HOW TO MAKE $1,000/Month on PRINT ON DEMAND - MASTER CLASS (Redbubble, Teepublic, Etsy, Displate)

one of the big questions that comes up is people wonder can i actually make a thousand dollars a month doing print on demand and look i'm not going to blow a bunch of smoke up your skirt and tell you absolutely you can do it the truth is it's really hard and you need to be in the top 10 percent of designers to even have a shot at making a thousand dollars a month but you can do it [Music] so here's the bottom line and it's a pretty sad world that we live in people get laid off people lose their jobs people get health problems people live in parts of the world where a thousand dollars a month is a fortune it's not hobby money and so i want to try in this video to give you real life tips and tricks on how you can actually earn a thousand dollars a month like i do on print on demand this is not a short video i want you to warn you up front this is a long form video this is like the master class my stuff for you so that you can get to a thousand dollars a month the reason i want to take proper time and energy is because you're worth it if you're sitting at home depressed anxious not feeling like you can do this i want to give you some real tools where you can sit down and come up with a plan so that over the next six months a year 18 months you can actually have a fighting chance to get to this level of income all right if you're with me and you're ready to figure this out for the long haul welcome welcome welcome my print-on-demand journey began about three years ago uh quick story 30-second story i got pulled over for running a stop sign which i didn't and so the police officer was a complete jerk to me and i got a fine for like 210 bucks and i was so angry i went to the courthouse i paid my fine and i vowed i was going to figure out a way to make an extra 200 bucks a month so that i was never outraged again if something unfair happened to me so look i know people have worse police stories than that good lord i mean i'm well aware of how the news works but uh you know don't break out your violin just yet but i wanted to share that with you to just let you know that i'm just a regular guy that worked really hard for about three years on print on demand and figured a bunch of stuff out and now i regularly make more than a thousand i think my best month ever was like four thousand dollars u.s i made and so i wanted to share with you some tips and tricks and i want to be very clear this is not just hobby income tips and tricks this is a deep dive on how to actually make a thousand dollars a month so the first thing that i want to talk about here are two types of artists the first one i just i'm just calling them a designer okay and the second one i'm calling an artist so let's take a look here at the first one if you're an artist if you're watching this video and you're an actual artist and what i mean by that is you do airbrushing you paint you draw you're coming up with your own original works then there's a specific plan in place for you to sell your art on redbubble tea public merch by amazon those print on demand sites so here's an example from redbubble this is an artist on redbubble called the latest kate this is one of my favorite shops i've highlighted it in a couple other videos this person obviously is designing their own type of art now i'm not suggesting they're drawing it themselves they might be i don't know but what they're definitely doing is they've got some sort of digital skill set that goes above and beyond just simple text designs so a lot of the videos you see online are like upload simple text designs onto redbubble and make five thousand dollars a month that's probably not going to work it might you might luck out i've had success with that i've uploaded a design and also i saw like a couple hundred and i'm going wow where'd that come from but i'm not banking on that if i had this level of artistry then i would have an entire shop like the latest kate does she's got like hundreds of designs on redbubble and they're all spectacular and she's obviously coming up these herself so that's one option for you is to create artwork that no one else can create okay so here's an example this is the store the latest kate on redbubble again i'm a big fan of this i think these are beautiful designs i am not in any way suggesting you try to rip off this store and copy these designs i don't think anybody can copy these designs these are absolutely spectacular my point is this person is a quote unquote artist they're drawing these designs themselves either by hand or using a stylus or doing digital artwork and they're creating these beautifully rendered pictures with motivational sayings this person's got 390 designs in their store and 390 designs in their store if i scroll right down to the bottom 390 there's a hundred and seventy two thousand favorites there's something about this store that is resonating with fans and they're not just simple text designs these are beautifully original illustrations that this person has either created themselves either freehand or using some sort of digital technology and at this stage it doesn't matter how but they're coming up with beautiful designs and you can tell this person is no doubt getting some sales now are they making a thousand dollars a month i don't know maybe they are maybe they aren't i have no idea but this level of success with the favorites it means they're getting a lot of traction and deservedly so this is an absolutely beautiful store so this is one option if you have artistic skill and you're like well i can draw as good as that then set up a store upload 500 designs make them inspirational and cute and come up with some variants and then you're done you don't need to watch any more of this video just upload 500 designs and be done with it and you can probably get to a point where you're going to be making a thousand dollars a month if you go to enough print on demand platforms redbubble t public merch by amazon display zazzle etsy there's a number of different options you could also open your own shopify store for example there's lots of different options but if you have this level of art in your brain go forth and conquer you don't need my advice at all so most of this video is going to be discussing the other type of artist which is more of a designer type of artist now if you're not a quote unquote artist and i'm not saying that as a put down what i mean is there's another type of artist a designer meaning you're taking other pieces of art and you're manufacturing designs out of them maybe you're going to public domain sites maybe you're you know a digital artist and you're taking two or three pictures and merging them together again that's great that's a totally different skill set than drawing freehand taking a picture of it digitally coloring it and uploading it they're two completely different skill sets so a designer is when you design products using publicly found designs so here's an example of what i would call a designer and look one's not better than the other it's just this one is more easily you can more easily replicate it so this is emily b again i just picked this person completely a random 30 designs and these are mostly text designs so you can see here do your squats wear spf squat queen these aren't like like you could make these today you could get a public domain silhouette image of a peach or a piece of fruit and you could type some text on it and you can upload it onto redbubble that's one of the appeals of redbubble and i'm just using redbubble as an example it could be t public merch whatever but these are just these are pretty easy to do so like anybody can make these designs and again this is not a put down but it's just just be aware that if this is the route you're going you're going to need a lot of designs in order to make an impact to the point where you're making a thousand dollars a month because there's so much competition in these genres if i type in the word funny cat the phrase funny cat for example i'm going to get back 443 000. well let's look at these top selling designs this is just a clipart picture of a cat like anybody could upload that it's not like this person spent four hours drawing this with a professional airbrush gun on the side of a garage and then took a picture of it like that would be completely different than this sort of a thing this is a clip art picture of a cat this is just clip art and again i'm not i'm not putting it down i'm just i'm just saying like this is very this is just text this is just clip art this is i love this antidepressant little kitty coming out of the pot thing here a little pill bottle but i mean my point is you know this one looks like somebody drew it that's hard to replicate you can't just find a picture i mean maybe you can but it's harder whereas here like a black cat clip art i mean there's thousands of black cat clap black cat clip art so my point is if you're going to pursue the strategy of getting a thousand dollars a month you're going to need to come up with some way to differentiate differentiate yourself from the competition and that's why redbubble is so hard because there's so much competition but that's okay i've got some tips and tricks in this video so you can get there okay so if we look at redbubble specifically and we have designer this is like the text designs and we have artists that would be like somebody who airbrushes where it is so good digitally that they're very hard to recreate we're looking here at redbubble print on demand you need a lot of designs in order to be successful and chances are you need some sort of niche marketing you need to go after niches that are under serviced and i'll show you a quick example of that okay so if you've watched any videos on youtube on my channel or anybody else's channel a big thing they talk about is niche marketing so here's a 30 second overview on niche marketing the idea here is that you don't want to just pursue big categories like new york new york has 250 000 designs and growing every day i love new york but i'm not spending a minute making more new york designs because i'm just spitting into the wind no one's ever going to see them unless it's by random chance that somebody's following my store or maybe they go over here to newest but chances are to get to the first page of this is going to take months if not years i'm not interested in doing that same thing here if i type in the word funny i get back 6.2 million results if that does not crush your spirit you're a better person than i am because i'm looking at that going man i think i'm hilarious but i am not cracking this top page for funny results with 6.2 million i mean let that sink in for a second that's insanity that's way too many so what i would recommend you start doing is looking at things like you know this is just one of three million examples night shift janitor it's very specific it's a specific profession or maybe it's a specific identification marker janitor mother nurse wife husband that sort of thing 14 results hey we can live with that you could upload 30 and you dominate that niche overnight night shift janitor maybe there's evening shift maybe there's donut worker maybe there's waiter there's all sorts of different professions different locations here's just an example of another one sanitation engineer well it's a garbage man right so we call them in canada anyway sanitation engineer so there it is there's a number one design out of 13 and it's a picture of a trash can now there's only 13 designs on here so you could upload 30 and you'd dominate the niche there are categories but primarily on print on demand sites customers find items through keyword searches so i'm just going to open up the sanitation engineer one just to show you what i mean when i say keywords so sanitation engineer i'm just going to scroll down to the bottom and we'll see there's keywords sanitation engineer t-shirts garbologist garbage man rubbish man garbage rubbish waste collector funny joke redbubble adds in these product tags as well there's not many tags i mean they recommend 15 but you can actually put up to 50 5 0 tags in there i usually split the difference i try to get about 20 25 tags in there so there's an opportunity here now i've got lots of videos about niche marketing so i'm not going to spend any more time on it but just one more example biologist 15 000 results too many biologists funny 6300 results getting better biologist funny woman 53 results ding ding ding there's my winner that's the niche i go after that's the extent of my niche marketing i just start doubling down on the niches how else do you identify are you a biologist and a woman are you a garbage person and a man are you a teacher and 30 years old 35 years old 40 years old you get the idea so look redbubble's just one platform that you can use there's other platforms out there as well so for example another path and there's multiple paths to a thousand dollars a month so please don't think i am floating on a cloud telling you the only way that this is done i i can share with you my experience and hopefully other people on this youtube channel share with you their experiences in the comments below and we can all support each other and help us grow and get better as a team but make no mistake there is more than one way to a thousand dollars many many different ways shopify is another example shopify is the easiest one of the easiest ways to build your own website you just kind of plug and play you buy a shopify you buy a domain name for a website you then get the shopify you know you buy it through shopify and then you just upload a bunch of designs and you sell them directly on shopify now you use a service called printful or printafi or this new or there's a bunch of different you know supplying you know fulfillment services but you basically open your own website store and you know again you're going to need to do a lot of designs and niche marketing and you're going to need to have something unique about them etsy is another option etsy's really good for custom work i sold on etsy for a couple years and again not trying to sound braggy braggy here but i was able to crack into the top 10 on etsy the top 10 percent on etsy and i was making between 100 and 200 a day on etsy before my shop got shut down due to some legal trouble but anyway i got a whole video about etsy where i rant like a lunatic for 20 minutes about it but at the end of the day etsy still is a good platform if you're selling uh and if you don't you know run into any legal trouble uh but you know my attitude is etsy can be a good opportunity for you to do custom work as could be facebook marketplace you could go to a print shop like staples and you could print signs and sell them locally you could print coffee mugs at the walmart and get them you know sell rude coffee mugs for example in your local neighborhood i do a lot of custom work so i don't say any of those ideas lightly i actually make quite a bit of money on the side doing custom work for my friends my family and then what happens is over time friends start telling friends so now i'm known as the guy the print on demand guy the graphic design guy so i get two or three requests a month from people that i don't even know they email me because they got an email from a buddy and they go hey can you make me bachelor party coffee mugs sure dude i can make those for you i'll get them printed up go to walmart pick them up and i bank a few dollars on the side because it's a fun hobby so the big thing here with etsy shopify redbubble i'll throw in tea public i'll throw in all the other sites and i'll do a quick overview here on each of them in just a couple minutes here the idea is you need a lot of designs now what is a lot redbubble i would say shoot for at least a thousand designs a thousand designs if you're on shopify it's an unlimited amount you can upload because you're the owner of the website so you want to upload as many as you can service because if you have your own website you'll be getting people asking questions how big is a medium t-shirt can you make this coffee mug can you do custom order do you ship to this country you're going to get a lot of i call them tire kickers but they're you know potential customers right etsy is sort of a hybrid between the two you're still part of a platform like a redbubble or a t public but you're getting a little bit more organic traffic from people who expect you to respond as a local shop so those are just three options but in any path you choose you're going to want to ask yourself are you a designer or are you an artist is there a way you can separate yourself as an artist maybe you have awesome photoshop skills or maybe you're a professional illustrator with adobe illustrator well if that's the case like if you as a hobby paint skateboards you're an artist like you should be like creating spray paint designs and uploading those because nobody else can recreate what you do that's what you'd want to shoot for ideally but if you don't have those artistic skills then you need to pursue the designer route which means you need to look at niches and then you need to look at variants and a lot of designs because you need to throw a lot of different lottery tickets into the mix in order to have one that hits the remainder of this video i'm going to be talking about being a designer okay so if you're an artist if you're that skateboard guy who's spray painting the sides of garages and stuff and you're a true true artist good for you i can't help you okay the rest of this video is going to be for the designers people who upload text designs people who use public domain artwork and just so you guys know that's me i'm this guy so i've made a thousand dollars a month plus being a designer okay so i'm not in any way looking down my nose at the designers i'm holding up my hand and saying hey i'm one of you you're one of me we're the exact same and you can do it too you can make a thousand dollars a month and that's really what we're what we're going to be focusing on now for the rest of this video is how as a designer do i make a thousand dollars a month u.s is it possible the answer is yes so i really pride myself on giving out advice and teaching things maybe in an unorthodox way so if we're going to get a little bit woo-woo here for a bit i'm going to try to earn my name here zen water cooler we're going to get a bit zen imagine that this is your shop all right you're a little castle in a kingdom and what you want to do so whether you're on etsy redbubble t public merch by amazon it doesn't matter whatever you want to do this is your shop okay and what you want to do is build a moat around your shop and what i mean by that is you want to build something that prohibits easy copying of your designs okay so here's an example of the lowest tier opportunity if you're getting into the print on demand space so if you're brand new and you're like well which one should i pick redbubble and t public are the easiest ones to get into you simply create an account on redbubble you can start uploading designs today in theory you could make your first sale 15 minutes after you upload your first design that's the both the beauty of it and it's also the most frustrating part of it because everybody else is doing this people are uploading designs from their phone they're uploading designs with minimal computer skills the vast majority of designs on redbubble do not sell and look i'm going to be judgey judgy here for a second if you're if you have any artistic talent at all i'm hoping you'll agree with me the vast majority of designs on redbubble are complete garbage like nobody would ever buy what they're selling but that's a that's good if you're an artist with actual artistic skills or a designer who is actually good at uploading designs because that means you have an opportunity here so i love the fact that redbubble is just littered with low end horrific designs it's embarrassing to look through because that means as an artist as a designer i have an opportunity to go in and beat the niche i look through a niche and i go i can do better than that i upload 30 designs i start making sales and i'm not saying that to brag i'm just saying look let's be honest if you want to make a thousand dollars a month you need to be a better artist than who it currently exists on redbubble that's a that's a no like that's a no-brainer you gotta have that down you have to be good at photoshop you have to have a basic skill set on canva you have to use some sort of technology and you can't just be uploading public domain images off your phone and expect you're going to make a thousand bucks a month you might get a sale here and there but you're probably not going to get that get to that thousand dollars t public is the next lowest tier it's slightly harder to get into than redbubble now anybody can sign up for a t public account but the problem with t public is that not everybody's account is activated for the search feature and what i mean by that is you'll upload 20 designs onto t public and then you'll search for them and you won't find your own design so you've tagged it all properly you've got funny cat in the tag you search funny cat under newest and your design is not there so i've got a whole video about how to get your designs searchable in t public you have to reach out to t public you have to ask them to turn on the search feature blah blah blah but what i would recommend is start on redbubble upload maybe a hundred designs and make them high quality like get them the highest quality get your store in order then apply on t public and if they don't turn on the search you can at least go back to them and say hey i've got a successful redbubble store now they don't know how many sales you got but you know you can at least show them you have a hundred designs on redbubble generally speaking t public likes the idea of artistic designs more than just straight up text designs but look i don't work for t bubble t t public i can't speak on their behalf you want to put your best foot forward when you're uploading your first designs onto t public okay the next one here is what i call an intermediate tier and the intermediate tier requires some sort of application process in order to get accepted the big beast is merged by amazon they're phenomenal huge and there's people on zen water cooler channel that comment there's a couple of them that say hey i'm on like tier 8 000 on merch i bow down to your superior superpowers i am nowhere near that on merch by amazon i wish i was and hopefully i will be someday what i mean by tier 8000 is they have 8 000 slots on amazon that they can upload t-shirt designs into to sell so no like this is not just like an open season that anybody can just upload onto emerged by amazon so when you go into amazon.com or amazon.co.uk you can go on amazon and you can like buy a shirt well those shirts are sold by people and you know some people have 10 slots some people have 8 000 slots but you have to apply to get onto merch by amazon and so that means you need to have a successful store somewhere else to increase your odds of your store getting approved i'm lucky i got to prove the first time through and again i don't say that to brag i'm just i got lucky i didn't even know what i was doing i applied and it said put in a link for your other stores and i was like all right so i put in my stored links and they were like good enough for me fine art america is another one where they're an intermediate tier now anybody can open up a free account on fine art america but in order to get to the premium account you need to spend 30 u.s a year and then that opens up unlimited channels for you on fine art america so you could upload 500 designs a thousand designs so there's people on fine art america that have like 5 000 designs they've been on online for like 10 years and they sell all sorts of products but again it costs about 30 bucks a month 30 bucks a year rather to to have the premium features unlocked if you just use the free account on fine art america it's like i think you have 30 slots where you can put in product maybe it's 20 but anyway once you pay your 30 bucks you then you have unlimited number of slots you can upload and you can even link things to like your own website that sort of thing displayed is another one where you have to apply i i've been on display now for about three years i've had some pretty good success on display i really enjoy the ease of use on display but they don't accept everybody that applies so there is an application process and you know all i can suggest is try to put your best application forward but these are intermediate tiers because there's a little bit of a moat around these companies right like not you know like imagine a gated community here your little castle your store is protected if you're on merch because not everybody can just start uploading t-shirts they have to apply first they have to build up their have to level up there's a couple here where you can do a direct customer pipeline and the two big players here are shopify and woocommerce but there's other ones as well there's big cartel and if you just google like how do i sell things online there's like shopify is going to come up they're one of the big players and i just i i personally like shopify it's just super easy to use these are not cheap if you're starting out shopify is i live in canada but let's say it's 35 us a month kind of thing woo is a bit cheaper i think it's like 25 us a month but it's like a monthly fee so you're burning daylight as soon as you start up with the account it's going to take you a whole month to get up and running and you're already out of pocket 30 bucks so i would recommend if you're brand new to the to the print on demand space you'd start off with red bubble then go tea public see if you like it i mean look if you're a month in and you're hating life there's easier ways to make money if you're not a graphic designer you can go dig a ditch you can go on you know online and just say hey i'll help out with moving people for a couple hundred dollars you know move some stuff so there's easier ways to make money right but if you're a graphic design artist you want to make sure you enjoy this before you invest in a website and a shopify account these are sort of advanced level print on demand pipelines etsy is one that also has a direct customer interface and i really like etsy i've used it for a couple years and i still sell on etsy a little bit i just sell through my wife's shop my wife actually technically owns it and runs it but i just help her out so i list a few things for and you know we make a few dollars here and there it's more hobby income etsy is a lot of work at least if you get a lot of sales it's a lot of work with people kind of asking a lot of questions they're gonna because they want a personalized experience on etsy so you know whereas on redbubble they're just purchasing from the company on etsy they're really a lot of customers feel like they're dealing directly with you so if you open an etsy shop you know you'd want to have like 50 or 60 listings and you would link to us to a supplier like printify or printful that sort of thing okay so let's talk about the keys to success here here's all the different ones and you might be wondering well where do i start i want to get like what's the best one to get me to a thousand dollars a month and the answer is drum roll please i don't know because i've only i'm one person and i've only lived one life so i can tell you that there's people that make a thousand dollars a month on merch i've seen it i've seen their their sales statements it's wonderful like woohoo it's amazing there's people that have shopify stores there's people that make more than a thousand dollars a month on display there's people i did i made more than a thousand dollars a month on etsy when i was on etsy etsy is one of the easiest ones if you have artistic skill a wonderful platform fine art america i've seen absolute beasts on that store that have thousands and thousands of designs and they've got a huge following they're also active on social media that's another piece keys to success whatever avenue you choose you're going to want to have a facebook page you're going to want to have a network of people and clients and when you if you sell something for example on etsy you can have a personalized thank you note if you sell something through your website you want to make sure that you give them a thank you gift or you send them a personalized email and say thank you this is a business the idea here is you don't just upload 20 public domain images to t public and sit back and let the cash roll in this is not passive income that's one of the biggest myths about print on demand is that you you upload some designs and it's passive it's there's nothing passive about it you've got to earn every sale and you got to continue to earn every sale so at the end of the day what i would recommend though because i don't want to just say to you i don't know what i would recommend is don't worry about shopify and don't worry about woo at the start because those take 30 40 50 bucks a month investment plus your time plus your energy redbubble's free you can open up an account today you can upload some designs today it's a high quality site i like their product personally it's free so i would suggest if you're going to start start on redbubble start on t public and go for 500 designs on each okay i want to go through a couple examples of that idea of building a moat around your business and what i mean by that is that the designs are not easily replicated now look as we jump into a couple of these examples just keep in mind you're always going to see trademark and copyright infringing designs on these websites it's super annoying i wish it wasn't there i'm only talking about the quality of the design please don't worry if you see something that happens to be trademark infringing i will never suggest that you ever go after a trademarked property be original state keep your nose clean don't worry about the trademark stuff okay i'm on display right now and here we've got gaming collections so i just went under find your display and i just went to gaming okay here we can see there's different levels of artistic creation this is minimalist video game stuff very you know a lot of a lot of gaming stuff this is one of the best selling collections on display dan fijaro and these are hard to replicate like if you like you need to know how to use photoshop correctly in illustrator correctly and these look like there's portions of them that are either digitally cleaned up or there's vintage backgrounds these are high quality in demand designs so i show these just as an example that these are not five seconds to upload this is not just a public domain picture this person has taken two three four five different public domain images or they've created something from scratch and yes there could be options in there where somebody's ripping off stuff from a trademark perspective but from a quality perspective they've added in different a different level of skill this one's called magical winter night i'm just going to let this load in the idea here being it's a high quality print imagine this on a poster this would look wonderful in fact you don't even have to imagine there it is so this is a beautiful print and it's hard to replicate unless somebody illegally just copies the picture it's really hard to replicate here we go to etsy etsy this is daniel's fine art company eight thousand plus sales look at that map wouldn't that look amazing on your wall you can actually make this yourself you know there's a program out there there's a website where you can get map designs for free i've actually got a sister channel called crafty stacks and if you just google crafty stacks in in youtube it'll come up and it's i've actually got a how-to on on how artists can make this design and so it's uh it takes some time it takes some skill and it's beautiful when it's all done this is hard to replicate and they're beautiful and this person has 8 000 plus sales of something that they've created once now they've made more they've got paris and they've no doubt have other cities as well but that's a wonderful looking hard to replicate map design here's my old favorite on redbubble these are this is the latest kate store we've seen this already i just highlight this just again because i can never get enough of this store but look at how beautiful these designs are and they're all the same similar style and they're hard to replicate they look like they're either hand drawn or they're digitally drawn this is on t public this is rusty quill rusty quill's got a couple designs on here as we scroll down that look to be like gothic dark monstrous art these are hard to replicate this is that idea of that skateboard airbrush auto mechanic somebody's got some serious painting skill here if they've created these designs themselves so if you have that sort of design then by all means go forth and conquer because you you have something that not everybody does the second tip sounds obvious but i'm just going to break it down in a bit more detail you want high quality designs now look i don't mean you need to turn into michelangelo and start painting the sistine chapel on a t-shirt but what i mean is look for high quality clean fonts make sure that your design is a clean vector instead of a fuzzy granular you know jpeg file make sure the backgrounds are removed so that if you're on a t-shirt it's got more than one you know you have more than one option for the background on a t-shirt i'm going to show you a couple examples of this and i'm not trying to put down other people's designs but look this is a deep dive i want to show you exactly what i mean when i talk about high quality designs okay so if you've watched any of my other videos i hope you guys know i'm a nice person and a kind person i would never ever want to make fun of anybody else's designs but i do think we need to get real about the quality of the designs and i'm just using redbubble as an example t public is another good example or even sometimes on merch some of the designs aren't that great but redbubble especially is just an absolute garbage dump for any and every design known to mankind on here if you ever want to see the worst designs just type in a popular search term and then go to newest instead of relevant and you can see just everything that's been uploaded regardless of popularity so i'm just going to just mention in general if if you know the person who's the designer i'm in no way trying to put them down but here's just an example stickers is a big one that you can improve the quality check this one out it's white font but they didn't they didn't upload a new design for the sticker so it's just white so no one no one on the planet is going to buy this sticker if i had a hundred dollars i'd rather throw it in the garbage than buy a hundred dollars worth of the sticker because it's just a waste of everybody's time now they're new they probably don't know but you can upload a different design for a sticker you could make a circular design a square design all black font all blue font whatever you want that's a very common mistake so there's an opportunity there if you look up a niche and you go huh great idea but their stickers junk well then great upload a better design upload a better sticker and now you're moving up the ranks above them because someone's going to pick your sticker instead of theirs another thing is that if you have a design like this one and again these are on the newest page so this is not in any way saying this is a popular design it's just a new design see how this one here girl power see how it's like one big sticker because it's one big design redbubble puts what they call a stroke around the design it's just a white apron and they did this on this mohawk sticker as well but you can see because there's so much space between the three little dots and the mohawk and the skull that it's now three different stickers it's not a deal breaker some people would like that some people might actually buy that sticker and go great now i can put the three different stickers where i want most people don't like this and they would prefer a circle or a square or something in that vein let's take a look here at funny t-shirts again i just went to newest so these are not the most popular designs by any stretch of the imagination this is a common example dark font on a dark shirt that's really hard to read here's another example way too big a font they didn't size it correctly and as a result we can't read it so again i'm not in any way trying to put anyone down i'm just saying this is examples of areas where if you're serious about making a thousand dollars a month you can't make these mistakes you can't upload 500 designs and have half of them be absolutely not sellable here's one that says little something irish but you could tell they were trying to make a flag well there's a bunch of white text here in the middle and it just doesn't translate to a white t-shirt so you'd probably want to re-upload that there's a lot of areas for improvement here on these shirts and you know as a result that's opportunity here's one do you see the mistake this is a please be kind i'm hard of hearing great idea but hearing is capitalized hearing is not a proper noun like the way you know england or you know somebody's name like that's a proper noun it should be capitalized hearing should not be capitalized or if you're going to capitalize it capitalize hard so it's the inconsistency here i have a problem with it's a small detail but it's the difference between selling the design and not selling the design and so you really need to be critical when you're uploading your designs to make sure that things are centered properly make sure your font is easy to read make sure that your spelling and your punctuation is correct do you want the period there maybe maybe not i don't know maybe you upload two different designs here's another one i am hard hearing please be patient well this person forgot the of it should be i am hard of hearing at least in north america that's how they say it i mean look maybe somewhere else in the world they say i am a hard hearing i've never heard of that not that i'm mr world traveler but it's an idea that there's an area for improvement here i am hard of hearing please be patient again it's a small oversight but chances are no one is ever going to buy this mask because they're going to be like that doesn't make any sense unless it's like funny and you're purposely misspelling something or you know that's totally different but this sounds like this is a mask that's designed to help somebody who's deaf and they're not going to buy that if they if it's not spelled correctly so there's lots of areas for improvement on stickers t-shirts the way things are spelled the way things are laid out the size of the font there's a ton of room for improvement so i mentioned this only so if you see there's 2 000 results i just don't want you to immediately give up and just go wow there's no point a lot of these designs are like really bad a lot of them so i'm not putting any individual artists down it's just i'm trying to say that to be like motivating and go hey man if you're a decent designer and you have an eye for detail and you're open to feedback and criticism and you can be self-critical you have a real chance of making some actual sales on redbubble because your designs will be better than these the third key to success is that this is not passive you're going to need to get it dedicate a ton of time and energy i hit my 1 000 mark about after six months of working between one and two hours a night every night for six months and then i got a thousand dollars in one month so i say that again not to go like i'm so great but it's just if you're if you're looking for someone out in the wilderness to give you an actual anchor and say here's what i did right wrong or otherwise and hey maybe some people have beaten me to the punch and they've gotten more sales in less time wonderful good good for you i mean that sincerely for me it was six months between one and two hours a night and there were a couple weekends where i did a push where i just sat down and for hours on end i was uploading designing checking my store opening up new accounts i just said i'm dedicating six months to it drove my wife nuts i love her to pieces but she was like dude let's go for a walk you've been downstairs in the basement for hours uploading i really just wanted to crack the code on it so i mentioned that not to discourage you i just don't want you to get bummed out after three weeks which is pretty normal at the three week week mark because you've done all this work and you've gotten zero sales like none zero sales and so what will happen is you're going to give up you're going to go well this is dumb i don't want to do this anymore that's right when you need to double down and go for another three weeks because you will start getting traction if your designs are good and if you have enough designs in genres that matter here's just one example and look i'm not going to waste your time and go through a ton of examples obviously you can go into red bubble tea public merch you can look at all of these people yourself here's just one example i picked at random because i was in the i am deaf keyword where we were looking through and i just picked the top one so that's just completely random this person kind x in has over 1 000 designs they've been online for a year so in one year they've uploaded more than a thousand designs and i say good for them they're doing the right thing look at these variants the same design but slightly different colors that's what you want they have a featured collection on their store that's what you want they've got six easy to understand collections that's what you want you can see here these are their top selling designs because we've got it sorted by most relevant you can see here beautifully laid out store easy to understand font use examples in the real world to motivate you look at stores that you like go on redbubble as a customer and order like one product go on t public as a customer order one product have it shipped to your house that will give you an idea of what you're actually dealing with i have disc plates in my home i purchased them because i wanted to be a customer first and then i was like oh i can reverse engineer this i can make these myself i own i'm actually wearing a red bubble shirt right now can't see it but i'm wearing a red bubble shirt right now and i buy the product i support the shops because i want to be involved and understand with tactile feeling what it means to own these products so i would suggest you do the same thing now look i'm not suggesting you blow an entire paycheck on red stuff but what i'm saying is buy one shirt by one mask understand what it takes to actually pull the trigger and buy something with your own money because that's the level of commitment that your customer is going to have they're going to go in and they're going to go huh nice shirt and then they're going to move on what's the difference between that and saying nice shirt i now click this and add to my cart and spend 30 bucks and get it shipped to my house that's the of quality that you're shooting for and so i hope that makes sense because it was a real eye-opener for me i started uploading onto redbubble t public display merch and then about a month in i was like oh i'm gonna buy a product and my whole view of redbubble changed it was like oh i'm not just enjoying designs i'm actually going to spend 30 dollars of my money and i remember that feeling very specifically it was like i looked at the same thing but i saw something different so look at this through the lens of an actual customer spending money and that could hopefully for the better change your perception about the quality of the design that you're uploading onto these print on demand sites okay so quick review here of the keys to success number one you must satisfy a customer demand you can't just upload funny cat shirts and expect to make a thousand dollars a month i love funny cats man do i love funny cats but i can't make any money with funny cats unless i teach my cat to write a unicycle and juggle it ain't happening so satisfying a customer demand is key you need to have niches where there's low competition and at least some sort of interest number two you want to have high quality designs and what i mean by that is make sure the spelling is right make sure the fonts are correct don't just upload calibri font all lowercase on a white shirt and think that that's going to sell you need to look at what actually sells go out and buy a shirt not one of your own go out as a customer and say what would i actually buy and why ask your spouse or your relative go on redbubble here's 30 bucks buy yourself a birthday gift see what they come back with because and watch them actually purchase the shirt they're going to look for the highest quality design you know and number three you know is is the dedication of the time and the energy i've probably spent in the last three years an hour a night easily so that's 900 hours probably more like 1800 hours probably more like 2 000 hours i try to make the experience as fun as possible so if i'm watching tv like say i'm watching a football game i'll upload designs or i'll listen to a podcast or i will listen to music but i try to make it enjoyable i don't just sit in a little sweatshop and tough it out for eight hours and never see my friends and family i try to consistently set aside an hour or two a night at least three four times a week to work on my hobbies and i consider redbubble t public merch those are my hobbies okay if you've made it this far a big congratulations you've got the mindset probably that you want to succeed at this so i'm going to give you a little bit of advanced training here this is called the pareto principle it's also known as the 80 20 rule and this is found in life in economics at work a quick example would be if you had 10 employees eight of the employees are going to take up 20 percent of your time and two employees are going to take up 80 percent of your time it's the same thing with customers at a store 80 percent of your customers take up 20 of your time 20 percent of your customers take up 80 percent of your time how does this apply to print on demand i'll show you a quick example and this really really hit home for me about a year into my print on demand journey and it really helped me so i'd like to share this with you here is 60 designs just pretend that these are designed 60 little blocks we've got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten times six that's 60 designs when you upload 60 designs or 600 designs or 6 000 designs you think that this is what's going to happen you think that you'll go well i'm going to you know the more i upload the more i'm going to sell i'll sell 15 those will be my best sellers i'll sell 15 of each of those and then the remainder every year i'll sell like five so if i upload you know a thousand designs i'll get like 5 000 sales and if i upload 10 000 designs i'll get like 50 000 sales that was my mindset when i went in because i was like i didn't know how this worked this is not how this works what really happens is this so your top selling design will most likely outsell all the other designs put together think of it in terms of like wealth in the united states you know you read the like news articles the top 1 of the united states earns more or has more wealth than like the bottom 50 well it's the same thing here if you had 60 designs on redbubble or 6 000 designs on redbubble you're going to have the top couple designs are going to outsell the rest of them all put together and this is true for me on redbubble this is true for me on display this is true for me on t public merch i've seen this repeated again and again and i'm to me this is as good as a law as it's going to get a law of nature so the reason i mention this is i don't want you to get discouraged when you upload a hundred designs and 97 of them don't sell this used to really bother me i'd upload 100 designs 97 wouldn't sell and i'd go man this is garbage and this is dumb no that's the pareto it's 80 20 rule the way it works in life the vast majority of your success will come out of a very small number from your overall population that's just life so i don't say this to be discouraging quite the opposite pick your best-selling design and try to make more of that upload that design to other websites so pay attention to what's selling this is my big tip look at your actual sales so you're going to get a sale someday if you're brand new you're going to get a sale and you're going oh that's nice no no don't just say that's nice drill down on it make more of those top selling designs so if you have five collections let's say you've got funny cats let's say you've got clowns let's say you've got gardening whatever right and then one of those collections takes off make more of that one collection stop everything else and make more gardening designs because that's the one that's selling because it's not an even distribution this was a real eye-opener for me it's the same thing on these platforms you will make more money on one of these platforms than all the other platforms put together i can't say i guarantee it but it's certainly been many many people's experience you hear about people that are successful on merch they're really successful on merch they make four thousand dollars a month on merch and they make 40 bucks a month on redbubble people who are really successful on t public i was in a reddit thread the other day and somebody posted their earnings on t public and they made two thousand dollars in the christmas season on t public that's not my biggest channel t public i love but it's not my biggest channel i don't make anywhere near two thousand dollars a month but they do that's the one that they've gone all in on so what i would suggest is just be aware that one and i don't know which one because i don't know you i don't know your path in life but if you go to all these sites and you upload 500 designs one will be infinitely more successful than all the other ones put together and that's okay you're not doing anything wrong if that happens and that was a big life lesson for me i remember i was driving around town one day getting some chores done and i was listening to a podcast where they where this guy mentioned the pareto principle and i was like what does that mean so i went and googled it so you can just google this it's called pareto principle it's the 80 20 rule this happens all throughout life you know the highest you know paid boxers in the world the top 10 boxers in the world make more than like the bottom 100 000 boxers the highest paid sports athletes make way more than the bottom rung athletes like it's not even close and so you're going to see this in your print on demand journey as well now it's not to say you shouldn't be involved in all of these channels but just be aware you're not going to blow out like i originally thought when i started i'd make 200 on redbubble and 200 on t public and 200 on finite america and you see where this is going 2 4 6 8 10. oh good i'm done there's a thousand dollars a month didn't work that way it's like 50 50 850. or it's like a thousand zero zero zero or it's like 912 four like it's not even close okay my best month i made like four thousand dollars on one of these channels and on the other channel i made like 40 bucks same time frame same thing and i was like well i guess i just really nailed that one channel for whatever reason i niched out and i i hit a home run so water your flowers that's my advice if you're really taking off on etsy spend more time on etsy don't make it all the same the other piece of advice i have is to put the best sellers on all the platforms now this is a bit controversial so if you don't want to do this i understand because some people go well i don't want all my designs to get stolen here's my attitude if you upload a design on redbubble and it takes off and what i mean by that is you upload 100 designs on redbubble and you get four sales right away and it's all the same design take that design immediately and copy it to all these other platforms because it's the universe telling you with the pareto principle that is the most in-demand one that you've got and i'll tell you right now either you can do it or someone else is going to copy that design and they'll do it and i've actually had both of this happen i had a really popular design on one of these platforms oh i can guess i can tell you which one it is it was etsy when i was on etsy i had a really popular design that i created myself and i was selling gosh between two and ten a day when i was working on etsy and all of a sudden i went onto redbubble one day and my design was on there and it was the top trending it still is by the way it's the top trending design on redbubble in one of the little niche markets and i'm going man i made that myself i was sitting on the couch watching football and i designed that design and someone stole it so my attitude is what i should have done the universe taught me a lesson i should have as soon as i was making consistent sales on etsy i should have copied them over so at least i could you know deliver a copyright strike and say hey i uploaded that design first it stinks because you can't register every copyright and you can't spend your whole life chasing down thieves art thieves you know but anyway that's a whole other topic for another day my point is if you have a high selling design you want to make sure you own it and own it on these other platforms make it yours i don't want to discount custom work so i'm going to switch gears here for a second and talk about custom work and by the way i really hope you're getting value out of this this is a long video i don't normally do long videos but i really wanted to spend the time and the energy because if you're really serious about making a thousand dollars a month i want to make sure you're getting value so if you're getting value out of this please do hit that like button please do consider subscribing that does mean a lot to me and i really hope i'm providing value here for you i don't want to overlook custom work i probably make on a good month 300 400 on custom work and on like a really wimpy month maybe like you know a few bucks like 12 but when i get like a custom order basically it's a friend of a friend they'll email me and they'll say hey can you make blank whatever it is we have a bachelorette party coming that was one of my first custom orders good friend of mine emailed me and said hey you do t-shirts right i said yeah you bet i do can you make me a bachelorette t-shirt and i want one that says i'm the bride and then like eight other ones that say i'm with the bride so i made basically a png file gave it to her she went on to printful ordered a bunch of these shirts and they gave me like 20 bucks that was like my first custom order ever and i was like happy to do it because i mean she was getting married i mean i wasn't going to rip her off or anything but she was really happy she was like here's 20 bucks i was like wow thank you so much so to me there's value to be had in custom work now i'm not suggesting you just give this away but what i'm suggesting is if somebody comes out of the fog either on facebook marketplace or friend of a friend or could be a work function a really popular one is if you're part of a social group maybe you're part of a social team a recreational like a hiking group a church group feel free to mention your services and say hey guys what do you think if you know our hiking group goes out every week what if i made like matching hiking shirts and everybody goes oh that's amazing oh man that'd be amazing well i'll make them i'll put them up on my shop on redbubble everyone goes to your shop and goes oh you've got tri-blend teas you've got a coffee mug hey can you make this in green font could you make this with a circular design all of a sudden you've got interest in your shop custom work don't overlook it another piece that i do with custom work is i go onto facebook marketplace i print some of my best-selling designs just on a print not on a t-shirt but on a print like a piece of paper a piece of cardboard i go to the staples i print it on on a piece of cardboard like a 11 by 17 print cost me a dollar sixty to print and i sell them for fifteen dollars on facebook marketplace it's local there's no fees and they can come pick it up in my house i just leave it in a bin up front i make 15 bucks so i net after everything's over about 12 dollars per and it's like easy money you could have an entire shop where this is all you do and you're making ten dollars per you just go to the staples get a hundred things printed and you're making ten dollars per we only need to sell 100 a month if you live in a city of like minneapolis new york boston chicago if you live in a major urban center that's a possibility so market yourself as a graphic designer don't sell yourself short and go oh i just upload text designs on redbubble no you're a graphic designer and that's a big deal if if you don't think you're a big deal talk to somebody who doesn't do bubble they'll have no idea what you're talking about they'll be like wait a minute wait a minute you make t-shirts yeah well i take you know vintage artwork and you know i remove the background and i change the font and i add this and then they're gonna go you're a wizard can you make me a t-shirt that says blah blah blah that's custom work make some business cards and what i mean is both physical business cards you can hand out to prospective business owners or friends or family or co-workers or church group people or rec soccer players or whoever you're hanging out with or in addition to that have a digital business card have a facebook page mention on your personal facebook page you have a shop don't be shy about it graphic designer is actually a pretty cool gig you know a lot of people know me as the graphic design guy and i take a lot of pride in that so i'd highly recommend you make a facebook page have an instagram account you've got to just start you've got to put yourself out there and market yourself as a graphic designer you never know where that next opportunity is going to come from another piece of advice i've got for you is to offer free graphic design at the start so here's what you could do just as an example if you know a local shop owner okay let's pretend you live in a city and you have a buddy who happens to work as a manager or they own a local store that sells apparel maybe it's like a local soccer store or a local meats and cheeses place you could go there and say hey if i print a couple t-shirts and you're gonna do this on printful if i print a couple t-shirts would you sell them in the store for me and i and you can take like three dollars commission and i'll take the rest so you sell the shirt for 30 bucks you get 27 and the shop owner gets three because they just hung up the shirt they get 10 you get 90 or whatever arrangement you come up with and now you're selling your shirts in local businesses now you have to buy them in advance but you could sell coffee mugs what if there's a specialty store in town that sells scottish items british items swedish items not the ikea but you know what i mean like a swedish store that sells swedish flags and swedish items from sweden and you come up with shirts coffee mugs phone cases and it's all things sweden and you go to the shop owner and you say look i have these items i can sell them to you for two dollars more than what it costs me now you're not going to say that when you go sell you're going to say look i can sell you this phone case for 15 bucks now maybe it costs you 13 bucks and he says yeah i'll take 10. great give me the cash up front you order it on redbubble you go over to the store there's ways you can get to a thousand dollars a month but you got to be creative you can't just upload 30 designs and sit back watch netflix and wait for the sales to come in you have to go think outside of the box a little tiny bit okay i'm going to wrap things up here this is a long video i hope i really hope you found this helpful here's my summary there's a lot of paths to get to a thousand dollars a month and i'm just using a thousand dollars a month because to me it's a mental it was like a mental hurdle that when i got past a thousand dollars it was like wow that's like i remember i took a trip i actually took a trip to mexico i flew to mexico i stayed in a resort it was an all-in resort for a week and i had the whole thing paid for by print on demand like that was so cool i woke up in the morning i stood out on the deck i looked at the ocean and i thought wow this entire trip is paid for by print on demand like that was amazing to me so look if you need to feed your family if you need to get serious about this and have it be a viable source of income i really hope that you found this helpful i would recommend watching this video again taking some notes i have time stamps below as well start on redbubble get the process down open up an account on t public get the process down open up a shop on etsy yes you will be out of pocket a few listings understand printful go to printful and sign up on printful and get a free account and you can start creating your own merch apply onto displayed and merged by amazon start the process and shameless plug you can always check out my other videos on my channel the channel is zen water cooler it's mostly geared towards print on demand videos specifically on how to like make money niche marketing that sort of thing if you're interested more on the artistic side i have a sister channel set up and it's called crafty stacks i actually run the site with my wife the youtube channel and it's more artistic it's still me talking it's still me walking through the videos but it's a little more of an artistic slant where we drill down more on images public domain images where to find cool stuff for art projects some of it's commercial related some of it's personal and educational related it's not all just for print on demand it's a little more arty so again feel free to subscribe to either channel i'd love to hear your comments down below i really hope you found this long form video helpful and let me know thank you so so much for watching guys take care you

Channel: Zen Watercooler

Views: 79,138

Keywords: zen watercooler, redbubble, can I make money on redbubble, print on demand, print on demand shopify, print on demand etsy, print on demand business, how much money can I make on redbubble, can I make money selling t-shirts, redbubble tips, print on demand tips, print on demand tips and tricks, niche marketing print on demand, t-shirt niche, selling t-shirts on amazon, merch by amazon tutorial, redbubble tutorial, teepublic tutorial, etsy tutorial, make money online, teepublic

Id: ajzcIpIyJkQ

Length: 68min 11sec (4091 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021