The first part of this series looked at companies offering merchandise shops that can be used to sell your own custom designs on products such as t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, bears and even books or CDs. This second part looks at how you can use the products to promote your own business.

The first part covered websites such as CafePress.com (a US based company), PrintShop (a UK based company), SpreadShirt (a European company) and Make my megaStore (another UK based company). These sites have a wide range of products that you can customise with your own designs and sell in your own shop.

But you're not limited to selling the merchandise to other people. You can buy the products you design yourself and use them to promote your business. Suppose you wanted a casual uniform for your staff so that they presented your company image to customers. Just create a design to print on a polo shirt or sweatshirt and buy a few from your own shop. You can even add a hat with the same logo.

You can create customised products such as mugs, teddy bears, keyrings, bumper stickers etc. to give away or sell at trade fairs. Just upload the designs, apply them to the products, make them available in the shop and buy a few.

Click here to see some of the products I created at CafePress.com

If you need a large poster or display for a fair, you can create one on your computer, upload the file to your CafePress.com shop and have it professionally printed and delivered to you.

Maybe you need catalogue of your products or a brochure explaining what your company offers, or maybe a professionally bound business plan or proposal to give to investors. CafePress.com offers a book printing service in several sizes and binding styles. All you need is a PDF file (Adobe Acrobat format) and an image file for the covers. You can upload them directly to the site and get your books or brochures printed on demand. Part 3 of this series will look at printing your own books in more detail.

CafePress.com can also be used to create real audio or data CDs (rather than CD-Rs). These are created from master discs which need to be sent to them. For audio CDs you can also upload MP3 files.

Future parts of this feature will look at ways of using these sites to publish your own book or launch a music band.

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