HOW I MADE 10,000 POD SALES (And How You Can Too) - Redbubble, Etsy, Teepublic, Merch by Amazon

so me about three years ago i go online i go into redbubble for the first time i'm blown away i haven't set up any accounts i've made zero sales i'm brand new look at all these different products featured artists i'm thinking huh i could probably do this i jump over to etsy i start looking at t-shirt designs i start looking at you know different products this guy's got 14 000 sales over 2 000 people 23.92 have favorited this shop huh and i just picked this at random so i'm looking at this a few years back i'm going on to tea public funny t-shirts all of these are designed by regular people now there's tons of them but i'm thinking what do they know that i don't how are they able to make these sales i go on to amazon i find a t-shirt shop it says here visit the t-shirt store so i click on visit the t-shirt store oh my goodness not only do these guys have sections upon sections for their shirt store look at their picture they've got staff are you kidding me how big is this operation so obviously my mind was blown redbubble etsy tea public merch by amazon could i ever make sales could i ever upload designs and actually make sales well that was me three years ago and after a lot of hard work a lot of time and energy a lot of learning a lot of failing here's some tips and tricks that i use to reach 10 000 individual sales i noticed this the other day i was adding them up literally sitting there watching tv and i added them up for my different pod sites print on demand sites and i was over ten thousand and i thought wow think i need to do a video about some tips and tricks that i've used over the years and some failures that i've done as well you know some lessons learned and i've got one concept near the end of the video that i think you might find really helpful and that you will come in helpful during your darker days when you're starting to doubt yourself this helped me very much and hopefully it'll help you too so you know what let's get into it let's [Music] go so we definitely live in a crazy time we've got more opportunity than ever before our entire world is our marketplace now we're not in a local mall selling to a local neighborhood we've got billions of people available to purchase items and i've just got a small sampling here of the print on demand sites that you could take a look at so when i first started i signed up for a couple and i just kind of got my feet wet and i made some mistakes along the way and the big one is i immediately got you know super excited about well i can just upload football shirts or i could just upload superhero shirts i would strongly strongly recommend that you avoid trademarked images copyrighted images the lure will be there and if you go on these pod sites like redbubble like t public even etsy you're going to find that there are lots of trademarks and fringe designs i would just say steer clear there's nothing worse than investing a year or two of your life into something and it gets your account banned and i can speak from experience that happened to me okay i was up on etsy i was in i i made i think well i made well over a thousand sales and then my account was banned and again i've got a whole video about etsy and my struggles with etsy but i would encourage you though if you're doing print on demand at least understand the concept of opening up a printful store and opening up an etsy shop because it can be you know really lucrative under the right circumstances so i would just say avoid all of this okay stick to original designs that you yourself are creating here's another thing that's going to get you down is you know you go into redbubble and you look up something and you're just going to see massive results this was another big mistake that i made early on as i just i started going and uploading funny t-shirts funny cat t-shirts well you're just you're going to be one little tiny teardrop in the ocean there's not much point in looking at these genres that have just hundreds of thousands and millions of designs so what i would encourage you to do and i've got some tips here later on in this video but i'll spoiler alert you know look for a niche that actually people are interested in so there's all sorts of niches on redbubble that you can look after and i'll and i've got videos and upon videos about how to do that one of the things i like doing are niche marketing videos so i would encourage you to subscribe to this channel and you can see more and more videos about niche marketing so here's a quick tip about just you know if you're if you're thinking about getting started you're not sure what to do it can be a little overwhelming i know from for me it was overwhelming at first there's so many options there's so many videos there's so many different things so what i would recommend this is what i did is just you got to get started somehow you've got to get some motion and some momentum so i would say get started understand you're not going to be perfect but i would say sign up for every free print on demand site that you can find just be like redbubble t public society6 open up an etsy shop just understand a lot of this stuff you're not going to be making sales out of the gate but you're understanding how it works so think of it and this is what i did and i think this was really helpful i said to myself i don't expect to make any sales for the first year first year okay so i'm going to be working an hour a night every night for a year and maybe two hours on the weekends and i'm going to school that's the way i thought of it in my mind i'm going to school for free to learn how this works because the growth on this can be exponential and what i mean by that is you can start off small and then as you gain more followers and as you gain more likes and as you in you know insert social media into your life and you know maybe open up a pinterest account and maybe open up a second and a third uh you know uh pod platform and all of a sudden you've got an inventory of 300 400 2 000 designs that are high quality and all of a sudden you're you know splaying them across multiple platforms you can see over time that you're going to get some momentum going but it starts with massive action it starts with you dedicating time okay so that's the big one is you have to dedicate time to this this is not passive in that you upload three designs and i've seen people do this they upload three designs and then a week goes by and they say well i haven't made any sales this isn't passive this isn't passive income at all and it's like well right i mean you have to dedicate a lot of time to make redbubble or t public work so i so i would recommend out of the gates spend like an hour a night learning an hour a night actually creating and uploading designs massive action for a year is what it takes to sort of get into the game now you could look out okay you could upload three designs and oh my goodness i made a sale right away it's possible but think of it as buying a little lottery ticket every time the more tickets you buy the more chances you have at winning the other thing is you're going to get all excited about this and you're going to start you know uploading designs and then after about six weeks when you're not making any sales it's not fun anymore and that's the thing i want to point out is you know and there's been days when i'm not feeling particularly well and i want to meet my my quota of how many designs i want to upload every day and i just gotta sit down put my butt in the seat and get it done and so you have to have a workmanlike attitude to print on demand if you want to be successful in the long run now hopefully you find this fun right i mean it's better than digging a ditch in the middle of winter in siberia somewhere so you want to make sure that you know you're having fun doing this but make no mistake there's days when you're not going to be into it and that's okay the other thing i want to point out is failure is going to happen and it's going to happen a lot and i'm going to get into this a little bit later on but there's a thing here called the pareto principle that i'll talk about where basically the vast majority of what you do is not going to work so just be aware of that when you start i was not aware of this when i started so i uploaded 100 designs and then i was really shocked that like 98 of them didn't sell i was like what's the problem well there is no problem that's life life is that most of what you do is not going to work so learn from it understand that this is normal and enjoy the successes when they come and they will come if you put in the time and the energy they will come so i've got three big tips that i'd like to go through that i think you'll find helpful in the long run three big tips and i've got some examples in each of them [Music] okay so the first thing i want to talk about is high quality designs and i know you've heard this probably in the past you know make your designs the best make your designs high quality and you're probably screaming into the ether what does that mean what does high quality mean so i want to show you an example so i'm going to go into redbubble i'm going to search for motivational okay pretty popular genre and we can see here there's 376 results so i'm just using this as an example to highlight what's good quality okay so good quality means it's easy to read it instantly makes sense like within a nanosecond it makes sense and it's strikes some sort of emotional response so typically the reason that people buy stuff on redbubble or t public or wherever is because they're really excited about something and they want to display it or they're really against something and they want to display it or it could be a gift for someone so they can go okay i love my grandma here's a grandma t-shirt but that's an emotional response so think of emotion when you're looking through red bubble designs and you know you want to upload something that's got some meaning so here i'm looking at motivational and it's the most relevant designs and we can see here you know if it doesn't challenge you it doesn't change you that's easy to read it's a sticker always stay humble and be kind i like this good vibes only easy to read despite the the tie-dye that's a very you know retro-hippie looking feel to it right so as we scroll on down we can see even on the first page most relevant there's still some areas to improve now i'm not saying that these are good designs or bad designs i'm just saying everyone's got a personal preference and my personal preference is you know for example will be all right okay that's the sticker but notice there's like space in between the sticker right here's one god is greater than the highs and it's like can you imagine trying to apply that sticker i mean it's got it's one two it's three different stickers right which again maybe by design there's nothing wrong with that but it's just you may wanna upload a different type that's got like a round sticker like this happy thoughts happy thoughts you could put that on a water bottle pretty easily right so that's just an example if you ever want to see designs that maybe aren't so great instead of most relevant you can go into the newest because this is just now sorted by whatever's just happened to be uploaded last right so here we can see a bunch of different designs and as i scroll on down like this is a nice design easy to read clean font okay this one maybe not so much because it's not contrasting font so it's hard to read from especially from far away here's one that's a great idea that's right i'm a perfect but you can see that'd be really hard to put as a sticker because the bottom piece is not attached to anything so i'd be like eh do i really want to buy that or do i just want to look for one that's one big sticker right this one's neat but it's really hard to read right don't worry about anything but pray about and then everything which is kind of the punch line is like really tiny right and then there's like a little bible verse here not saying it's the worst design in the world but you can look at these and you can think how can i make these better here's one always stay humble and kind well it's written in disney font which is a huge red flag and it's squished like the like the font itself has been moved together so not a huge fan of that if i'm being perfectly honest and as i continue to scroll down i can see there's lots of ways you could join this niche now i'm talking about the quality you know the quality here these are really nice shirts okay so what i would recommend is take a look at designs that you like that you think would work that you would personally buy so go on to these sites and actually click the little favorite button a little heart button and you can save these designs i'm not suggesting you're going to just steal them that's not what i'm suggesting but you can look at the way they're designed the color schemes the fonts and you can recreate your own designs in a similar complementary image so that's what i did i went in and i thought okay i'm going to look at a design like this and then whatever my sayings are they're going to have that similar look and feel to it these little things up at the top these little fig leafs these are little borders some people like those some people don't so it's again you're you're adding to the to the top like to the words here with these little arrows and with these little fig leaf things and so you have to decide do i want to have those on my designs or not so you're going to take a good look at high quality designs and avoiding sort of the rookie mistakes that a lot of people use you know having things that are not centered for example that's a big one having things that are like you know like this is a good example of a bath mat where it's actually centered it's actually the same above and below but there's lots that i see that are not like that this one's got white font on a white hoodie not the greatest design because it's hard to see so you want to look you know here's a great example of a power fist but it's off center now maybe by design it may be off center but probably not and again maybe maybe the artist goes i absolutely wanted it to have more black space on the top than underneath i doubt it though so this is something where if you're going to do a circular design on a clock make sure it's centered right here's a transparent sticker that's you know i look at the way it's written don't stop until you're proud keep going it's all spelled correctly sometimes you know there's spelling errors right especially if english is your second you know second language your third language so these are things that you can you can have control over in your life so you want to take a good hard look at the quality of your design and make sure that you've got the best high quality images the best high quality fonts understand what works and what doesn't [Music] alright the second one i'm actually going to jump over to t public to walk through because we're going to switch it up here and the second piece of the puzzle here that i put together is to satisfy a demand and what i mean by that is finding something where people actually want to buy so for example i'm just going to type in let's see here search all designs and i'll type in covet 19. now you got to think a couple years ago there were zero results for covet 19 because it didn't exist right so here is a genre that is very popular i want you to wash your hands and stay at home that's on the first page missing have you seen it obviously toilet paper joke right if you're in the middle of the quaint in the quarantine this is pretty funny right so there's a lot of different a lot of different designs here that are related to covet that's one that you would want to look at another one is for example you know in 2020 there's a new president getting sworn in so joe biden is a popular trending design right so that's something where people are looking in here regardless of like they don't know what the designs are going to be they're not looking for a specific design they're looking for a specific genre or a specific trending topic so you can use google trends you can use e-rank you can just go into google and look up the shopping tab there's a number of different ways you can look for trends but i would recommend that you take a look at life watch the news you know join facebook groups uh you know talk to your friends and family even just when you're walking around the store you may see like you may maybe go to the walmart or the target or something and you see people walking around wearing a shirt not the shirts on the rack people wearing the shirt because that's somebody who bought a shirt and is so proud about what they bought that they're wearing it so that is something that you would 100 percent be kind of peeking at i'm always doing that whenever i'm out my people watching is really shirt watching i'm like what's what are people wearing you know here we can do things like for example horoscope signs is a popular genre and that's one that really never goes out of style because lots of people have well everybody's got an astrological sign but you know lots of people like the idea of different horoscope designs so i mean these are beautiful i mean these you know asian texts you know this is wonderful and you can see this pretty popular it's on the first page right so these are some designs you could look at again i'm not i will never suggest you're stealing the design but you're looking at the genre so this is what i did i went through and i looked at popular genres but popular genres that did not have a lot of results so for example let's pretend that i live in omaha nebraska so i'm going to type in omaha as my search result and you can see instead of 50 pages i've only got 15 pages one five well that's not a lot of designs right i mean you know these are pretty nice but i'm sure they could you know use a couple more let's go on redbubble just for example and just see because i like the interface there a little bit better when we see omaha i'm just typing in one word simple phrase omaha how many designs will i get back 3 800 that's not a lot of designs i mean yes it's a couple thousand you know but it's not like it's 5 million right so again you could you could make it even more specific if you wanted maybe you do omaha you know soccer you type that in and i've got 15. okay now i'm not suggesting you start ripping off omaha professional sports teams i don't mean that but maybe there's like minor league soccer players that are playing in omaha like pee wee like the little guys the children are playing soccer so you look at this result and you go okay maybe i live in omaha and i play soccer and there's a whole bunch of soccer teams and so i would have like omaha soccer mom omaha soccer dad omaha soccer grandma it's so specific that if somebody was living in that town and they had a shirt that said that and they show up to the soccer game everyone's head's turned and they go oh my goodness betsy isn't that a hilarious shirt because it says omaha it's like someone called you out in the crowd and said i know you you're special so this is the ideas you want to find these genres and then you drill down inside the genres and you make people feel special so here's one that's corn beer football now if you don't live in omaha or nebraska corn means nothing to you you're looking at it going why would i buy a corn t-shirt if i live in new york city well you wouldn't so this is designed for people that live near a corn field and corn fields are such a huge part of their life that it's on their t-shirt so that's a great example of one that's local has no trademark violation as far as i know i mean the word corn is just the word corn but it's something about that so corn beer football that's a great design and as you can see there's only 15. so if i was you know if i was gonna you know living in omaha and i wanted to exploit a genre a little niche this is one i would look at so that's an example of finding areas that not only are not much competition but has the potential to actually have people buying in that niche okay the third tip is about tagging and visibility and this is probably the least fun piece because you get into redbubble and t public and cafe press and zazzle and etsy and merch by amazon you get into all of these because you're excited about creating fish masks you know and water bottle stickers and pancake t-shirts you're not excited about search engine optimization and you know the mathematical formulas behind why things appear on the first page versus the second page so it's it's a bit boring and it's a bit frustrating because it's all behind the scenes computer nerd stuff right so i'm gonna try to break it down here really easily because i'm not a huge expert where i spend hours and hours a day trying to figure out search engine optimization it's it's relatively straightforward if you reverse engineer it so here let's take a look at red bubble and i'm just going to type in something here let's say i love welding okay welding is a profession you know the guy with the welding mask and he's like you know working on cars or he's you know welding metal together so here we go there's a picture a silhouette of a welder so there's 371 results for i love welding so this would be a niche you know you're not going to get thousands of people you know every day you know pouring into welding because it's a specialty niche right but there's a few good designs here i got sparks you know i like that phrase i'll albeit not a fan of the white space there's a sticker here with the welding with a skull you know welder's mask i love welding that's pretty popular one hashtag love welding so there's a bunch of stuff here now let's pick the top result uh that's not completely copyrighted here so we've got welder and we've got a couple machine guns or something here through actually let's let's pick this one because it's got the welding sparks so i like that design so i'm going to click on it and this is what you would do with any design that you're excited about you'd look at the design and you'd say okay scroll on down you see it's available on a bunch of different products and then you're going to look at here's the tags so way down at the bottom of the page okay so i'm at the top looking at the picture scroll right down to the bottom and you'll see here's all the reasons i was able to find it now it's on the first page of redbubble but it also may show up in a google search as well so welder stickers weld stickers welding stickers we've got a bunch of different welding and play on words so here's an interesting one hooning stickers right so i'm going to go into google and just type hooning stickers and we can see redbubble comes up when i click on shopping we can see there's the welder king one there's the redbubble one so again it's a really specific search term and i'm not suggesting that this is you know that this would work for everybody but when you click on hooning stickers redbubble pops up right away so again welding sparks you know there's a bunch of different tags you can use so take a look at how many tags we've got 2 4 6 8 10 20 he's got about 30 stickers on here or she now there's all product tags so these are different ones now redbubble adds these in as well right so the idea here is you've got tags that you yourself have entered now you can put in up to 50 and i would not consider this spamming because there's very you know there's different plays on words there's different types of genres that this person's looking at but this would be an example of you want to have a good number of tags in here this gets you into google so that you'll show up in search results people are going to find your your sticker or your design in really two different ways one is they're going to go onto redbubble and search or they're going to go into google and search and either way could get you to that sticker or to that design so that's really important to understand the way tags work now i've got some videos about tagging i've got some videos about stickers i've got some videos about niche marketing so i encourage you to watch those as well and watch other videos on youtube as well because there's a lot of different tips and tricks about making sure your design can get seen this is the big key here is you can upload a thousand designs and i've seen this people upload a thousand designs and they go i'm not getting any sales well do you go look at their store they don't have any tags they've just got like four tags well you want to have like 30 tags because that's going to help drive traffic because people are searching for this stuff [Music] so here's the bonus tip that i had promised at the start of the video i'm going to type into google this thing called the pareto principle if you ever want to take an evening and read about it it's pretty cool it's also known as the 80 20 rule so i'm just going to load this up and the pareto principle basically says that for many outcomes in life so this could be for economics wealth sales on red bubble roughly eighty percent of the consequences come from twenty percent of the causes so the idea here is that you're going to get about 80 of your sales from 20 of your designs so i've got an example of this and i just i just picked this person completely a random i don't know them i don't know any of the shops that i've looked at in this video but here's just an example here's cross the line they joined back in january 2019 they have 369 designs which is not a huge amount i think we would all agree you know there's lots of people that have 8 000 designs on redbubble this person has less than 400 designs and as we scroll on down we can see there's you know pretty neat you know regular designs and as i scroll on down to the bottom again less than 400 designs okay there's 13 000 almost 14 000 favorited designs huh now we don't know which of these designs are favorited okay we don't we don't know but if we search by relevant okay so most relevant this means that by definition redbubble has put the top designs at the top because the redbubble wants to sell your design because they want to make money too so a lot of times people look at this 13 900 and they think oh this person's all of their 369 designs must have been favorited a bunch of times but that's not necessarily true the pareto principle which is the 80 20 rule would tell us that probably most of the favorites are in the top 12 or 13 designs so these ones here are probably the most popular by a long shot and that these ones down at the bottom probably hardly sell any so these ones are good but they're probably new or they're you know they're not great sellers the ones at the top these are the ones that are selling the best typically big picture and again i'm guessing about this so if you're looking at a shop on redbubble and you're saying okay how do i get more sales well one thing you can do is reverse engineer what's happening here so you can see there's a certain type of sticker that seems to be popular or a certain type of design they're funny they've got skulls they're kind of masculine looking they're kind of like you know rebellious that sort of idea so that might be something again i will never suggest you copy their design but what i'm suggesting is the genre itself the style itself the way it looks that's something you would want to do more research on so that's just an example one of many many different stores on there and the reason that i would highlight this store and i would take a deeper dive on it or any similar store is that they don't have a lot of designs but they have a lot of favorites and that means chances are with the 80 20 rule that the very first few are incredibly popular and the rest not so much and we've seen this time and time again if you go on reddit threads or if you go into redbubble discussion groups people are going to say you know i uploaded a thousand designs but i'm only getting sales on my top 20 designs is that normal that is normal you're not going to have a huge number of designs all selling since consistently you're going to have a few designs that sell amazingly well and the remainder of the the designs hardly sell anything and that's totally normal but that's not to discourage you rather it's to say build up a portfolio you know here's a portfolio of less than 500 designs and this person is getting pretty solid traction on these designs now again there might be social media involved maybe this person's got a store outside of redbubble or there's all sorts of reasons but the general rule is the top designs are much much more popular than the lower designs so i hope you found that helpful a little bonus tip in there for you at the end i'm going to do a whole video about the pareto principle in about 80 20 but for now a little bit of a spoiler there so i hope you guys found this helpful as always please like please subscribe i really appreciate you guys feedback and hopefully you found this helpful on my journey to reaching 10 000 print on demand sales i know you can do it put in the time put in the effort i believe in you thanks for watching

Channel: Zen Watercooler

Views: 42,336

Keywords: print on demand, print on demand redbubble, print on demand teepublic, how do I make pod sales, how do make sales on redbubble, how do I make sales on etsy, redbubble how to make money, redbubble tutorial, redbubble tagging, printful, merch by amazon, passive income, selling t-shirts online, selling t-shirts on teespring, print on demand t-shirt business, print on demand 2021, print on demand sales, print on demand no sales, zen watercooler, tagging, etsy, printify, displate

Id: qUJvCLlejfg

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021