So in last week's video, we covered a very important topic. And what that was, was
copyright infringement and trademark infringement when you're creating t-shirt designs, leading to your listings, being taken down and removed
from print-on-demand websites. So in today's video, I'm going to walk you
guys through step-by-step here on the camera and
here on the computer to show you how I make my personal designs to make sure that I'm not infringing on any copyrights or trademarks. So with that being said, today's video is going to
be straight to the point, but I do just wanna make one quick note to say, welcome to the
channel if you are new, my name is Greg and I like to talk about online entrepreneurship. A lot of the videos you
find on this channel are about print-on-demand
and affiliate marketing. Those are the two business
models that I personally do. So if you're interested
in making money online, feel free to look around the channel and consider subscribing. Now, lastly, before we
get into this video, to all of you guys who have
been supporting these videos and this channel overall, thank you guys so much. Without further ado, let's
go ahead and get started. So the very first thing when
creating t-shirt designs for print-on-demand is
to find out if the niche that you're thinking
about printing designs in is actually profitable. Now this is a step that
many people overlook, especially beginners,
because they're just excited to create designs and put
them out there for sale. However, creating designs
about random topics that you wanna design
on in the very beginning will hurt you a little bit
because you may be going into very competitive
and saturated niches. What that means for you
is if you're not looking into these niches before creating designs, it may take a lot longer for you to start seeing your
first sales coming in. So with that said, my very first
and highly recommended step before you start creating
designs for print-on-demand is to quickly do some niche research. Now, there are a lot of niche
research tools out there both free and paid, however, I recommend being careful
which one you choose to use for print-on-demand. Most of these tools out there
are using Google search data. However, for print-on-demand,
we really need a tool that's using t-shirt
print-on-demand data specifically. So with that being said, I'm going to save you guys a lot of time, instead of comparing all of these tools. I just want to jump into the
tool that I personally use. Now, switching over to the computer here, the tool that I personally
use is called Merch Informer. Now it is a paid tool, however, they have a three-day
completely free trial. So everything we do in this video, you can do on the free trial. So I'm going to go ahead
and get logged in here so we can start using this tool. And once you're logged in
whether it's on a free trial or a paid plan, you're
going to see this dashboard. And all we need to do
is come to the left side and click on competition checker. So right here in this
top box called keywords, this is where you wanna type in the niche that you're considering
making designs about. In the beginning, it's very important to find a good niche that has a good score on this competition checker, because that will give you the best chance of starting to see those first
sales coming in the fastest. So to give you an idea of how to do this, I'm going to show you a good niche, and I'm going to show you a bad niche. So first I'm going to type in
tacos and we're going to see if designs on tacos are
good for print on demand, or if it's far too competitive. (keyboard clacking) So just like that, this tool
has given us a letter grade. It goes from A to F so
as you can see over here, tacos rates at an F. So this means that by the score of an F, tacos is not going to be
a good niche to go into, especially as a beginner, because there's far too much competition. There are a lot of people creating designs in the tacos niche so
it's going to be hard for yours to get found. So with that said, I'm just
going to come right back up top and I'm going to search for another niche. So when we searched for tacos, it was just one word. So
we just type in tacos. However, when you search for any niches that are more than one word put parentheses around that search. So in this example, I'm
going to search for van life. Since this is more than one word, I'm going to put parentheses
around it the search. (keyboard clacking) And then I'm just going to click search. Now while this is loading
for a second here, for those of you who are
not familiar with van life, it's basically people
getting into camping, converting their own vans. This is a pretty interesting niche and I've been watching the trend go up. And as you can see by the
results right here, it got a B. When you were searching these niches, anything that gets an
A score or a B score, is something that I would
recommend going into. And just remember, you
don't have to limit yourself to just one specific niche. With that being said, just a quick note. If you need a full length
tutorial on print-on-demand from start to finish, I'll link
it down in the description. It will expand on why these
niches are so important. But as we look at these results, we can see right off the bat
that we have a B score here. So that means it's a
good niche to go into. There's not a lot of
competition in this niche. So it's a good niche to
create designs in because there's a high probability
that you will get seen and you will get sales. So one more quick thing, just
to show you about this tool. If you do scroll down, you can see all the keywords
that people are using in their listings, and you can even see 10 of the best-selling t-shirt designs in this niche currently. Now these are not t-shirt designs that you're going to wanna copy as is. In the next section here,
I'm going to show you how to come up with ideas
to create these designs. So now that we've found a good
niche to create designs in, step two is to find
inspiration for the designs that we're going to create. So coming back to the computer, the way that I like to find designs and get the creative juices flowing is to come over to Pinterest. So you don't need to have
an account on Pinterest to do this. All you have to do is click
explore and it'll bring you right into their website. So now what we're going to do is keep that van life niche in mind. And now we're gonna
search for t-shirt designs that have van life, or have camping things in that niche just to get some ideas. So the overall niche of van life may be a little bit specific, but I'm going to search for it anyways. All I'm typing in here is van life shirt just to browse through and get some ideas. So now, as you can see, when you start scrolling through here, you can see a bunch of t-shirt ideas. Now you don't want to go in
and just copy these designs. That is completely not
fair. It's not recommended. But the reason we're
doing this is to get ideas and find things that we can build off of. So looking at these photos, these shirts look a
little bit basic to me. I'm just finding things
that say van life on them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch van life over to camping (keyboard clacking) and see if we can find a little bit more interesting shirts here. So this is the type of result
that you wanna find here. So these are all shirts
here with great text and designs on them. So as you start scrolling through these, you're going to gather a ton
of great ideas for designs, but this brings us into
step three of this process. Step three is finding out
if the text on these shirts is copyright or trademark protected and if we can use that
text in our own designs. This is one of those very
important parts of this process. As we were talking about
in last week's video, if you use text on your design
or images, company, logos, anything that is protected
by copyright or trademark, your listings will be taken down. So what we are going to
do is one quick step here, just to find out which
ones of these phrases we can actually use in our own designs. Now, one more disclaimer, I guess here is we're not going in and copying these designs. If the phrase is not copyright
protected on a design, that means that we can also use it. However you wanna make sure that you're not copying their design. Later on in this video, I'm going to show you how to
create your own custom design. So you don't have to copy these, but I don't want anyone
to get the wrong idea, thinking that we're just coming in here and copying people's designs. So quickly, I'm going to
show you three different ways that you can find out
which ones of these phrases you are allowed to use on your designs. So looking at all of these designs here, I know from experience the
ones that are typically longer have less of a chance of
being copyright protected. However, it doesn't mean
that you're off the hook and you can just freely use them. But for the example in this video, I'm going to find one
that I'm really not sure if it's going to be protected because it is a shorter phrase. So if you look right up top here, you can see one that says, keep it simple. This is interesting, I
don't know if keep it simple is a tagline of a company. So I'm going to show you how to find out. So the first way to find
out is to go right over to the original tmsearch.uspto.gov What this website is, is the United States
Patent and Trademark Office and it allows you to search
all of their records. So what we wanna do is go right into a basic word mark search. And we're just going
to type in that phrase, which is keep it simple. (keyboard clacking) Now we don't need to
select anything else here. We're just going to hit submit query. Now, what this is going to
do is bring up a big list of everything that has keep
it simple that is protected. Now there's two things that we need to look for in this list. First is to find out on this right side, if it's live or if it's dead. If it's dead, it means
we are allowed to use it. If it's live, it means that
it's actively protected. Now here's the second part
that we need to look for and this is the reason
that I don't personally use this website, but I wanted
to show it to you guys. The second thing that
we need to find out is if this phrase, just how we typed it in, keep it simple, not anything else. Just keep it simple is protected
on apparel and clothing. Now, as you can see, there
are multiple, keep it simples throughout this list. So what you have to do is
click in on every single one of these and read through this description to find out if it's protected
on apparel, clothing, hats, anything that you're
going to be designing on. Now as we can see from this
one, it is protected on paper, paper, stationery, all
different things related to paper and rubber stamps, but it's not protected on apparel. So now we need to go
back and we need to look at the other ones to find out if they are protected on apparel. As you can see, this can turn
into a very lengthy process. So this brings me right
into the second way to find out if a phrase is
copyright or trademark protected. This second way is going
to be a lot faster. But as you can imagine, the
third way is the ultimate way, which I'll get to just in a second. So moving on to the second way, this is a website called trademarkia.com and basically again, you're
going to type in keep it simple. (keyboard clacking) Give that a search. And then you're going to have a very streamlined approach here that's going to show you
in a more simplified way, just for this phrase of keep it simple, what the results say. You can see on the right side, if it is live or if it is dead. And then it's going to show you in the already opened description,
what it is protected on. So as you can see for
this specific search, we actually did get pretty lucky. And in this trademarkia search, it shows that keep it simple
on clothing is labeled dead and it is not an actively
protected phrase. Now this worked out very well
and we got our answer quickly. However, in other cases, when you're using this website to search, you have five pages that
you need to scroll through to find out if it's protected on clothing. It doesn't always work out this easy. Now with that being said, this
brings us into the third way to check if it's copyright
or trademark protected. This is the way I personally use because it is ultimately the
fastest way to find out. So what this is is actually
back on the first tool we started on of Merch Informer. This video is not sponsored
by Merch Informer. It's just, they have really
good tools and again, you can use it on their free trial. If you wanna make a big list of this and just get ahead of the game, you can do all of this
on their free trial. This is a tool that I
personally use regularly and as you get further
into print-on-demand, you'll probably find
yourself doing the same for the tools that I'm
covering in today's video. So all you have to do is
come over to the left side, click on trademarks, and then
click on trademark alerts. Now, all you have to do is type any phrase that you wanna search,
which is keep it simple. And then what's nice about this is you can actually press Enter and you can type in all
of the other phrases you wanna search at once. So if we come back to Pinterest, we can type in any of these other phrases that we wanna check as well. And it will search all of them at once. So for this example,
I'm actually just going to search the first one,
but I'm going to click Save. It will add it to the
list at the bottom here. And all we have to do is
click Check Trademarks. Now, once that loads very
quickly, just refresh your page, and now you'll have a quick answer on this check mark right here on if you can use this phrase
specifically on apparel. Now, as you can see,
keep it simple is safe. It has a check mark, not
a red X, meaning that yes, we can use this phrase on apparel. So as you can see, this tool
is very quick and effective. So if you're back on Pinterest, you can gather all of the phrases you want and search them all at the same time. So just like that, we
finished up step three of this process and making
sure that this phrase is actually able to be
used on a t-shirt design. And it's not going to get taken down for copyright or trademark infringement. Now we've done all of the
preliminary work coming up to creating our t-shirt design. So now we can go into a t-shirt designer and actually create the design, knowing that it's not
going to get taken down for copyright or trademark infringement. So with that said, now
let's get into step four of this process and actually
create t-shirt designs. Now, when you're creating t-shirt designs, there's a few important things to know. One is that you wanna make sure that if you're putting graphics in your design, they are not copyright or
trademark protected as well. And the second is I highly recommend using a t-shirt design tool.
There's a few reasons for this. Mainly it's going to
be fast and efficient. You're going to have templates
you can build off of. And second is also very important, the graphics and the fonts that you find on a t-shirt design tool are
copyright and trademark free. So there are going to be a lot of different t-shirt
design tools out there. I have used a ton of them, again, to save you time here,
instead of comparing them, I'm just going to show you
the one that I personally use. And what this tool is
it's called placeit.net Again, this video is not
sponsored by placeit.net. It's just the one that I personally use and I highly recommend because
they really are the best and they've solved all the problems that we face as t-shirt designers. So with that said, I'm
going to switch back over to the computer and go into placeit.net and show you how to create
some awesome designs. So this is placeit.net, now placeit.net is not just
for creating t-shirt designs. They also allow you to create
mock-ups with models on them. They allow you to create logos,
videos, all kinds of things, but we are going to be using this for creating designs right now. When you hover over designs, you can come down to
t-shirt design specifically, and then we need to sort
this to find the ones that are related to van life or camping. Now there's something
really cool about this, which I'm about to show you. And this is one of the reasons
that I really like using this tool is because van life is new, van life is very niche
and it's very specific. So there's not a big chance
that they're actually going to have a lot of van life designs. With that said, if we type in camping, we can customize them to van life and I'll show you how
to do that right now. So I'm going to type in camping up top, (keyboard clacking) and then I'm just going to click Enter. And now you can see, these are
all camping t-shirt designs that we can customize, and they're all going to be
fully commercially usable. And we can just bring in
those phrases that we found on Pinterest to customize these designs. So right off the bat, looking at this one, this one actually says simple life. So that draws me to
think that we can create this to keep it simple. Now, technically any of
these we could transform into keep it simple by
just changing the font. But I'm going to use
this one, for example. So once you click on this, it
opens it up into the designer and this is where you
can customize everything. So I'm just going to change the font, which is over on the left here and change it to keep it simple. (keyboard clacking) So now, as you can see, just like that, we've changed the text, but this is the part
where it gets really cool. All of these graphics on the right side, and you can search them to sort
whatever you're looking for are all copyright and trademark free. They're included when you're using Placeit and they're all fully commercially usable. So if we just switch
this to camper over here, I'm looking for a van, something
that looks like van life. So as we scroll through
here, this one is perfect. So this is a van, this is a camper van, and one of the best parts to
creating your t-shirt designs with Placeit is all you do
is click on that graphic and it re-edits it into your design. As you can see, the tires are
lined up, they perfectly fit. It just puts it in the
place of the other graphic and it does the hard work of formatting and lining up that graphic for you. Now, if you wanna go in
here and you wanna change this text or anything, you can still click it and
change the size or the colors. But just like that in a matter
of a couple of minutes here, I just created an awesome t-shirt design. Everything on this design
is commercially usable. It doesn't infringe on any
copyrights or trademarks, and there are a couple extra
steps that I'll just show you how to finish this process. So as you can see, this design
has a colored background. And as you know, if you've
watched any of my other videos, when you're creating a
design for print-on-demand for a t-shirt, you want it to
have a transparent background. So you can put that design
on any color shirt or item. So all we have to do is
click on the dropdown for the background color, switch it to the transparent checkerboard. And now we have a design with
a transparent background. The next step here, all we
have to do is click Download. And just a second here, it's
going to process our download. And then in a second,
it'll be ready for us to download straight to our computer. So just like that, our download is ready. I can click to open it. And just like that, we have ourselves a high
quality t-shirt design. As you see, when you zoom in
the quality on this is awesome. But with that being
said, this design as is, would be good to upload to
Teespring and Redbubble. However, if you are someone
that uploads to Merch by Amazon, which I highly recommend
uploading to all three of these, you'll find out that Merch by Amazon has a format requirement. They want the size of your
design to be 4,500 pixels by 5,400 pixels. So how do we make sure that
this design is formatted in that 4,500 by 5,400 pixel size? Well, if you have a resizing
tool on your computer, that would be very easy. You
can just adjust the size here. However, if you don't, you
can do this right on Placeit. So all you have to do is go
to view all of your downloads. And then right on this design,
we just hit the dropdown. We go to crop and resize. Now it's going to bring
in our design right here. All we have to do is switch
it from whatever size it is to 4,500 pixels to 5,400 pixels. Now our design is in the right size and I'm just going to
move it to where I want it on the shirt, which is
in the upper chest area in the center of the shirt. All we have to do now is click download. And again, this t-shirt design
in 4,500 by 5,400 pixels is processing, and now
it's ready to download. We can click and open it
right on our computer. And now this is sized for Merch by Amazon. So all in a matter of minutes here, we've just created an awesome design that's not going to be
taken down for any reason. And it's precise to use on any of the top print-on-demand websites. Also, I'm going to link up on the side and down in the description, the full print-on-demand tutorial. So it'll walk you through
from this point on, what do you do with these designs? How do you get your first
sales and how do you get your print-on-demand
accounts to start growing? So as always, I hope you enjoyed this. Feel free to give it a thumbs up, share it with anyone who you
think can use this information. And with that being said, I will see you all in the next video.
