Okay, as I’m sure most Squidoo Lensmasters and Zazzle Artists know, a recent branding initiative was launched to bring the two services together. There have been a Ton of blog posts about how to build zazzle lenses, integrate your zazzle gallery, etc etc etc.

However, what really gets confusing is what happens when you start talking about the zazzle affiliate program.

Zazzle members can make money in two ways:

1) by adding designs to Zazzle and putting those designs on products and providing a markup (similar to how CafePress works). The amount you make depends on how much you mark up items.

2) by promoting any of the products on Zazzle and referring people that buy them, similar to a classic affiliate program.  Zazzle will pay 15% of the sale price to whoever refers the items.

There is a new module on Squidoo that lets you include Zazzle items on your lens. The module has two input options, one for the username and the other for keywords to search within that username’s gallery. I’ve found that including a username is almost mandatory to get any meaningful results to show up in the module. The benefits of promoting your own Zazzle items with this module is pretty obvious, but what about promoting other peoples art?

There is a significant thread over on Squid U (which recently got redesigned so you should check it out if you haven’t been by in a while) where I discuss whether Zazzle modules will generate commissions using the 15% payout affiliate program. 

Ideally, any item you put in a zazzle module would earn the 15% commission if it sells by someone clicking through. Squidoo and the lensmaster would then split this commission in the same way they split eBay, Amazon, and Cafepress commissions. 

In fact, this would provide a tremendous amount of value considering that actually using the Zazzle affiliate program to generate links to products is a gigantic pain in the butt in my opinion. (and I look at a lot of affiliate programs)

Unfortunately, Megan apparantly has stated that currently the functionality of the affiliate program is not a part of the Zazzle module. This is really quite dissapointing as I had very high hopes for using it in a ton of my lenses as another revenue stream. My artistic ability is probably a negative value so I can’t really create any Zazzle designs, but they would be a blast to promote.

Hopefully this will become a feature available in the near future, but until that time it is going to be tough to justify the use of the Zazzle module to non-zazzle lensmasters over the CafePress module. 

I do hope it gets resolved though, as I really enjoyed using the Zazzle site and I thought the designs overall were of a much higher quality than Cafepress.