Zlio Bites the Dust

Zlio was a service where you could easily build your own shop in a matter of minutes. You did not sell your own products, you received a commission for every item sold by the various retailers that you could worked with Zlio. It's a straightforward concept and one that proved very popular. However, Zlio have been losing money over the last few years and it seems that they have finally accepted that they are not going to be able to turn this around. So now Zlio will be closing down on 11th September 2011 and all shops will cease to be from that point.

It seems that the fatal blow was Zlio losing a court case against a SEO company who said that they would be able to improve the standing of Zlio shops in Google searches. Also they have had to pay damages to the SEO company for making the dispute public on Twitter.

I have three Zlio shops, none of which make me hardly any money. Having said that I have put very little energy into promoting them and getting traffic to them. In truth I have no problem with letting them go as I really gave up on trying to make any money on them quite some time ago. So really it means that I have 3 less sites to worry about and means I can stop fretting about the fact they are not getting any traffic. I had various plans in my head to improve traffic to these shops which would have involved lots of work. I am quite glad now that I never got around to doing anything about it!

Resurrecting my Zlio Shop

I put together my first Zlio shop, The Earth Store some time ago, but then have done nothing with it. I went to have a look at it a couple of weeks ago and found that more than half my selected items were now out of stock! I have now updated the shop so all items are now in stock. Because I have not put a great deal of effort into promoting the shop, I have not had a great deal of traffic and no sales. My plan then is to concentrate my efforts over the next couple of weeks on promoting the shop and making sure I have plenty of good backlinks to it. A bit late for Christmas this year, but this is more of long term strategy. My first task in this respect has been to write a HubPage on constructing and promoting a Zlio shop.

In the meantime, I have made a tentative start on 2 more shops and I have ideas for another 4!! Just where will I find the time to get these together??

Set up Your Own Zlio Shop for FREE!!

I came across another way to make money on the Internet last week which involves setting your own online shop. You can do this for FREE via Zlio. With these shops, however, you don't need to actually handle the goods themselves or the payments. Effectively what you are doing is advertising the goods on your store, then people are re-directed to the merchant who actually sells the product and you take a commission! Setting up the shop is the easy part. You can choose from a range of templates, or create your own. You then add products that fit your shop - apparently there are 3 million to choose from! You can also add Google Adsense if you want to increase your income further. It takes literally minutes to get your shop up and running.

The tricky bits are first of all deciding on a niche and a name for your shop. Once your shop is ready your next challenge is trying to get customers to your shop, which is much like promoting any other website - except that some options (such as reciprocal links) are not an option. However, there are other tools available such as link exchanges with other shops and a widget that you can post in your blog (you can see mine in the sidebar) or website.

With your FREE registration with Zlio you have the opportunity to open up to 50 (yes, that's right 50!) shops. If you have 50 ideas for shops that is. I've just created one so far - another 49 to go! I have decided that it probably best to concentrate on a specific niche, so my first shop is focussed on all things organic, recycled and fairtrade. I have called it The Earth Store. So why not try it yourself. It's easy!

By the way did I mention it's FREE!

CLICK HERE TO CREATE YOUR OWN ZLIO SHOP