Easiest Way To Start Print-on-Demand in 2024 (From Scratch)

trying to start a print on aand business can be overwhelming with all the different steps and strategies it can be hard to know where to even start so today I'm going to share my exact strategy for how to start a print on demand shop completely from scratch I've used this exact strategy to grow my own six and seven figure print on demand businesses so if I had to start over today from absolute zero this is the exact strategy that I would use I've been sharing strategies that get results on my YouTube channel for the last year and it's helped you generate over $1.7 million so if that sounds interesting make sure to get subscribed and let's get into it PR On Demand is a business model that allows you to sell various products like t-shirts mugs and posters with unique artwork on them but the items are only printed and shipped when a customer orders that way you don't have to buy any inventory up front and you can run the entire business from a laptop the only time that you have to buy a product or spend any money is after you've already made a sale this also means that if done correctly this business can be mostly passive allowing you to scale it when you have the time and keep earning income while you're traveling sleeping or watching more Alec videos there are four components that you need to get started the product the design to go on the product a website to sell it on and customers to buy it component number one picking a product this is the easy part but if you get it wrong it can ruin your business so how do you pick there's three things that I look for in a winning product number one make sure that the product I'm selling has and will continue to be an evergreen product I don't want to put a ton of work into or make a bunch of designs for a product that's going to become irrelevant to find Evergreen products we have to look at what's already been working at the end of the day nobody wants to buy a blank product so we're primarily selling the design that goes on the product if there's competition it means there's demand I've only ever sold longtime bestselling products like t-shirts mugs and posters because they've been proven to work for years my first successful product was the standard white mug and while it might scare a lot of people away because of the huge amount of competition I saw it as a huge opportunity with a ton of demand picking something that's Evergreen just means that it'll sell today and it'll continue to sell into the future number two the product has to make a good profit there's no point in doing this if you're not going to make good money I always aim for around a 30% profit margin so when I sell posters they'll cost me about 11 bucks to get printed and shipped to the customer depending on the size so since they'll easily sell for around $20 or even up to 50 in some cases that means that even after all of the transaction fees I can still easily make a 30% profit margin I always analyze successful shops like this to see how they're actually doing when I look at their monthly stats we can can see that they're not doing too bad at all and then if they're making a 30% profit margin or so they're easily doing $110,000 a month and this was literally just some random shop that I just found 30% is just a rule of thumb though because if you're able to sell a lot more units with a cheaper product like a mug you'll be able to take a smaller profit margin since you'll usually be able to sell more items number three the product has to be Universal now I sell Evergreen products but I use the design that are on the products to Target different Trends and niches we'll only get good sales if our designs are good but our product has to be versatile enough to upload all different kinds of designs to it if I'm going to sell a mug I need to be able to sell it to all different kinds of professions interests hobbies and Trends if it's an evergreen product that can make a good profit and allows you to upload Universal designs you'll be set now you can have a great product but without a great design you won't get very far the reason that most sellers fail is because they don't understand customer psychology customers don't care about your products but they do care about things that they're already passionate about this could literally be anything their career their Hobbies their pets their Hometown and with print on demand we can make products for all of those interests so to make Banger designs we have to start with one of these ideas which could be literally anything thing so how do we know where to start who do we make designs for first this can be the most difficult part of the business and if you don't do it correctly you're almost certain to fail I'm speaking from experience because my first products were terrible we want to start by doing some research to see what customers are buying and to do research my favorite platform is to use Etsy because all of the sales data is public now from a glance we can quickly see what shops are doing well based on their total review views and then when viewing a listing we can see if that particular item has gotten any reviews on its own you could also use different marketplaces like Amazon but not all of the data is public which is why I like Etsy on Etsy when I'm doing research I just need to search for the product category that I'm selling in so perhaps I'm selling a candle Now by looking at these results I can quickly spot the top performing shops that have gotten thousands of reviews usually shops will get about one review for every 8 to 10 sales that they get so looking at the reviews is a great metric to track success I'll click through one of these shops that has a high review count and make sure that they're selling the product that I want to sell their shops should kind of be themed around it then I can come down to the bottom of the page to this reviews section and this will show me what people are actually buying and then liking enough to leave a review on a few of the ideas here are teacher candles divorce candles and even retirement candles so if you wanted to sell candles but you were worried about the huge amount of competition if we target a specific idea like divorce candles the competition is significantly reduced by doing this process enough you should come up with a huge list of design ideas and with that list there's four methods that we can use to turn those ideas into actual designs the important thing to keep in mind is we're not here to reinvent the wheel simple things work best just take what's working and add a little bit of zest method number one is the traditional good old-fashioned handcrafted design from this candle example most of the top candle shops sell basic text designs just with creative fonts now if you don't know what saying to put we could come over to chat GPT and write a prompt like this to generate a list of sayings that we can put on our candles so maybe we'd use this one scent of Freedom retirement Edition then we just have to put it together so it looks nice and this is pretty easy to do as well see we could look at other popular designs to get inspiration we could use the arched two-line style from this bestseller with this modern Sleek looking font from this bestseller then if I just took this and put those two elements together we don't get a design that looks half bad we could use this strategy to make several different variations of the same saying to increase our chances of getting sales with that saying these are super easy to make in just a few minutes using a free program like figma and I've got a full design tutorial so if you need more detail you can check that out but the text designs are so simple because we're literally just typing them out and don't underestimate simple designs even the simplest single font designs can become bests sellers this design right here has over 100 reviews which means it's likely sold around a thousand times my best-selling handcraft raed designs are always stupidly simple even though handcrafting designs actually isn't too difficult a lot of people still find this the hardest method so if you're looking for something a little bit easier to do you could try method number two buying pre-made designs this seller has made thousands of dollars from this item and they don't have any complex design skills because they just bought this exact design pre-made for $5 you can use this exact strategy whenever I find a winning product like this Halloween shirt for example I can just rightclick on the image since I'm in Google Chrome the Google Chrome browser and I can hit search with Google Lens this will search for the exact design across all other areas of the web where I might be able to find the original source file which I could then buy for a few bucks and then use it in my own shop if it's already being sold on a t-shirt I could also sell it on a t-shirt just using a different mockup or I could sell it on a different product entirely Reinventing the wheel and trying to get too creative will leave you without any sales you have to take what's working and just make it a little bit different even with dozens of other shops selling this exact same design it can still work for new shops and there are entire shops dedicated to selling pre-made designs just like this now for those of you who don't have the money to spend on buying a ton of pre-made designs you could try method number three AI generated designs I personally use mid Journey but now there's a lot of different AI generators that you could use and this is by far the easiest method for generating art all I have to do is learn how to craft a great prompt and the image generator will take care of the rest using the same product research method as before I found this pumpkin shirt that's probably sold at least a few thousand times considering it has hundreds of reviews Now using that mid Journey AI I talked about I simply wrote out a prompt describing the type of graphic that I wanted and it generates me several variations from here inside mid journey I can just upscale the image and all that's left is to remove the background using a free background remover and I'll be able to sell products using this graphic but now with the power of AI we're also able to create designs that can cover entire products maybe you're considering running a mug shop and in your product research you found this floral mug that's selling pretty well inside mid journey I could ask for the same style of image and indicate the aspect ratio that I'd like it to be in so it'll cover the entire mug this will spit out a version of the image that can be perfectly sized to fit specific products like this white mug now all three of these methods for making designs work but by far the best method to ensure success is to create hybrid designs going with this method allows you to take advantage of handmade AI and pre-made designs all in one shop giving you the best chance of success with pron demand we want to make the most amount of designs possible to widen our chances of actually getting sales so by using all three methods in a hybrid strategy we'll have the best chances for Success this will allow us to build out a big catalog of products that can sell for years even the products that I made way back in 2020 which was 4 years ago now still continue to sell and make me passive income to this day by using these four strategies you should hopefully see that making artwork isn't too difficult after all and you'll be left with a ton of designs however even with the best product and the best designs if your print provider sucks you're almost guaranteed to fail the print provider you choose will dictate how quickly your customers get their products the level of customer service you get as the seller for orders with defects and shipments lost in the mail and ultimately how much profit you get to keep from all of your sales print of gelato and printful are the kind of top three print OnDemand providers and I've used all three of them for my own print on demand businesses over the past years now they all do have their own pros and cons But ultimately to this day I've stuck with printify I could go over several reasons why they're my favorite but just on cost alone you can see that printify always outperforms their competitors that means that with every order I get I'm keeping more of that sale as profit I've used PR for years now and they've genuinely been the best to work with they've enabled me to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra profit since I'm selling tens of thousands of products but we're still left with another issue which is getting all of those designs that we've made onto the product that we're selling in printify if you have 20 mug designs that you created in bulk it could take you quite some time to get them onto the mugs that's why I invested over $20,000 to build the printify product uploader program this program allows you to upload as many designs as you want at a time and bulk upload them to whatever product you're selling on autopilot so there's no user input required you could start your uploads go make a cup of coffee and when you come back all of those designs will be uploaded to the product you selected pream and ready to go this is a massive timesaver so when you're done watching this video I'll have a link where you can get my automated printify product uploader program completely for free now with all of our products ready to go on printify we need a place to sell them online and there's several options here as a beginner you've probably heard about a lot of different options that you could go with but hands down the most beginner friendly and easiest way to get started is to open a completely free shop on Etsy we want to sell where the customers already are Etsy has over 95 million active buyers and they drive more than enough organic traffic to their website than you'd need to grow a six or seven figure business Etsy is the best place as a beginner when you're just first getting things figured out and once you're in a comfortable position and have some cash coming in we can talk about scaling to Shopify Etsy drives so much organic traffic to my businesses that I wouldn't even have to use Shopify if I didn't want to plus printify is an Etsy approved integration which means that we can connect it to our shop and publish all of our products ready to sell setting up an Etsy Shop is super easy to do and I've created a quick start guide which will walk you through everything that you need to get your shop open and started from coming up with the business name to creating a branded email getting your shop open and ready to sell this guide will walk you through it by following this guide and using the links in it it'll get your shop set up completely for free in under 10 minutes again at the end of the video I'll give you all of these resources including this free guide now you might be wondering why we aren't using Redbubble Teespring or Society 6 or any of these other free to use print on demand marketplaces and the short answer is because they don't work that well I've posted over 2,000 products for sale and over the past few years I've made a grand total of $232 so not a very worthwhile process if you ask me the issue is that these websites just don't drive enough traffic to be profitable and if you do end up making sales you'll lose most of your money to the fees now once your Etsy Shop is open there's a few things that we can do to the design of the shop to help it feel more trustworthy and generate sales what exactly should a trustworthy shop look like well here's a good example of one first just notice the logo that I've got in the corner it's a super clean logo that really isn't anything too special again this could be made using AI or just using one of the templates that you get from canva I made this particular logo using canva next look at the banner on the top of the shop this just displays basic information about the shop it makes it look really clean and more than anything it just conveys the vibe of the brand right it's premium modern custom and that's what the banner is for to convey the idea of quality and trust this is a great example of what a lot of beginner Shops look like it's all over the place they're selling products that don't make any sense and nothing about this shop really conveys trust the mockups look bad and lazy and the designs look really sloppy this shop is the same story or they've got a little bit better idea because they're only selling mugs but they're infringing on copyright and none of their mock-ups look good again and nothing about this shop feels real or communicates trust both of these shops kind of feel like those junky gift shops that you find around a tourist trap we want to go for something that feels more Boutique where it feels like we specialize in our items compare this mug shop with one like this this and hopefully you can see the difference everything you do from the logo to the banner to the mockup images it all needs to build up this image of a premium brand when you do this and you really focus on making your shop look professional and premium it really helps with component number four getting customers getting random people online to see pick and buy our products out of everyone's seems like a hard task and it sort of is if don't know what you're doing we have to get into the potential customers head and have them imagine that they've already bought the product we're selling out of everything that we've covered by far the most underrated aspect of the business is the mockups these are the images that display the fictional item as if it were real since we're not ordering every product that we make to take a photo of it the mockups basically have to sell the product for us the mockup images are the marketing for our pron demand and products whenever you go through and look at the top shops in any category selling any product they've all figured out what mockups to use to get the most amount of sales these mockups or similar ones to the best sellers are how we build trust and the first step to actually converting these random Shoppers online into paying customers now it's really common for these bestselling mockups to be available for purchase right on Etsy or similar website for just a few dollars or if your product permits it you can try generating similar looking mockups using AI to actually get your designs onto your product mockups you can either do it manually by hand which admittedly can take quite a while or you can use free bonus number three the Photoshop mockup script this allows you to generate hundreds of mockups on autopilot without any user input with this program not only can you use your bestselling mock-ups but it's also way faster to use than anything else like place it which those mockups don't work anyway once again this will be available at the end of the video free of charge now here's where everything finally all starts to come together we've picked and made designs for our product we've gotten them uploaded and ready to sell in our Etsy shop we have mockups chosen and made and now we have one more important task which is getting our products to show up when someone searches for them all we have to do is put good SEO keywords or search engine optimization in our listings this will help get them to rank in the Etsy search engine we'll simply search for the type of product that we're selling with the design idea that we want to rank for so maybe this floral mug then we just look at the top listings here because they have the best SEO keywords we can simply open up one of these listings and then look at the keywords that they've put in their title section and all the way down at the bottom of the page in this tag section it's these little bubbles are each a tag we can reuse these keywords from Top listings in our own listings these keywords are already proven to work which means using them will give us the best chances of ranking on the first page of search results organically now we could decide to pay for Etsy ads but the ads will only perform as good as the product is and they'll still only show the ads depending on the SEO that you put in the product just relying on organic unpaid traffic you can get almost the same exact results as if you were paying for Etsy ads the only downside is that you have to wait a little bit longer for all of your products to rank organically in search you might have noticed that I ran zero Etsy ads well basically zero I only use the free traffic on Etsy I'll pay for my own traffic on a Shopify website but I don't need to do that on Etsy as promised you can find a link down below to get access to the Discord Community the quick start guide the printify product uploader and the Photoshop mockup script all completely for free because you finished the video leave your questions down below I hope you found this video helpful and please hit subscribe

Channel: Alek

Views: 579,554

Keywords: ALEK, Alek, ChatGPT, OpenAI, MidJoureny, Easiest Business to Start in 2023, Easy side hustles, side hustles 2023, easy side hustle, AI side hustle, super easy money online, make money online, Make money with AI, AI revolution, Print on Demand AI, POD Etsy, Sticker Business, How Much I made, easy 6 figure side hustle, six figure income, online business, Alek Sheffield, Alek Sheffy, ecommerce, passive income side hustle, print on demand, make money, pod, print on demand 2024

Id: Nxj2Q5ONZ0g

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 13 2024