Cafepress.com is a great website where kids can make money, improve their art and design skills, and gain useful experience in marketing and promotion.

Cafepress users can set up shops and sell their original artwork and designs on t-shirts, tote bags, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and more. Shops are free to start, but Basic Shops can only offer one design per item. If you want to offer multiple designs, you can open up another free Basic Shop or, if you get serious about making money with Cafepress, you may want to upgrade to a Premium Shop, which costs $6.95 per month, or $59.95 per year.

Cafepress Age Requirements

Cafepress's Terms of Use requires users to be at least 13 years of age, and requires that users between the ages of 13 and 18 have parental supervision.

However, even if you are younger than 13, you can ask your parents to set up an account for you. This account must be in their name; however, when your store reaches payout, they can give the money to you.

• a love of art and design
  
• a digital editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, or Gimpshop
  
• a scanner (optional - if you want to scan paintings or other traditional artwork to sell)
• a digital camera (optional - if you want to sell your photographs)
  

Got them? Good! Now it's time to get the final thing you need:

• a Cafepress Shopkeeper account
  

Remember, if you are under 13, you will need to get your parents to sign up at Cafepress for you.

Start by signing up for a general account. You'll need an email address and password.

Then answer a few simple questions about what kind of shop you'd like to have, and open your shop.

Opening Your First Shop

Start with a Basic Shop to get a feel for the website - you can always upgrade later.

You will need to choose a unique Shop ID and shop name. Make sure you do NOT click the ticky-boxes marked "Affiliate Eligibility Opt-Out" or "Private," as these will prevent your shop from showing up in the marketplace or search engines, and reduce your income.

Once your store is set up, go to the "Storefront Info" tab to change your store description (writing a good description is important for being found in the search engines) and other settings. You can also add a logo image or heading to your shop, set default mark-ups (the higher the mark-up, the more money you'll make, but if it's too high, you'll get fewer purchases), and other settings.

Then, before you start adding products, go to your Media Basket in order to upload your images.

You will need to create images of specific sizes and image resolutions in order to create the best-looking and most profitable Cafepress products. Study the following two pages very carefully:

Cafepress Beginner's Image Workshop

Cafepress Product Templates

For example, if you want to create a basic white men's t-shirt, you will need to create an image with the following specifications:

• .png format
• 10" x 10"
• 300 dots per inch (pixels/inch)

To create such an image in Photoshop, for example, you would go to File->New, and give the following settings:

• Resolution: 300 pixels/inch
• Width: 10 inches
• Height: 10 inches

When your image is done, go to File->Save for Web and save in .png format.

Then upload the image to Cafepress and choose a name, category, and tags/keywords to describe your image.

Save them and return to My Shops->Products->Add 1 or More Products. Click the products you want to add and scroll down to select an image. Choose the image you want to add, then click Add these Products. Voila! Your first products are added to your store and you are ready to start making money with Cafepress. Select "Done" and go check out your new store!

As you get more serious about making money with Cafepress, you'll want to improve your product descriptions, tagging, and titles in order to make it easier for people to find them and easier for search engines to rank them.

You will also want to promote your shop. You can do this many ways, including social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, blogs, and including the link as a signature in your emails.