journals, wall clocks, mousepads, even boxer shorts or a thong with the same design!

If you have other designs that you’d love to use on similar products, open another free shop. You don’t need a new username or password. Cafe Press encourages you to open several shops using the same account.

Once you’ve created one or more shops, it’s time to tell your friends.

Promote your Cafe Press shops

Let your friends know about your new shops! Post the URLs at your website, LiveJournal or blog. Share thumbnail pictures so that they can see the images you’re using. That encourages traffic to your Cafe Press shops.

Use your Cafe Press URL beneath your signature on emails. On every list that I host at Yahoo!Groups, you can always post up to three lines of commercial links or ads, beneath your name on each email.

Get paid

Cafe Press holds your commissions for 45 days, in case someone returns an item. But, once the 45 days has passed, your commission is “cleared” for payment. Cafe Press will mail you a check on the 15th of the month, every month, for all commissions that have cleared to date.

Cafe Press waits until you’ve accumulated at least $25 in commissions before printing a check. You decide that minimum amount ($25, $50, or $100) in your payment preferences at your Cafe Press account.

Some months, I make only a few dollars at some of my Cafe Press shops. (I have a mixture of free shops and my Premium shop, Santa Flamingo.) And, particularly at gift-giving time, Cafe Press shops can provide some extra income.

Cafe Press may not become your primary source of income, but for extra dollars now and then, I’ve had excellent experience with it. And, there are some people who make a living from their Cafe Press shops.

Start right now!

If you already have an image that’s ready to use on products, you can open a Cafe Press account and be selling products within half an hour.

Try a free shop and see how you like it. On another webpage, we’ll talk about Premium shops, which give you more control over how the shop page looks.

In the meantime, experiment with free shops to learn more about how Cafe Press works. Get ideas from others’ shops, too.

Really, it’s very simple to create your shop. Cafe Press will talk you through the process, step by step. Click here to see if Cafe Press is right for you.