How to Make and Sell Shirts and Merchandise STEP by STEP

okay and it looks like we are live everybody so first of all welcome to another youtube live stream this is roberto blake helping you create something awesome today today we're gonna be talking about merchandise we're gonna be talking about how to make and sell merchandise online and today's live workshop is brought to you by our good friends over at spreadshop who are sponsoring today's video as well as our friends over at epidemic sound links in description and make sure you're checking that out thank you to spreadshop for sponsoring today's video so we're going to actually go into spreadshop on my screen into the back end we're going to go into the youtube merch shelf as well and we're going to walk through step-by-step creating and selling merch online so i hope those of you who are in the live audience are really excited for this i know there are a lot of you who have been looking forward to this if you're watching the replay hopefully i've added the show notes to the description in terms of time stamps if you're watching the replay and you'll be able to follow along a little bit more easily if there's anybody in the audience who wants to make timestamps feel free to do that as well and so that's what we're going to be doing today like i said let me go ahead though and let me start you off with some easy listening music so i'm just gonna do that and i'm gonna also queue up my screen here so that all of you can follow along with what we're doing hope everybody's having a good weekend we are doing this on a sunday i usually do these live workshops more or less on sunday so here you can see spreadshop and oh here's this guy uh sponsored by spreadshop and you can see that a lot of content creators use this for making their merch and their print-on-demand products i do this jessica stansberry daniel patel nick nimmin all of us have been using spreadshop in fact spreadshop has been what my first merchandise on the youtube channel was done with and then we moved to teespring for a while um a lot of you you know liked that but you weren't happy with the shipping options and so we moved back to uh spreadshop um i think during the pandemic so i think maybe as much as two years ago and so we've got a lot of great quality merchandise this is actually one of my favorite hoodies and so this is something that i think a lot of you are looking forward to in terms of how to create and sell merchandise so we're going to go over that we're also going to go into how to create mock-ups you can see here that i have a bunch of mock-ups done i did not take these shots these were generated and so we did that with placeit.net so i'm going to be showing you guys more than just super easy beginner stuff i'm going to actually walk you through more or less the full process of making and selling your merchandise and so we're going to be you know in spreadshop you can see my products here so we have a variety we have uh both men's and women's here and we have some really cool stuff in terms of uh the creator t-shirt uh the create something awesome t-shirt to create something awesome today a t-shirt that goes with the podcast and so on and so forth so we have a lot of a variety of products and there's a lot of different things you can make and do with spreadshop there is definitely variety there we're going to go over a few things like you know um optimizing your stuff in terms of quality and i'm gonna talk you up to you about some of the apps you can use to make and design your merchandise and then also i'm gonna talk to you all a little bit about how if you're not a graphic designer the thing is you can go and you can find people on fiverr to help you with this and it makes total sense to do i have a link in description below for anyone who wants to find uh freelancers over on fiverr as well but um in terms of a t-shirt design you know that is something that people do offer and you can find you can find people who do uh good work when it comes to this so there are definitely there are definitely options i mean if you take a look at this there are options and you can get reasonable things done i do think you should if you're not a graphic designer by trade i think you should invest into decent designs for your merchandise here's the best part about spreadshop y'all spreadshop is free it's free to use so there's not really an upfront cost except for paying for your designers or for your design software or if you're using you know canva there are things you can do with that but i would definitely recommend like canva pro you might need to buy some software so i mean let's start with some basics let's start with covering some basics for y'all when it comes to um doing this sort of thing let's start with the absolute absolute basics what are you going to need what are you going to need in order to make and sell merchandise so what you're going to need is you're going to need some kind of software that can help you design your products in the first place i recommend either adobe photoshop or adobe illustrator one of the reasons to either want to use adobe photoshop or illustrator is um when it comes to um working with whether it's spreadshop or any other print-on-demand service they usually have templates that are made specifically with adobe photoshop or with adobe illustrator in mind and so in terms of the types of files here and let me just uh try and adjust the layout here there we go so you'll notice that they have um what are adobe illustrator files often called ai files and they have adobe photoshop files normally called psd files and regardless of what print on demand program uh you're using in terms of a platform whether it's spreadshop or shopify or something else most of them are going to have templates that are made for adobe photoshop or adobe illustrator now there are alternative programs that will open those files if you don't want to have a subscription to adobe i have an adobe subscription i think that if you want to make money online if you want to be a youtube content creator you want to be a content creator on social media i feel like the 60 a month for the adobe creative cloud is a good investment and that you will make infinitely your money back and that you should be able to make you know 60 to 100 break even on whatever you're doing i don't feel it's so unreasonable i don't think it's so unreasonable the good news is with spreadshop that's zero dollars up front so then in terms of your design software well it might be illustrator or it might be photoshop at least to be able to take advantage of the templates but if you aren't using the templates what they do have is they do tell you the design specifications and they give you all the design requirements here so you can use a different program and you could do this manually but it is considerably harder to do if you don't have a design background so if you don't have a design background to pay attention to the dimensions and the sizes for the things that you want to make especially when it comes to posters that becomes a problem so our basics are we need a platform to print on demand for print-on-demand we need a print-on-demand platform for our products and we need design software that is capable of making quality designs in the right file formats right dimensions and right sizes in order to make our products and so again the investment in the platform if you're using spreadshop is zero dollars if you're using shopify you're gonna be paying at least i think thirty dollars a month on top of your software cost if you use adobe software cost is uh 60 a month so it's something where you're okay to break even if you want to go all in and you want to do things at a higher level okay you're gonna have to be making about a hundred dollars or more a month before break even and that's if you're doing everything yourself if you go and you find designers on fiverr to help you with at least the design process there might be some upfront initial investment there you might need to pay 25 30 50 100 150 dollars to get the design that you want made with this because they have skills you don't have whether that's hand lettering you can if you're getting hand lettering done that might cost some money so if we type in hand lettering we type in hand lettering and we want somebody to do um some cool stuff for us we want somebody to do graffiti for us you know you might have to cough up a few dollars i don't think you have to spend hundreds of dollars on this but i think you know you could spend a reasonable amount pay your people well and then you can get something you know nice nicely done and get it the way that you want it if you decided that what you want is going to be a pattern design and you want let's say you wanted um a seamless pattern seamless patterns are going to be somewhere and if you want them good quality i say those are gonna be somewhere between uh 50 to about a hundred and fifty two hundred dollars for really good pattern design but when you do that you can make ultimately you could probably make nearly unlimited products with a proper pattern design and so um that can be really good now when it comes to the starting price on this yeah you can start as low as 30 but by the time you go and you do some other options i always look at you know people's premium stuff and you're going to want that because you're going to want commercial rights you're going to want um you know you're going to want commercial rights you're going to want to have the number of pattern selection you might need to add things to that so again this could be a pretty good investment but you get to make unlimited products so that would be you know the good side of it and then when it comes to um let's see here when it comes to your store and you do pricing i want to show you something so you can set your profit margins when it comes to your pricing and so when you do that when you're looking at your different products you can go ahead and you can price your products so that you know how much you make i don't make a lot off of say premium t-shirts i don't charge a whole hell of a lot for it so the profit margins on that stuff is um it's not extraordinarily high somewhere between five and ten dollars basically whenever i sell merch you get like you know i get somewhere between five and ten dollars a sale so it really depends some other things it might um you know make sense to charge more i mean like with this teddy bear thing uh which is actually pretty uh cool um i might you know it's an accessory i might be able to up the price and say okay that's going to be 25.99 that's not unreasonable for something like that uh if it's stickers yeah we can up the price for stickers and we can like make a few bucks on that so it just really depends on what you want your profit margins to be i think that good sweet spot for profit margins is about eight dollars and it still keeps you within competitive pricing so i think you know i think um five to eight dollars is great i think when you start trying to go into you know higher than 10 per um item profit margins you price out your audience and they can't buy things from you so i mean i think keeping reasonable prices is you know practical i think you don't need to like give it away for free i think that's totally practical to do that so i mean that's that's what would make sense in terms of your pricing so we know that we need design software which if we get if we use canva we use what's built in that might be almost nothing we hire a designer we might have some upfront investment in that and we'll need the source files if we want to edit those we're going to need the proper software to do that and our platform is going to initially cost us zero dollars so that's going to go very profitable so again we're starting off with something really reasonable here we're starting off something really reasonable and if you're a content creator this is not like a high barrier to entry in any way to get into merchandise so uh is everybody basically following along so far let's go ahead and check the um let's go ahead and check the chat so uh kazuki nero ask are we able to protect our designs on spreadshop designs are technically when they are published protected from copyright now it doesn't stop people from stealing it it just means that you would have legal recourse and the ability to issue dcma take down notices to people but you would have to be willing and manually able to do that and you'll want to show when you published it versus when they published it and so on and so forth the only way i know people i know there's this obsession lately partly because of the nft conversation people are very sensitive the artist community is very sensitive to art theft art theft is nothing new and the only thing the only thing that protects people from art theft is you being willing to formally copyright and trademark your creations with the us copyright office if you do not if you are not willing if you are not willing and i'm not saying people should be uh ripping you off i'm not saying that at all i'm not but i'm being very real with you if you do not invest in the system that truly protects um artists and creators which is the us copyright and trademark system you can't be too upset that you don't have a lot of options and that's easier to steal from you but people shouldn't be doing that but it's no different than registering any other paperwork it's no different than registering any other paperwork you have to pay to go through the legal process and it's the same thing like insurance claims people ensure they they protect against death by locking their doors but they insure their property in the event that that doesn't work out in the event that doesn't work out so i know that people get really sensitive about art theft i really understand it i am a traditional artist first and then went into digital art i get it what do you think copyright and trademark exist for that's the reason you're free if you publish something you are technically technically when you publish something is copyrighted but your responsibility to issue a dmca take down notice and the thing is you have more enforceable power if you've filed a formal copyright or trademark and so that's the that's the issue you can't expect platforms to do all the work for you and they don't always get everything right either even when it comes to dmca take down notices on youtube's the platforms don't get everything right even when people do have the ability to protect their work so just be aware of that and be aware of what is and isn't fair use that's your other responsibility so um i think that creator responsibility you know plays a big role in these things and i think that a lot of people expect it to be done for them but that's not how anything really works and it's wildly impractical it's wildly impractical um so we looked at that in terms of uh fundamentals here here's another thing a lot of people take for granted the idea of uh they don't create any way to promote their merchandise in uh social media besides oh here's my link or whatever mock-ups mock-ups are amazing and you know you can do some really cool stuff and placeit.net is where i do that so i think i pay 89 or 90 dollars a year and so i get to create these uh cool mock-ups so if i go to placeit.net and you can see it here this is a from envato as a website and so i mean it's pretty dope it's really dope so if i decide to uh click on this here i end up with um you know an instagram i end up with an instagram story that's already animated and really cool and all this stuff for me and it's using um text and this is already like kind of pre-designed if i didn't want to do that though i can upload my own image and i can have that stuff all good to go so that's pretty cool that you can just go ahead and you can have that now what i like to do is i like to go to apparel and then like let's say uh it's apparel and it's hoodies and let's say i like the look of this model i'll just click on this right here and then insert image so i can upload from my device which is going to be in my case it's going to be my computer i'm going to upload uh creator v1 so we're waiting for that to upload did it take it open height or width oh wait um height or width needs to be 750 by 750 pixels okay i can probably adjust that over in photoshop and then i'll upload it for y'all actually i have another i have another image i think i can use i think i have [Music] yep so i'll use uh this one right i'll use this one this is from zenbuster this is a yin yang uh type symbol so i went with that i can change the color of the hoodie and make it really zen i can change the stage color here so that's pretty dope and then i would have a pretty dope mock-up for my hoodie so that's pretty cool and then i would just click download and i would instantly have a mock-up that i could use to promote my hoodie which is pretty cool and you can do this with any number of things you can do this with any number of things any number of models any number of products that they have a primary example do this and boom instantly i have this in a mock-up immediately so this is pretty cool and for those of you watching yes the replay if you are watching live will be available we do leave the live workshops up um less than 10 000 of you all usually watch these so by the way if you know that there are other creators out there that could benefit from this make sure you're sharing the stream you're sharing the replay and yeah i noticed that like there are some mock-ups by the way where certain things will change in the background and it won't uh be as clean as you want like the other one her fingernails and stuff like that change is fine the ones that work and then and you for you don't worry about the ones that don't this one it was like you know uh because i was changing the background that one just wasn't like great but if i use this one i guarantee you it's going to come out much better on the ones where i don't change the background color and all i do is change the hoodie color so if i do this if i change the hoodie color let's say i decided to make it gray boom right there my guy looking sharp and then i can just you know download that and it's a really good mock-up of you know what i have going on here so i mean i think that this looks actually really dope and this would be easy to uh promote so you could use this as promo material and like i said uh to do place it is pretty affordable i think it's about 90 bucks a year and you get access to everything you get unlimited downloads unlimited downloads so this is a great way for you to be able to promo your merchandise this is going to help you sell it this is going to help you if you build a custom website of any kind or if you want promoting your social media timeline your instagram your facebook your youtube community tab your twitter this is what's going to help you promote and sell your merchandise and so this is called uh placeit.net i'll link it in the show notes i think i might have an affiliate for this so that's pretty cool and then like i said with spreadshop spreadshop costs zero dollars it's free and we use this to sell our merchandise and so we have some relatively affordable tools and options between the fact that we can get people to design stuff in fiverr we can do it ourself and go either way with that and so um this is actually really straightforward to do now i am going to walk you through the back end process of making a product and going through that and we're going to talk a little bit about metadata i'm not i don't really care as much about it as other people do um when it comes to the merchandise side but you know um that's fine but we will talk about the you know the back end of how you use this and how you you know you create and upload it's actually really straightforward they tell you the file types and i will explain these and so um that's something that we're going to walk through but right now i just i do want to take a couple of your questions you know i do want to take your questions let's see yes this will be this will be archived later for you to watch some of y'all are debating about the um copyright stuff but i mean y'all y'all can do what you want like i'm just telling you how it is it's possible to um it's possible to fight it without the us copyright and trademark stuff it is possible to fight it it's just very difficult and i think the people get very emotionally invested in it and i think there's um i think that you have to go through the practical ways of doing business but if you have questions about something other than copyright because that feels like it deserves its own thing and we can bring on a panel of lawyers at some point if you all want to live stream about copyright then you know we can do that but in the meantime i really just want to talk about merchandise so let's see clovertac says i use spreadshop and have not had any trouble however my caps and stickers are made locally and it's nice because i have a lot more control over the designs the quality and consistency absolutely there are some people who like to do things locally for that reason when it comes to uh their merchandise and they ship it out uh themselves and stuff like that jared polin did that for years and so i don't have an issue with that uh deo ask is fourth wall good for merchandise i think that they're more of like a squarespace competitor as my understanding when it comes to um fourth wall but i don't know if they're in the merchandise game but i would have to ask around it could be interesting speaking with something i do that a lot of people don't and take for granted i'll give you a primary example i'm wearing some of the create something awesome today merch right now this is one of the most comfortable hoodies in the world and my because it's uh atlanta and it's pretty warm outside right now like my house is set to like 62 degrees so it's polar bear weather especially with these lights polar bear weather inside here so i am wearing the hoodie um and hoodie is optional if i got too hot i could just you know go to the t-shirt that i have under it but this is merchandise and so one of the most practical things we can do we'll talk about selling your merchandise on your youtube channel but one of the one of the really important things i feel is to before you really get hard into selling merch to your audience you get yourself a copy you set aside some money maybe you set aside a hundred dollars and you get yourself a couple of copies at cost of your merchandise um in its different forms whether that's okay you put this design on a t-shirt you get one of the t-shirts maybe you get two or three of the t-shirts to test the quality uh you get the men's and the women's you get um the hoodies you get the hats you test the quality yourself of the print-on-demand vendor that you're using at some point because i literally have sourced from and i'll probably do a video about this and one of the wonderful things about working with spreadshops shout out to spreadshop once again one of the things is in working with them as a sponsor they have not prohibited me from making ex like content about any of their competitors they're that confident they're that confident spreadshop is that confident that um and one of the reasons i partnered with them is they said roberto if you want to talk about shopify you want to talk about printful you want to talk about printfy you want to talk about redbubble we don't care we're that confident in our quality and our product and i was like wow that's that's a pretty significant statement that you don't care if i talk about or compare competitors and that was like a really good sign for me in terms of partnering with them is they don't care if i mention other people and i'll tell you i've sourced in every every print-on-demand shop has its perks and has its benefits and i've sourced redbubble in terms of um variety like having some things that are like athletic gear i really like redbubble there are a few products that i like from t uh spring i think they switch to spring for creators as their name now and they offer some digital download stuff and so okay yeah that's kind of cool selfie selfie is great for digital downloads on the cheap shopify is the most robust platform that there is but you have to pay for it and you have to pay monthly and there's a lot of things that feel very intimidating for people but i could do a shopify step-by-step live stream and walk you all through that but spreadshop is so confident in what it offers that didn't put any restrictions on me in terms of what like whether i can talk about competitors or not which i think is a testament to just exactly how confident they are in their overall product one of the reasons i like spreadshop is you have two choices when it comes to integrating into the youtube merch shelf when it comes to the youtube side of things and you can integrate into the youtube merch shelf on your channel and you go to like store or you go to a video you have two options you have spreadshop and you have spring for creators um now i've done both and the thing is they both integrate fine and properly for the viewing audience and they show up under your videos and all this stuff and again i'll show you the back end of customizing the youtube merch shelf here a little later in the stream and what that looks like in terms of like playing with this and choosing which products go where and all that good stuff we will talk about the back end of that but one of the reasons that um i chose spreadshop is because there are two options for content creators that have over ten thousand subscribers for directly integrating into youtube at the moment that's spring for creators and spreadshop so if you want to directly make it super easy on your audience well that's those are your two options the thing is youtube doesn't take anything extra from you as a result of that they have a partnership with these two platforms i believe i don't swear to this i believe that eventually they will offer spreadshop i mean that's spreadshop shopify i believe they'll offer shopify and not just spreadshop and spring i believe they'll opt for shopify because the biggest content creators you might have noticed that they're merch shelves that you go to these custom store websites in their merch shelf that then turn out to be um shopify so i believe that youtube has the capacity to do a shopify integration i just think since most content creators don't have the money for it they are not pressing that as like an option outside of the top tier creators but that could change over time i'm not going to swear to it but i believe that that can change over time now there are reasons why people do choose shopify some people they want absolute control over what their uh store looks like i mean my storefront is pretty basic here i haven't done a lot with it i just mostly said to hey let's go and like hear the shirts here the things let's go and so and i think that's fine for what youtube merges and what influencer merch is i think that's fine at a basic level for your audience but when you want to be more advanced and you want to do very specific things um and you want to also have like a custom domain name you could technically have a custom domain name and do it with this but like primary example is i have uh create awesomethings.com and this is where i sell my photography prints and again i get a little bit more control with shopify there are templates i can choose for this and i can also choose vendors and i can choose things that i don't have in spring or spreadshop in terms of things like canvas prints and woodcut prints and things like that very high quality you can do posters with those but not necessarily the same thing as premium prints canvases and woodcut printings so or even photo books or journals with custom designs in terms of journals so if you're wondering okay why do some people have shopify instead of doing spreadshop or spring well the reason is uh the limitations on products the variety of it and zero cost up front versus paid up front so zero cost versus investment that's a big difference and that could be the difference between again a content prayer that's at 10 000 subscribers versus a content creator that's a hundred thousand or a million it might just vary in terms of what they want to do what they're willing to invest how far they're willing to go with shopify they might want to literally source the vendors and test the fabrics and go to all these extremes do some rating comparison and figure out just how ethically sourced all their products are or something like that something very extreme and that the resultant difference is that their stuff might also cost more which is why even for regular t-shirts from content creators you end up paying like thirty dollars or thirty four dollars just for a t-shirt but again they're going through a lot more upfront expense and there's uh more things involved with what they're doing and uh they're sourcing again they might decide that they want all organic or they don't want things that are fast fashion or they want things that are ethically sourced then you pay a premium for that that price is passed on to the customer every time when you want to be extra about anything now with me my margins are not super high either though because i'm charging relatively little compared to most people but i'm also picking the highest quality that spreadshop offers so when we go back into where i had uh the margin pricing here you can see it there's not like all of this uh you know compared to the base price and then my profit margin i don't make a lot when it would come to a merge purchase that any of you make um it's not a high profit margin it's not usually even double-digit profit margins it's between five and eight dollars in almost almost every single case no matter what the product is so uh when it comes to that there are people who make uh different choices just based on how much they want to profit and what makes it worthwhile for them to recoup their investment on things like their designers we talked about uh pricing out designs and things in fiverr and you could figure out okay well if i have to invest let's say you decide let's say you decided that between getting samples of everything and paying for um three or five specific designs to be done let's say that you invested and you you know and you did um some other stuff you did some mock-ups you did some photography you did a little bit of marketing you can even spend money on ads let's say you want to go all out and you want to make some great merch for your audience and you spent fifteen hundred dollars which for most of you watching that's a lot of money uh even for me that's like money i'm like but like let's say you spent fifteen hundred dollars because you want to give your audience like five premium designs but you want samples of everything that you're going to sell because you want to see it with your own eyes hold in your own hands before you ask your audience to buy but there's nothing wrong with that so let's say between paying uh your designers well and getting these five designs done getting in your hand samples of everything so you know the quality and the printing and everything let's say you invested 1500 well with the average merch sale with the average merch sale netting a very uh minimal profit of between you know five and ten dollars when you spend uh fifteen hundred dollars before you if you have your if your profits are five dollars you're going to have to sell 300 of these to break even on your investment so the thing is if you don't have a thousand true fans that'll spend money with you spending fifteen hundred dollars and you know you need to make fifteen hundred dollars back if you don't have a thousand true fans that'll buy and you've got you know and your profits five dollars you know five dollars gives you a thousand five thousand dollars you spent 1500 your profit margin is only 3 500 which means great you made back the money you spent and then you made a little bit more than double after breaking even so it's not an indecent amount of profit but that doesn't move the needle much for you as a creator and but the thing is i'm not saying that merchandise can't ever move the needle i'm just showing you the difference between investment and profit margin and cost and you're just understanding what that looks like and that's if you just did that one merge drop a year well what if you're also paying for your all your adobe software where that's 50 a month so you might be you know you might not count that though because you're spending that as a content creator anyway for all of the things so just be aware and again most people will not invest fifteen hundred dollars into making their merch or anything like that that's like again that's a different tier those are creators who are really invested in the idea of creating products for their audience in merch and there are other uh ways that are more practical to make money but if you want to have your audience have product from you then this will you know this could be a way now if you have enough different items and things for people to buy and they buy a lot of stuff um then it could be lucrative and you could make good money on it if you have a thousand true fans and if they are all buying more than one thing then yes you can make decent money off of merchandise if there's enough of it for them to buy and they're invested in being part of the community so um that does matter um i have some people asking if we have mods uh i could there should be some mods but i could always theoretically mod a few people up if we think we're having problems or rudeness in the chat um so let's see also thank you to scott t for the 2.99 super chat you are appreciated my friend appreciated um let's see there should be some uh moderators i can mod a few people so we're gonna mod uh rosalind um monique no youtube does not take a cut from the referrals from your shelf it does not uh do that uh it does not uh take a cut excuse me [Music] and the artist haven uh you're a mod now it's the camera junkie you can be a mod scott you can be a mod yeah i think that's probably enough mods to cover anything that might be a problem there so let's get back to the stream and i want to pop up monique's question uh because yeah monique had a good question does youtube take a cut from your referrals merch shelf so actually youtube does not take a cut from the referrals merge shelf youtube does not take a cut you get straight up whatever the profit margin is that you set up in spreadshop or whatever platform you're using but in this case we're covering spreadshop so uh youtube takes a cut on almost everything it does not take a cut on that mega man says uh hey and your prints look great thank you yeah for anyone interested in my wildlife photography prints my wildlife photography prints are at createawesomethings.com that is create awesomethings.com that is where you can find my photography prints and in terms of my merchandise you should be able to see that below this video in the youtube merch shelf if you're watching on youtube and if you're watching anywhere else you should be able to see that at robertoblake.com shirts so roslyn says i think the hardest part of selling merch is what's designed to even sell yes let's talk about that and then we'll go on to how to actually upload your designs and how to um how to publish them so let's uh let's dig into that real quick so when it comes to what designs to even sell the main thing is to focus on something that is related to your community the reason that um my creator hoodies were like my most successful merchandise product ever i sold like i actually had a really like i did all right with merch but i didn't really promote it and i'll tell you how to promote it and then client of mine a client of mine that i'm doing a podcast episode with a coaching client he's all five hundred thousand dollars worth of merchant a year five hundred worth of merch in a year and we came up with a strategy for that together and it worked out really well now most people can't do that he's a huge youtuber he's about a million subscribers so don't get twisted he's about a million subscribers he had over 2 000 fans and uh that bought stuff and they bought a lot of stuff they bought you know an average 200 300 worth of merchandise each um because they were the type of people they're gonna buy four or five really like you know products three at a time and they gonna buy multiple drops and he did multiple drops that was another part of the strategy we'll talk about is we'll talk about the marketing we'll talk about merchandise shops we'll talk about those things we'll talk about pricing a little bit more um because i want to cover some fundamentals this is why we do the live workshops because i think it the these are lectures these are just basically you're getting free courses basically you get free courses when you show up to the live streams which is another good reason to support with super chat if you want to do that switch up the music [Music] there we go but yeah if you want to support the channel you can definitely do that by either super chatting or you can click on our sponsor spreadshop linked in description down below sign up today for zero dollars for free and you can start making and selling your own merchandise but yeah hardest part of selling merch is what designs to even sell if you know your community and you make something really dope that's about them instead of you you will do better with selling merch it is very hard to sell merch when you just slap your face or your logo on it and you're not a famous youtube content creator or a famous twitch streamer or a famous instagram influencer you got no business trying to be nike and slapping your logo on something you got no business thinking that your shack or kobe and can slap your face on it it doesn't work that way if you're not famous and so what a lot of content creators do wrong is they try to mimic people and not just with merch they do this with their content too they keep trying to mimic people that are already famous instead of using the tactics that they used as rookies they're using the tactics that uses all stars and they haven't earned the right to do that so what you do and the way that works is you have to make a shirt that someone can buy without knowing who the hell you are you have to make a shirt or a hoodie or a dope thing that someone could buy without knowing who the hell you are and so i'll give you a primary example of that the reason that i made the creator hoodies the reason i made the creator t-shirt and the crater hoodies was actually part of the same idea you do not need to know who i am or care to buy a t-shirt that says that you're a creator you want to say it with your chest i'm a creator that's what i'm about starts conversation create something awesome that's something you do not need to know or care about who i am to buy that's about you more than it is about me always be creating you do not need to know or care about who i am to do that you do not need to know or care who i am to say books are awesome and just decide that that's what you're going to buy and that you're going to say it with your chest and so when you make something about the community and you make something about the conversation you make something about the culture that your community belongs to you make it about the community's identity without it needing to be something that you do not need to know who roberto blake is or care about any of that to buy a creator t-shirt or a creator hoodie or create something awesome t-shirt or create awesome hoodie it is the hand lettering on this was just dope and so just finding a saying that is like universally applicable and getting dope hand lettering that's a win someone can buy that shirt think about the shirts you buy when you if you were a kid if you're like my age or if you're in your 30s and you remember hot topic and spencer's gifts you could just walk in and buy clever or ironic t-shirts or buy t-shirts that say something really clever cute or smart alecky and graffiti or really cool hand-drawn lettering and that was that and there are people who still will do that to this day you know um buying stuff from famous creators and famous youtubers is about just being part of their community and that's a different level and that's a different thing when people don't know who you are and you have less than 10 000 subscribers or less than 100 000 subscribers less than a million subscribers or followers you play the game differently and a big part of that is just being closer to the community and more down to earth and something they would respect and want and something you would wear something you would wear in real life a lot of you have ran into me in real life and seen me wearing a creator t-shirt or a crater hoodie and it's because they're comfortable as hell um but it's also just really easy and it's like why rep somebody else's logo why rep a nike or adidas logo when i can wrap my own uh with cut material and fabric that's just as good so i i go that route uh we have a 20 super chat here thank you so much cloud gaming dad i appreciate you so cloud gaming dad says these are great really look forward to these streams absolutely like i said probably like a lot of you would get more out of these streams than you might get out of a um 200 to 500 course and they're free but please super chat uh volvers thank you for the two dollars euro says so could a slogan work that is aimed for everybody i would say less that's aimed for everybody but is not necessarily gatekeeping and so you can use a saying but it's easier if it's something that your audience would care about instead of oh everybody but like the people who could be in your audience you again a creator's shirt doesn't matter to people who aren't creators but there's a lot of people who are creators and wannabe creators in my audience so it makes sense it makes sense and if i had a version of this that said streamer that would make sense because there's a lot of streamers in my audience you know so that would make absolute sense if i was hayden hiller smith it might make sense to make a piece of merchandise that speaks to video editors because there's not a real reason to watch hayden hiller smith if you're not a video editor it's just like jared polin jared polin's t-shirts say i shoot raw that is only really applicable to photographers so he made something that photographers because raw versus jpeg in photography is a whole rivalry it's a whole controversial rivalry of raw versus jpeg shooters and he's like hey i'm on the side of i shoot raw not jpeg and so um i shoot raw plush jpeg so you that was so he played into the culture of the photography community with that and so that would make sense it's just like how i wear armbands that i got on amazon and they are photo focal lengths and so this doesn't mean much to people who aren't photographers or videographers or camera people but when i when i wear um and i go out in public and people see 24 to 70 millimeter and they see 7 200 millimeter they know what's up if they are in the camera community and that culture you see so i mean a photographer could literally print a t-shirt series a series of t-shirt that just were um really cool hand lettered or graffiti or a specific typeface design about like 50 millimeter lens 20 millimeter 24 millimeter lens 35 millimeter 85 millimeter 135 105 and the photography community would know what's up with you know they would know what's up with that but that but that would make sense if you're a photography youtuber so do you get what i mean marty gill says should i start a youtube channel first before i start selling the merchandise um i mean it's really hard to sell anything if you don't have an audience to sell it to it's extremely difficult to sell anything if you don't have an audience to sell it to but merchandise is a really good day zero product merchandise is a really good day zero product so what do i mean by day zero product when you want monetize on youtube it takes a minute to get the four thousand hours of watch time and the one subscribers to start making ad revenue to start getting super chats to do all the in-platform monetization things but you know what you can do at day zero at day zero you can be an amazon affiliate and you could recommend products and sell them and but you do have a very low likelihood of people clicking on that unless you're doing oh free audiobook from audible and then you get the five dollar commissions off of that that's when's the easiest way to stay in the amazon affiliate program right that's a zero that's a day zero monetization tactic another day zero monetization tactic is to be wearing your t-shirt on camera and have a link to your merch and you may not sell anything but you have a better chance when you start youtube and you're doing your first 100 videos you have a much better chance of making your first 100 dollars from the merchandise and selling t-shirts because to make a hundred dollars you'll have to sell between 10 and 20 t-shirts or hoodies 10 to 20 t-shirts and hoodies that's it you have a much better chance of making your first 100 online selling merchandise as a youtuber then doing ad revenue because you don't get monetized right away anymore and so uh the monetization thing it's gonna take you a while in most cases especially as a part-time youtuber to get monetized with ad revenue but with spreadshop at zero dollars up front and merchandise that you can sell you can make money and get your first 100 faster with prints on demand merchandise if it's good and it would help you if you wear that in your videos and if you're promoting your videos because even if you get a hundred viewers and one buys you made your first ten dollars you made your first five dollars if you get more people to watch and then a couple of them even buy a shirt and again they're not gonna buy a shirt with your logo they're not gonna buy a shirt with your logo or your face they will buy a shirt that is about the culture though they will buy a shirt that's about the culture so like i said um i think that it's hard to sell something without an audience but i think you can start with an audience at day zero with the intent to be supported and i know a lot of people don't like that a lot of people are crying and whining about being a sellout and everything like that they're gonna keep crying and whining and they're gonna keep being broke i'm gonna print a t-shirt that literally says cry more and so i mean don't complain if you're a starving artist and you are unwilling to um support what the market wants by saying there are people who want to buy and you're not going to bother with the people who want to buy something and want to support you because you don't want to hear that you're a sellout and you don't want three jackholes crying in the comment section about your selling stuff or how dare you there there are people who want to buy or who don't care about the fact you're offering something to the people who do want to buy or do want to support you don't ask don't get and if you refuse to ask and get then also don't complain cry more because and i have no sympathy and it sounds harsh and it sounds rude i have no sympathy for people who want to like say that nobody is supporting them but they are not creating an opportunity for the audience to support them and they're saying well you can only support me this way you can only support me this way or why don't i have this or why don't i have that give people what they want create an opportunity for people who want to support you to support you create as many buying opportunities as possible and don't be afraid to promote yourself in your videos and to give people the option to support with you and rock with you because they're going to give that money to somebody they're going to pretend that they're not they're going to give that money to multi-billion dollar corporation they're going to give it to somebody they're going to buy a t-shirt from somebody they're going to buy sneakers from somebody they're going to buy some digital download whether it's a video game or something else or an in-app purchase they're going to spend that money and if you're deciding you're not going to get a share of that then it's on you for not creating the opportunity and not willing being willing to risk ridicule to market and sell and promote yourself because multi-billion dollar corporations they've got no problem asking people to buy from them so creators shouldn't have no problem asking people to support them either that's just a harsh truth and a lot of people don't like when i say it a lot of people don't like when i say it there are people who say oh sell out or oh you know like what about creativity for creativity's sake it's easier to do creative creativity for creativity's sake when you're not broken struggling it's a lot easier i've done both i will tell you it is a lot easier to make what you want after you've given people enough people what they want it's a lot easier to get to do what you want when you want to do it thank you thank you enjoying the beautiful education here thank you appreciate that but yeah so one of the things i will tell you is that with your shirts and your merchandise you should be wearing them if you don't have a sponsor you can be the sponsor of your own videos and you could be promoting your shirts and one of the things that you could be doing is remember how we talked about place it and we talked about creating these mock-ups and place it if you're creating these uh mock-ups and place it if you're creating these mock-ups and place it like we talked about then you have all these opportunities to market your stuff whether it's um and they'll let you do all kinds of things i even do this for my digital products and stuff like that but you can you can create all these dope mock-ups and place it for physical and digital products and then you can market and promote them and again they come out really good i really like how a lot of these came out um [Music] like this is a really good one and again you can just like click on them you can download it um and you can just make whatever your merch is you just have to upload your logo and like i said if we go right here grab this and then you just have something that looks great that you can use and you can put in front of your audience you can slide that on the screen you can animate it you can just make yourself a little mock ad placement and you can promote your own merchandise in your videos and be your own sponsor and you can do a 15 or 30 second plug for your own thing a 15 to 30 second plug for your own thing in an 8 to 12 minute video is not a big deal and if people like want to dip out because of that okay so what because when you sell a handful of these if you if you have some people dip out but you made 10 sales off of doing that in the first week you just made an extra 50 to 100 that might help you pay a bill a lot of you are not willing to do that because you're scared of people criticizing you but if in the first week or in the first month you make a couple hundred dollars selling a few extra pieces of merchandise and you didn't have to like spend a lot of money up front to do it then that's going to be really good and it could add up and it can really help a lot of you out and then you still have the opportunity once you do get monetized on youtube to have ad revenue you have the ability to have ad revenue which get monetized on youtube and again at day zero you could be you know um doing amazon affiliate and you could be making commissions off of that and then all of a sudden all of a sudden when you have your merchandise and you have a bunch of videos out and you've plugged your merchandise all of a sudden making an extra 20 30 50 a day is not so impossible when it's like oh if i want an extra 50 a day well that's 5 or 10 sales of my t-shirts or hoodies every day and you have the internet to hustle that you have social media you have youtube evergreen working in the background if you have a couple hundred videos out there plugging merch and they're getting a couple hundred or a couple thousand views one percent of the people buy one percent of people buy that's a couple sales and then life gets you know a little easier after a while once you have that going on it's an opportunity and then you got ad revenue potentially now you might not be making as much on ad revenue as you do on the merchandise so for a lot of people that's true and if you also have your merchandise numbers and sales you have your product sales maybe you can take your product sales and your affiliate sales and it might be easier to get more money out of a sponsor when you can show them that your audience will buy something from you so if your audience is buying from you it's actually gonna be easier to get sponsors down the road because you can say i do numbers when you can say i do numbers you can say look here with me it wasn't my merchandise numbers because i didn't push that as hard for me it was my um coaching and it was my digital downloads like the youtube starter kit and now the brand deal starter kit being able to show those sales numbers is really helpful because it shows the buying power of an audience and it shows the support people are willing to give you and that's powerful when i can sell a 99 digital download it's really easy to convince you know a brand that hey i can help you if you support me because if my audience buys a 99 product and you sell a 20 product what do you think is easier for me to sell so having your own sales numbers and then for a lot of you the merchandise is going to be comparable to the price of the products that you rep for sponsors a lot of times so if you can show that your audience will buy merchandise from you then your audience will buy uh products that your sponsors are selling if it's at a comparable price so then it's actually really good in terms of presenting those sales numbers to a sponsor to say hey i'm capable of moving products so i'm worth being paid and so those things often can really help you and so that's a little bit different but i want to get to some more questions i want to get to some more questions about uh merchandise before we get to the product design walkthrough i showed you the product mock-up walkthrough because that's super easy with uh placeit.net it's super easy um and i showed you pricing already and we'll timestamp a lot of this stuff but i definitely want to uh share that with you and then we'll talk a little bit more about promoting in your youtube videos someone says that's so true many graphic tees i buy have a message that resonates with me absolutely or it's something that just looks dope i mean i think a lot of you would probably buy this yin-yang hoodie that i had made up like i think a lot of you all would buy that playing with teresa says great content there's always roberto hopefully in the future i can implement some of this when i have an audience yeah build an audience absolutely [Music] this is a great point nikki heath when people buy shirts they want to say something about themselves they listen to this band they watch the show or they believe this thing mass appeal is best yep definitely absolutely yes kids do love shirts with sarcastic sayings absolutely [Music] liz gordon says uh it made our merch with others in mind still having an issue with visibility so i'm hoping we get some fresh ideas on how to do that today one of the most important things i would say is the best visibility is your own existing audience your own existing audience is often the best visibility that there is the best visibility that there is typically at least in my opinion is your own audience so for me what i would say about that is i think that your own audience is your best shot at visibility so what i would tell you in that situation is i would ask are you creating a 15 second spot in your own videos on youtube to promote your merchandise or the thing that you want people to buy and if you are not comfortable to do it in the middle of your videos where the audience might drop off then you're only comfortable because i know a lot of small youtubers are hypersensitive to i just want my channel to grow well it's harder to make money when all you want is your channel to grow but i get it i get it especially if you're trying to get to that 1000 subscribers 4 000 hours of watch time you don't want to stop anything other than doing that on youtube so for some of you all for some of y'all i understand if that's the way you want to do it but you could always do it in a way where you say okay every other video i'm going to promote the merch no matter what whether it's in the middle or at the end of my video because then you have a chance of getting something especially if you're not monetized already and so that could motivate you to keep making content because at least you know there's a chance to make money and for a lot of you it's hard to justify doing youtube and not making money at it because then you have to answer to somebody for some of you it's your parents for some of you just your significant other for some of you it's yourself that you you just are so you know frustrated with money that you can't really justify to keep going without being monetized and even when you get monetized you find out oh god ad revenue is crap a lot of times not for everybody if you're in a high cpm niche it's different but for a lot of you you make 10 of what i do for ad views but it's because it's a different niche like gaming or something like that you guys get two dollar cpms to instead of 20 or 30 like i would get so it's radically different for you all and if that's the case if you're getting like two dollars or less for a thousand views on youtube you are better off interrupting a video and selling a damn shirt and getting five dollars off of less than a thousand views getting five dollars if one person have a hundred buys yet five dollars if you're a youtuber and you get monetized you gotta find out that for a thousand views you're getting less than five dollars you're better off selling the shirts you're better off selling the shirts i'm just saying for real if you can get one out of a hundred people to buy a shirt it's more profitable than getting a thousand people to watch a video but a lot of you would rather have the thousand views than have 20 shirt sales and that's ironic because a thousand views is not going to pay you a hundred dollars but 20 shirt sales will so it's the validation versus the money i feel more validated by money than attention but that's me because i you grew up with like in an era i grew up in the 80s and 90s money matters money matters i was sitting there with a you know counting my coppers got my piggy banks what like in my piggy bank watching scrooge mcduck i'm like yup i care about money not even embarrassed by it i care about money more than i care about attention it's not even close it's not even close validated much more by people willing to spend money with me than spend attention on me and it's not even close because money they're exchanging value with me on that and they're taking it seriously attention people spend attention all types of things so there's it's harder to equate the value of attention but if you really want an equation for it you can look at your youtube adsense revenue and your youtube adsense revenue you look at your revenue per thousand views your rpm your revenue per ml for most of you watching you get a thousand views and you will not get ten dollars for it if two people buy shirts from you you'll get ten to twenty dollars so tell me which one makes more sense if it don't make dollars it doesn't make sense so when it comes to merchandise and this is why i'm teaching this to you guys today and again you sign up for spreadshop for zero dollars you can sign up for spreadshop for free and start selling merchandise if you get even 10 sales 10 sales 50 for a lot of you you won't even get 50 if you get 10 000 views on youtube you get 10 000 people to pay attention to you and it will not add up to the money then if 10 people buy from you it's just math it's just math and it's crazy to think about it right it's absolutely crazy to think about it so from a monetization standpoint product sales make the most sense whether it's print on demand like i said the margins on that are rather low the margins on print on demand 5 10 upper echelon is 15. and that's it now me i prioritize i'm gonna make some more cool merch by the way because for some of y'all that's what you could afford to buy to support me i have the ebook coming out and i'll do ebooks and things like that and those will be like you know affordable those would be like 10 ebooks because that's a way for people to support that they can afford and they're getting something out of it right so and same thing with me letting you guys uh once a month do the channel reviews that's a way to support and still get something out of it and so it makes sense for y'all because then it's under 20 same thing with merchandise i'm not going to be doing digital products unless i do a store that has individual templates that's different so like eventually creator template store will come and they'll have individual 20 products but in terms of that that's a different form of merchandise that's digital merchandise right digital product sales digital products my main digital products are like 99 and that's where i start and that's the lowest i go and it's practical but not everyone can afford it and so that's that's challenging for something but if you make product levels for your audience that have things that are under 20 or 30 dollars then a greater amount of people can buy and for those of you at the beginning of your monetization journey that makes the most sense now if you're in the education space and you can do something or if you're in the productivity space productivity is really great productivity you can make uh digital merchandise and products where you might have uh planners and things i'll do a whole thing we'll do a workshop on digital products sometime we'll do a definitely do a workshop on digital products we'll do another one digital cortex just sometimes we're gonna do print on demand today but there's a there's a large margin in digital product sales and that could be planners that could be workbooks it could be any number of products i'll do a video on it maybe i'll do a video this week on digital products exclusively just as a roundup video like oh like you know six digital products you can sell and actually make money or something but for a lot of you um you'll make your first 100 faster selling something to your audience than having a larger audience because of the way that youtube monetization works versus product sales works you start selling merchandise without the audience i think it's hard to sell merchandise by an audience it's hard to not have somebody to sell to president says what about shop title any suggestions okay this is a good uh this is a good point i don't think it really matters what you call your shop as long as it's easy to spell and easy to remember what a lot of people do is they just um use their online name and handle and then shop nikki heat says uh if you're willing to buy locally you can purchase them in bulk six to ten dollars then ship on your own that's a lot of work and it's a lot of upfront cost which is why most people don't do it that way and that's why i recommend spreadshop because it's just going to be less work and it's going to be less upfront money [Music] i like what scott says if you're giving people uh time and you value your craft you should have no issue selling i agree i agree with that i like that gaming dad is roberto is one of the most transparent and candid creators in the game thank you i really do appreciate that i do appreciate that i mean i i just really am very straightforward i don't have time for the nonsense um uh 38 going or i'll be 38 later this year so i'm going on 40. i don't have time for the nonsense i tell it like it is and uh you say yes all the time and you tell people what they want to hear at a nine to five job i don't do that anymore so i get to tell the truth um you know so that that's how it is uh chaostune says can confirm on amazon live and brands want to see sales numbers yes they do you can use the sales numbers from selling your own products or selling affiliate to uh boost your brand deals [Music] um carl i don't really know like place i love place it and it's in the envato network and i can vouch for the quality the only other thing that does mock-ups reasonably well compared to place it is canva so the only two that can really suggest are place it and canva when it comes to these mock-ups and that's why i wanted to show you that with uh place it and i showed you guys exactly how to do that so what we're going to do next here is we're actually going to go into the back end of spreadshop and i'm going to show you guys how to um upload and create your products in spreadshop basically from scratch and then we'll talk more strategy here in a minute but we'll go with the the technical tutorial then we'll go with strategies for selling and uh and also we'll answer any uh questions you guys have in terms of um super chats triathlon tips coach john yay what's up man spent 25 years as a t-shirt artist and i learned people will pay for graphics with a message yep yep i think you meant a message over just an image but yes [Music] [Music] money over attention yep i agree uh you know what's funny uh book sales i have a book coming out talk about book sales the margins on selling books any of these books on my shelf the margins on selling a book are the same as the margins on selling t-shirts at the end of the day even if you do it with amazon or you do it with um ingramspark or whatever your profit margin your profit margin is basically the same selling books as t-shirts there's more clout in selling books mind you and there's more prestige and being a bestseller matters but the profit margin is the same the difference is whether people value representation versus utility so books you're selling utility when you're selling merchandise you're selling participation and representation and so that's different but from a margin standpoint they're even but the difficulty and investment in getting a good ebook done both between the layout design and the cover design it's cheaper to pay somebody to design epic level merch that is to get a book cover design i said as a graphic designer used to do it they get a book cover design and they get an ebook interior design it's going to cost more money to do it well up front more skill level to get it done if you do it yourself and more time to write the book than to just create dope merch but again the split in an audience is representation and community versus utility and community and so merchandise and shirts are about repping the culture or repping the creator or repping the community the books are about utility and participation instead of um representation and participation so that's the that's the caveat but the profit margin is the same the difference also is that a book can scale to people who don't know you in a way that merchandise may not be able to so it just depends but it also makes more sense to sell merch as an entertainer and a book as an educator to your audience so it's also that [Music] uh creative market has a lot of mock-ups too okay so yeah definitely check out canva does place it does and creative markets [Music] yeah so we'll definitely do a work i think we'll have comments here we'll definitely do a workshop um around digital products and i'll do some content around that uh stacy does have a question and then we'll go and it fits with us going directly into the back end of spreadshop here uh stacy axe how can i find out which t-shirt brand uh drop shippers use i like the look and the feel of gildan or fruited loom shirts so the good news is in spreadshop they actually tell you and you can look it into their uh website and the same thing if you go to if you go through shopify you can look at printfy and printful and they will tell you and you can pick and choose which ones you want for your merchandise and so at some point we'll do like we'll do some kind of prints on the main thing because again in a box somewhere the problem is i moved and i have them in a tub or a box somewhere i might have to just spend a couple hundred dollars and do another set of orders to do a video about this but i ordered a bunch of stuff from like five or six uh prints on demand vendors i think it was printful printfi spreadshop spring redbubble and i think there was like one other one that i looked at that was popular and i bought a bunch of them i was going to compare but i put that tub somewhere when i moved and i never got around to making the video and i haven't found it from unpacking the garage yet but at some point i will do like a print-on-demand style video that breaks down quality and prints and like stuff like that yeah let's go into um let's go into more of the back end of spreadshop here and let me uh wait i have to log in again which is fine not a robot log in all right so if we go into spreadshop and we want to uh create a design we can create a product we can do up to 20 all at once um i'm gonna go with normally you can use an eps file which is a file type that i can recommend so let me tell you these file types the file types are jpeg which is going to produce probably the lowest quality outcome and is not what you really want because there's no transparency to jpeg so for everybody at home we've reached at uh at an hour and 20 minutes here this is the like full tutorial part of making a product and so when we go into spreadshop and we go to the create products we can upload um you know up to 20 designs at once which we really don't want to do we want to do them one at a time and we can choose to either do um we can select whether or not we want a product that has multiple print areas which will basically be like if you want to print on the back and front of a t-shirt or the sleeves as well as the front so just keep that in mind and i want to explain these different file types so with these different file types we have you have jpeg which for most of you all you all will not want to upload a jpeg i promise you the exception i can see if this is if it's a poster maybe but i i don't really think that's going to be what you want you can upload a png and that usually can work out really well that will have transparency but you need to make sure the file has transparency and that you can check that uh gif which i do not recommend for because it's probably not what you want you can upload an svg which is a scalable vector graphic which you can generate using canva affinity designer or affinity photo adobe illustrator can as well you can also upload ai files which are adobe illustrator files and i believe you can also upload eps files which is almost like an open source version of the file that you can generate from adobe illustrator with regard to vector line art graphics and when it says um cdr that's usually corel draw so once you upload something like that it's going to process and it'll it'll take longer to process depending on what file type you upload if i upload the same image as a png it'll process almost instantly and so just for our demo it's probably going to be easier to wait on the uh png that is going to be on the eps file but yup see there but in terms of high quality the eps file is going to be infinitely better quality for print than the png but we're just going to use the png right now just for demo purposes so we have that we're going to click on that now we get to decide whether or not we're going to sell this on spreadshirts marketplace which means other people can find it and they kind of give us a discovery platform or in our own shop or both we can always pick both so they'll sell it for us and we can also sell it in our own shop and so we can get free marketing and that's another cool thing with a spreadsheet so as you can see here we have all of these wonderful design options look at that we got a lot of stuff that we can do with this so we can get this cut out sticker which is actually pretty dope uh you know men's premium t-shirt women's t-shirt we got hoodies we got all these options and this is pretty dope and so these are the ones that it thinks are the most appropriate for us and i went ahead and picked this uh we even got tie-dye here which i don't think really works for this so that's pretty cool uh but the thing that we really i think want is i think what we really want is we want this hoodie and so we go into here and you can see that it's kind of optimized for us and it went with using about roughly 70 of the available uh space of the hoodie so what we can do is we have the option here to make this a little bit larger we can click a button and it will center it for us and i think that looks a little bit dope if it's a little bit bigger here probably make that even just a little bit bigger if we're being honest again we can just make sure that it's centered horizontal and vertically so i think that that actually looks pretty dope so we have to see front and the back we did not select multiple print area designs so we don't really have that option here we'd have to select that at the beginning we also have product colors here and so we can display it in these different product colors and we can select which ones we like and we want to be available i don't think this teal works for it so guess what we do we can deactivate that teal block color and we can say that it's only these colors and so that's pretty dope and so uh we'd move on from there to the next product that we've selected for this or we can say that we're done and so we've we've modified that specific product but we could also modify individual other products or we can decide what products we don't want it to be on i don't really like how this flowy tank top looks so we ditched that i don't like the vintage sports thing i don't like the tote bag i don't really like the mug the crew neck the apron um we have a woman's hoodie and we have a men's hoodie are there premium versions of those no the unisex one is the premium i don't like the tank top i would go the premium shirt not the regular not the printed cotton not the tie-dye not the baseball t-shirt and we're only going with the premium and so we've basically done our product selection now there are more products than this available so again if we look at all the products that are available there's a ton of them you could look at them by category and we can activate them or not there's kids products there's all these different categories there's accessories i'm not a big fan of how these uh masks look so i'm not you know so we're not doing that uh they have the mugs stainless steel print cup uh mason jar duffel bag and so that's pretty dope carryall pouch fanny pack and i think those things would be more suited to the fanny pack stuff that could be more suited to a pattern design the snapback baseball cap could work and so i turned that one on and so out of accessories there not really a big fan of these phone cases not really a big fan of um these the the buttons on the other hand yes again these will be better if we use the eps vector i do like the dog bandanas if i'm being honest and i do like the bandana uh yeah the teddy bear and the dog don't think we need to do that uh mouse pad and i don't think so again if i go and i look now we have a few more of these options and we can edit this stuff again i think that's dope now again with this like i said this will all be better quality if we use our eps file instead of png my png is really high quality because it came from a vector file so it is usable but the eps file would be better it's just that for the purposes of time i didn't want to wait on it for processing this is not as suited to a snapback cap it could work but it's kind of super small so having seen that i'm just gonna mix it from the product line here with the buttons look at the buttons this is actually pretty dope on the button side as it is and i can make it bigger and yeah and so that's actually kind of dope next product we got bigger buttons all right making it bigger blankets dope done dog bandana i kind of like it just as is i think that's dope so yup regular bandana i think that's dope as is so that's a go if we wanted we could you know we could do something it tells us what our printable area is again with patterns you can do different things with this but it's like it gives us really good it tells you the design size so you you know you could work with that so again i really like this as is so done and done and so [Music] you know we could go [Music] we go with the zen yin yang koi the design name and we can add [Music] some of these keywords here if we wanted to we want to associate this with me we can add my name if we want to do that if it matters i don't think you have to go overboard with these with tags to be very real with you um for a description [Music] i'm just gonna like i'm just gonna do a brief description here it's not something i could write a description i just can't think of one for this right now so if i um go with this it's already published in my own uh or it's rather it's being published as an available option in my own store it tells me what the product selection looks like so i i guess if we go here and we look at new products we see what's available and so that's pretty dope and if i go and if i actually [Music] go into my shop something that i can do is i can actually decide which one of these colors are visible as the main default and i can also like i said i can deselect which colors i don't think work this design though is so well made that almost any color will work with it that's actually pretty dope and so if i um if i go in to uh the design in spreadshop if i go into this particular design and i edit it um i go to product selection i can pick let's say this men's premium shirt i can go with product color and i can make the default something else i can make it this black i can make it any number of things i can also decide what is and is not um an option like if i don't like this green which i don't i'm just gonna like uh we're not gonna have it in green you know um if i don't think this pink works which i don't we're not gonna have it in pink um so i can live it the colors i don't like that mauve either if i'm being real with you um and i don't even like the red because then we lose the symbol on the red the red part of it so it's like looking at it i can look at and go nope nope and i can just decide kind of what colors i think it works with and which ones i don't i really don't like that green so that's gone this is a lot of colors that i don't think this works with personally so i'm just getting rid of them just getting rid of them i'm just reducing it to a very minimal amount of options i don't even like it with that blue if i'm being real with you i'm being hyper picky i do not like that one [Music] so again by doing this i don't need it in that sand color so now yes i am limiting the options but i'm also preserving what i feel the quality of the design is and those are just personal choices people can make in terms of you can let it ride with as many or as few colors as you want to or you think is appropriate i'm being hyper selective about it i don't really even think this navy does anything to have there so i just kind of like reduced it to what i think are you know a handful of colors and so and i also made um a basic there i can do the same thing here on the women's side i can select which colors i think work i think i think with this one the pink does work um with other ones i do not like that green and i'm ditching the purple i really doubt the burgundy works no it does not work neither does the red oh ditching those does the fuchsia work nah we lose the red so and i do not like that blue so we're keeping it basic so we're just like we're eliminating a lot of colors because i don't like them [Music] and then like i said we get to decide which one ends up being the featured product color so this lets our shop just look a little bit more interesting and so limiting the color options is actually wildly practical you know and it also makes sense that like i hate that neon that can go that neon that neon can go also we can make the design bigger but like yeah looking at it i don't really like that so that can go neon can go that blue almost is like some goku thing so i can i can live with that uh not really feeling the burgundy really not feeling the green some like broccoli green there don't really like that all right if we're gonna have the blue we're not gonna have the ice blue um you do not need that green not need that hunter green either so yeah we're going with more neutral colors for this design so boom that's done so like i said this gives you a real good example of how quickly easily we can literally spin up a design and have something again we're assuming because like what i did was i got this design made on fiverr so in in short and showing this and showing this we have um something wildly practical monique says can you do bundles of die cut stickers a set of ten so if i look at the stickers i don't know how many come in the stickers but um white matte white glossy and transparent glossy okay super interesting so i don't know how many come in this i'd have to check at how many come in the sticker pack i think the sticker pack i'd have to look at how many come in the sticker pack and look at the sticker packs product details but you can get clearly the buttons or five packs i assume the stickers might be something similar but you do have cut out stickers and again this is another good thing about uh you know i would do this with vector graphics so i would do this with an eps file a coreldraw file um an illustrator file something like that or an svg or an svg those are the file types and formats that best work with transparency and line art and that's what you guys will want for this especially if you're working with logos and graphics versus anything that's more photo or photorealistic or pixel based um so i would in general i would recommend that you all go with uh vector graphics wherever possible and so that's going to be probably done in like adobe illustrator coreldraw or some other vector graphics program like that you know even affinity designer the free version of like inkscape or something like that for people who want to be super open source who have to be free or cheap it's like so yeah you would use those but um yeah that's my thought on that one i can live with them having purple that one's not bad i can look them up in the blue i don't see a need for the navy so the navy's got to go is that fuchsia looking i can live with i can live with them having the fuchsia [Music] yep [Music] which one shows it off more yeah i think that shows it off more so yeah yeah i feel like these are pretty good options when it's all said and done for this product design so i hit apply and it tells me that this has been instantly published in uh english english speaking countries and so boom and so this is available so pretty dope we literally were able to spin up a new product just like that so we have another super chat here we have another super chat and another question eula mcpherson thank you knowledge bombs as usual roberto if you want to see a new design website with some really dope templates go to uh kittle.com easy as canva but way cooler okay i'll check that out sometime that's a new one that's a new one i'll definitely check that out [Music] hoodie needs to have a zipper down the bit they do have zipper hoodies they do have zipper hoodies that is a product option so they do have zipper hoodies but i think you'll see that if you use spreadshop and you can sign up for zero dollars you can sign up for free right now they're sponsoring today's video but with spreadshop you can literally make products if you have the design ready you can make products you can sit here for like 20 minutes and you will have products and you will have like a good solid five or ten products that you can spin up in your store if you have the designs ready again you'll want to think about a name for the design you might want to write a description you might want some keywords but that part aside the biggest problem will be you know creating your designs and we came up with the fact that you know you can go and you can find people in fiverr and you can get uh t-shirt designs done um [Music] t-shirt designs you can get um hand lettering done you can get all kinds of stuff done i will create hand-drawn typography design for your t-shirt for starting at 20 so like i mean you have um these options available to you you have these options available to you to get some really cool stuff done it doesn't have to be wildly expensive some of them are more expensive than others depending on how premium or pro you want to go um this person does like has a thousand positive reviews or something this person starts at thirty dollars for their standard stuff and you get commercial use with it um and the source file but it's not as detailed their uh other one goes up and you get a lot of um stuff for that you get five revisions uh 75 dollars and then they you get full exclusive colored illustration with background and details and up to three characters for 105 bucks so you do that and you have a bunch of products and right right there you've got you know somebody who's a top-rated seller um has a bunch of orders in the queue and you can get a premium level design out of this and it's like okay 100 bucks so you can get a couple of designs done you put a little bit of money in if you can't do it yourself or you don't think anything you do yourself if you don't think anything you do yourself will sell then you just you know you find somebody like this in fiverr that's quality you spend a hundred dollars or so per illustration or design and you come back with something that your audience might actually want to buy and i think that's pretty straightforward you you know can do mock-ups here to help you sell it with graphics and place it and then with spreadshop you know for zero dollars in uh fees or monthly fees or anything like that you can uh make this and then you can also set your own uh profit margins where do we have that i have to sign back in but you can you know you can uh set your own profit margins in your store yep you set your own profit margins you decide how much you make and so it's mad convenient it's just it's mad convenient it's easy enough to do and you don't have to spend a ton of money and then you can make money for the rest of your creator career um as long as your audience is willing to support it and it's easier to make your first 100 doing this than to make your first 100 off the ad revenue so like i said i just really don't think there's much stopping any of you from doing this i think the issue is that some of you need to be taught how to promote how to promote and how to sell because from a technical standpoint from a technical standpoint um merch is not difficult from a technical standpoint merch doesn't have to be um very difficult and it doesn't have to be you know uh wildly expensive we already did that we already did the price stuff here and i mean you can see it here we rated the price of how much the base price of cost is and what your profits margins is and you can decide how much you want to make per sale and you can figure out what the base price is for every product in every category so um in terms of can you give an example of how much they keep for your work and how much you anticipate to make per shirt you can decide that but it usually generally speaking if your pricing reasonably is gonna be between five and eight dollars a shirt sale five and eight dollars a shirt sale uh yes spreadshop does work in the uk for those asking yep it works in the uk so let's talk a bit of more about um let's talk a little bit more about the youtube merch shelf and then we'll move into um sales tactics stuff to help you with the sales part of selling your merch again also uh feel free to ask your questions feel free to donate uh super chats but um youtube has something called the merch shelf and you get access to this at 10 000 subscribers on youtube doesn't mean you have to wait to 10 000 subscribers to sell merch it just means you don't get access to a direct selling tool in youtube so what you can do is once you have this and you connect your store and you can only connect two types of stores spreadshop and teespring so we're using spreadshop spreadshop and teespring are the only ones that you can connect to the youtube merch shelf and promote directly using again using youtube features you can promote anything you want you can set up your own website you can set up your own shopify store but in terms of youtube direct integrations to make it easy for your audience right now watching this video down below if you're watching on youtube down below there are um options right now for you guys to be able to uh specifically use the youtube merch shelf if you want to buy any of my products so that's like a whole thing so when it comes to that so when it comes to the merch shelf on youtube the merch shelf on youtube and having access to the youtube merch shelf that is something that you get once you have 10 000 subscribers on youtube to customize it you get to go through all of your uh products that are currently available and depending on when you make your products it might take longer for them to propagate here you can also search for them things like that but depending on when you do that you can go ahead and you can select your products you can move them over to which products you want to highlight and showcase you can also change the order by drag and dropping and moving manually you can save and they become available and i believe you can showcase up to i want to say [Music] i want to say you can showcase maybe um 12 products i think you can showcase i think it's only 12. yeah i think it's only 10 or 12. i think that's the maximum but yeah and so once you do that over on your youtube channel in addition to the merch shelf on the individual videos there's a tab called store and so uh your store will have this and i believe like i said i think it's up to 10 and again it can take a little while once you make changes for those changes to propagate on all sides and the same thing if you update um any design changes on the back end of your spreadshop but this is what mine looks like and this was what should be available um in terms of displaying on the channel and down below in the merch shelf and so on and so forth so that is why and this is why it's easier for a lot of people to promote because then you also get this convenient youtube link for your store and so for a lot of people that's easier to promote and what happens is if somebody decides to click on this they go directly to the product and they get to buy so you can see how easy this is in terms of reaching your youtube audience and being able to directly sell to a youtube audience and this is why people uh want to do this this is why you know people create using spreadshop specifically because of the youtube merch shelf integration that directly happens that makes it easy for the audience to just buy stuff from you so that's the youtube merch shelf part and so like i was saying earlier you have that you have your direct products here and again it was super easy for us to make and spin up a product i wonder if the eps file so the eps file there was something i guess um wrong with it or didn't work or they want a different version of it so again that's why i had the png as a backup here for us to be able to do that and my png is super high quality but i could also give them a different file version of that i could give them an adobe illustrator file because since i have it as an eps i can just re-save it as an adobe illustrator file if that's easier for them what i can do with this or with like anything if there's anything that i don't like or it doesn't work out i can always uh you know just um you know re-upload it or i can delete it so and so forth so it's again just depending on what your files are and the thing is if you would like need access to your original file again you can always click this download button and get access to your files again you know so if you have a png it'll save as that if you have something else you know it'll save accordingly so just you know be aware of that the best file like i said is some type of svg or it's some kind of other vector file is typically what's going to be the best thing but a png works fine if it's high enough quality and in general you want a minimum of a file to be 200 dpi which is dots per inch for quality i basically make everything very large and i make it 300 dpi but they also give you specifications for all the different products for what you could want print so just kind of keep that in mind in terms of designing your um in terms of designing your website when it comes to your spreadshop store they do have uh themes that you can select so you can go with um any number of these different themes that you think look dope uh and so that's pretty cool if we went with uh let's say select focus we could like actually also preview this and it's like okay theoretically that looks dope but it's really not any different for the most part than what we had so i'm just gonna discard that change and we're back to classic default because i mean not that much of a difference if we did this one i mean we could preview this this looks alright this is pretty dope but i don't know how well this would work with ours but if we did it we could always decide okay i want to see what that looks like so if i select it and i let it apply it i could make some changes again not feeling this one too much so discard even if i change the color scheme i wouldn't be feeling that one too much so again for me i just kind of like the classic theme if i'm not gonna try to customize it too much you could also choose colors and fonts you know i don't think you have to be crazy about that too much just depends on what you want you have logo options i went with the shop name instead of a logo because i just don't feel for me at least uh the logo would matter in this particular instance you can always change that you can always decide to switch on model images and you can also pick your models and so i don't have kids in these uh we don't have any masks that we're selling so you can just decide which models you like and you just like pick like that guy like that guy those are fine i don't have any kid models so i don't really care [Music] so yeah you can just kind of pick and choose which ones you like you could also decide that you want to limit it to a very small number of overall models and that might be more consistent in some way with like the overall aesthetic of what you have and so that could also so you see it generates these instant mock-ups or whatever so you could decide to go that way and i think that these m i think it just depends on the model like what how much they have in terms of um which products they apply to but if i apply these changes and i want to see how it looks we'll just end up we'll end up seeing how it looks together but you don't have to select models on some people prefer not to and i don't think they have models for every product type i don't think they have models for every product type i think even if i turn back on some of the other models they don't have models for every product type there may be some option for me to select which model i want so again i'm not a hundred percent sure and so yeah i think if you want the most like i think if you want most of your product designs to work you have to select every one of these like models based on which ones are available for which products again that could be a personal preference or choice i have to look a little bit more into the model selection thing and what it allows for or doesn't allow for or which ones activate which products because i'm not a thousand percent on that [Music] yep some activate uh others yep so you know that's something you have to take into consideration with these i think there may be something where you can actually decide which one which models to put on which products and everything like that but they may or may not i don't have any kids products so i don't think it like applies to any of the kids stuff [Music] and i wonder if i deselect if i deselect some models it gives me other stuff so interesting yeah for now we'll just try it [Music] and like i said earlier you don't need 10k subs to sell merchandise you really don't it's just that youtube gives you the features yep there's some more models so yeah youtube gives you the features when you have 10k it gives you the direct ability to sell in the youtube merch store so that's just a different um so again i would just like grain of salt it to where it's like you have to understand that with youtube it's not really about um you needing 10k subs before you can sell it's the fact that youtube will not give you the feature to directly integrate this um you know without that ten thousand that's all it is it just makes it easier it just makes it easier and out of ten thousand subscribers you're also more likely to have hundreds of people who could be buyers but it's not impossible without ten thousand you know you just need direct supporters you just need direct supporters and so um we can definitely talk about how to properly pitch your merch and some sales tactics and stuff like that but again i wanted to show you some more of the back end of the sprite shop stuff and how to utilize it how to take advantage of it and so there you go let's switch up our music a little bit [Music] [Music] uh the the really only difference between svg and eps files is both of them are scalable it's just a matter of format preferences and it's a it's a matter of like open source software working with them that's all it is eps and svg are mostly the same if you don't want to be too technical about it it's it's largely just a matter of like uh it's just largely a matter of compatibility with certain software and certain platforms that's all some platforms are more compatible with one than the other you just have to be aware that that's really all it mostly comes down to uh raymond media says roberto what are your views on those who sell merch based on music tv and other review channels how far can trademarking go you talk to a lawyer about that you need to talk to a lawyer about that what i will say is there are platforms that do provide licensing for those things because they have agreements with the major ip holders and that's usually what it takes but most people can't do that properly or but you if you're with a platform this is why there are other platforms that exist and some people don't use uh spreadshop or teespring is because they use a platform that has a license and they make a lower profit margin or they just charge more for the products but they have a license with major ip holders like you have star wars and marvel and what have you uh the main one that comes to mind in terms of having ip licensing is uh redbubble some people go with um specific youtube um creator driven platforms like that are huge that have huge craters places like fan joy and stuff like that and other ones because they have licensing agreements so that's why some people join organizations or work with networks or stuff like that because they have licensing agreements for that type of ip and they have lawyers to help you and all of those things but you give up a chunk of the money so people do it but they know that because they have those things they might sell more so that's the trade-off is they'll do volume they'll do higher numbers because it's recognizable but they'll take a lower overall profit margin a little shiny there so yeah so they'll take a lower profit margin to use a license ip but they'll be doing it legitimately if they do it that way yep how do i feel about pre-orders i mean if people who are established do them that's fine because then you don't have to worry about people who are established not delivering majority of the time i just would rather sell things that already exist so but you know um as long as people can deliver i don't have a problem with people doing pre-orders um but it's better and it works better and people trust it more when it's coming from established people people do kickstarters all the time and stuff like that so i don't have a problem with that my favorite author brandon sanderson he did a kickstarter for uh these four books that are coming out granted he's technically already written the books so they haven't been produced or manufactured or published yet but he's already written them so i have a problem with that there's going to be pre-orders from my book but my book's written it's just then we just got the cover designed it's just a matter of the editor working on it and doing some final packaging and design stuff for the physical copies but like pre-orders yeah i mean like if it if it's something that is finished or close to finish and there's a reasonable expectation that the person will deliver sure why not i don't have the guys i don't have strong opinions and feelings about most things i just use common sense i don't think most people need to have strong opinions about most things i think people just need to have common sense that's all it is apply common sense and if you're really scared about something apply the rule of law look up what the rule of law is or talk to a lawyer if you're really nervous about something but other than that you can usually apply common sense therefore when you know the rules and you apply common sense you don't have to have strong opinions about anything because you're just living in reality when you live in reality the you don't need strong opinions about most things because you just have the reality presented to you if it is what it is so yeah that's what i think that's what i think i think when you know the rules and when you apply common sense there's no need to have a strong opinion or feeling about most things so that you're just working with what exists so speaking of working with what exists let's take a look at something here i wanted to talk to y'all about how to promote merchandise so let's transition real quickly into that i think we can go into solo mode i think we can go and i can answer more of your questions with regards to that with regard to the like sales and marketing type portion about this i can answer a ton of your questions so go ahead and get your questions in go ahead and get your super chats in i'll pop a bunch of those up on the screen um ecocentric home said you know what common sense is not common practice anymore that's the trick common sense is not common practice most people are not applying common sense nearly enough they're not practitioners common sense so common sense is not common practice anymore so that's the trick so erica robin says i did a rb that's red bubble by the way so you did red bubble partnership it was a lot of fun challenging your skills your partner cartoon network's dexter's lab how to blast your contract ended so your artwork went with it yeah that can be a thing that can be a thing there's ways to go about doing um some ip partnerships and doing stuff like that and doing these things usually again through certain platforms redbubble is a popular one for licensing ip but there's conditions terms limitations and things like that so there's trade-offs so it's all about uh trade-offs when it comes to that uh have you ever done an episode on group organization channels channel networks examples channel awesome daily wire versus individual singular creators like you and pewdiepie and so forth uh at some point i will uh multi-channel networks are a whole bag of worms i will do a video about it i had a very bad experience with a multi-channel network a lot of creators have been scammed by multi-channel networks but there's a difference between a multi-channel network and then building your own media company or media organization which is much more your own media organization is what like a daily wire or a channel awesome is and they're very successful at doing that and so i have no problem with people becoming small independent or even large funded and backed independent media companies that then build uh channels and intellectual property under them i'm eventually going to build a network of education channels under me but it's going to be a media network not a multi-channel network as in a youtube mcn uh you know we're gonna build just an actual media company or entity where we're going to just basically own intellectual property outline and like hire producers and team and staff at some point this is a long term play for me this is like 10 years from now or something is a 10-year play for me and raising money to do that to build education channels that specifically focus on i want to say we're going to focus on some general education things i think are important but we're largely going to focus on uh career development and tutorial channels and things like financial literacy and so we'll build out those ips we'll hire people on to be public figures for that and so we'll like you know do all that stuff in-house it'll be a bigger deal like i said i won't even start this until much further in the future five to ten years from now and i will definitely get funding and backing so i i think that's fine to do those type of things i think it's less stressful to be an individual creator sometimes but i do think that it also works out great for uh for talent that wants to be hired on to those things that doesn't want all the stress and problems of doing their own thing per se because it's very different um now you have a lot of these people they'll start out with something like they'll start out as employees of buzzfeed and making their content build um notoriety get attention and then they'll shift over to doing a solo thing it works out for some people it doesn't for others it's a matter of whether you have the ability and the talent to not only make the content hold the audience do all those things but also handle all the back end and logistics and finances by yourself handling the editing and production by yourself versus having resources to do that or being able to afford to do that once you get up to monetization here so it's like it's really yeah it deserves like its own coverage and maybe i can bring on a panel of people who've experienced it um firsthand it deserves its own coverage but yeah i don't have a problem with people deciding which model works better for them i don't think there's a right or wrong i think that there's reasons people do one thing versus the other uh vulvar says can you one day do a series on getting into landscape photography probably on a different channel probably on like crater gear guide or something can we snag viper we can't viper when he's available um i don't think i gave him a heads up on this stream uh but he probably wasn't available today um and for today's episode for what it is it didn't occur to me to like make it a big thing say hey like fight for get off get on get up but uh uh i think next week we'll have viper um i think next week we'll have viper because i think next week is what date is next week i think next week on sunday is may i think it's like the first weekend in may so uh we'll probably do may channel reviews or something you two together is the best yeah i know i agree uh roberto's no chance you're going to create an rvn roberto blake network i'll let him turn her now i'm going to do something i mean you could think of it that way but um you can think of it that way but what i'll own is a a network of media like i'll have a media entity that owns channels and basically will have channels where i put up a different host we'll use an in-house editing team that edits for all the channels a graphics team that does the graphics for all the channels and we'll do them one at a time or two at a time and we'll do the sectors of things that i think matter they're also highly monetizable so we'll do a dedicated channel that teaches people about personal finance we'll do a dedicated channel we'll do a dedicated channel that teaches people about personal finance that isn't anti-capitalism because like you have a bunch of these ironically have financial literacy and education channels that have become about the host anti-capitalist views while trying to teach you about money which is ridiculous um and so we'll do a like very non-politically based non-biased financial education channel at some point in the future and we'll have a host for that um we'll probably do a lot of stuff around creative career development basically youtube's answer to what if you have a guidance counselor that sucks like i don't want to name the channel your guidance counselor sucks because i think that's too uh demeaning and it and it wouldn't be fair to the good guidance counselors that exist out there but we'll basically make a channel that supplements the idea that most people's guidance counselors might suck um [Music] so we'll definitely do something like that um yeah there's just uh there's different different things but let's get to some q a i want some more questions that are specific about merch y'all i want some uh i want some more merch questions so hit me up with the merch questions because i mean um we definitely can talk about this i'm talking about marketing your merch and about selling to your audience directly so uh just hit me with more of those questions please after along with kristen says my guidance kind of stole me i never get anywhere and to not bother with college so i went that's hilarious it's hilarious it's jazzy yo says i really like how you announced the last three streams if you do it again definitely easier remember because i can set reminders on my phone on the youtube app yeah i'm finding that uh scheduling announcing and promoting the streams is working out uh better and so uh we'll be doing more of that for sure uh vulvar says how would you set up a facebook ad for the merch um so that's a great question how would you set facebook apps for the merch a lot of that can be done within some of the platforms depending on what platform you're using uh shopify specifically does that very well uh you can do that with anything but here's the thing for most of you watching i wouldn't recommend buying facebook ads for your merchandise for most of you watching i would rather you promote organically so the reason of why would i promote organically versus buying ads because ads are guaranteed traffic is well most of you your margins are razor thin and most of the people you're promoting to you probably the first time you run your ads in facebook google instagram most of you one you don't already have a large organic audience in most cases which means that you're not paying to guarantee being in front of people at the most attachment to you so that's number one the exception to that is youtube video ads but in terms of merchandise i feel the margins are too low to justify buying the ads and so what do i mean by that let's say you spend um a thousand dollars on advertising you spend a thousand dollars on advertising let's say through some miracle of miracles you spend a thousand dollars on advertising let's say you're advertising at a thousand dollars reached let's say for the sake of argument it reached ten thousand people okay it reached ten thousand people out of ten thousand people let's make a very wild assumption out of those ten thousand people let's say that through some miracle of miracles you got two percent of those people to buy you've got 200 sales now out of those 200 sales you're only gonna make maybe five dollars a shirt so if you spend a thousand dollars you get two percent of people to buy you're only going to break even at a thousand dollars right then and there so to me for most y'all it wouldn't be worth it now again a thousand dollars a lot of money why am i only assuming you'll make you'll reach 10 000 people um i'm assuming that you know that's the number of people that will actually even entertain the idea of buying but let's even say let's even say you reached a hundred thousand people but it's gonna be really hard to get even one percent of them to buy so again you spend a thousand dollars you might make five thousand so then your profit margin is theoretically four thousand but if you got people to buy that your merchandise probably didn't cost you zero dollars to make because you probably weren't a graphic designer you probably had to invest in people really like liking the merch and liking what it was and so you probably had to spend money on getting the ad made instead of making yourself so you hired someone to do that you probably had to pay for the design to get done so you paid to do that so your margin is your profit margin isn't going to be four thousand dollars it's probably going to be less than that so again i just think that for merchandise when you don't have a large enough audience on your own already that and you're not well known i don't know that advertising would be better in terms of a usage of your money versus investing that into just growing your content and growing an organic audience that will buy so i don't think marketing to strangers from merchandise works that well i do think it works well on higher profit margin digital products that are utility based so in that case a 100 digital download you have a better chance of making your money back and not losing money a 500 course you have a much better chance of marketing that with ads and not losing money but if you try to market t-shirts hoodies music downloads i think there's a very good chance of your profit margin being zero or you outright losing money even if we're talking a thousand bucks i think that you end up at a wash so it's a great question it's a great question because okay if i have a small audience and i'm not getting views it's like well maybe i don't make sales but if i buy traffic maybe i get sales i understand the logic i understand the principal the profit margin isn't there though that's my issue my issue is the profit margin isn't there with the zero dollar cost youtube videos though i believe that if you get a thousand viewers i think for a thousand viewers you can sell five or ten shirts i believe it's more likely that for a thousand viewers on youtube you sell five or ten shirts for a thousand dollar thousand viewers on youtube you're only going to make five bucks an ad revenue at best unless you're doing uh finance content unless you're doing finance content it's gonna be like five bucks ten bucks if you're lucky that's selling one to two shirts you have a better chance out of a thousand view audience of selling one two five shirts and making your money than you do off of making it from the ad revenue so i'd rather people promote their merchandise for free in their videos even if it's a thousand viewers because from a thousand viewers you stand to make ten or twenty dollars on merchandise on a thousand viewers that you will never make on ad revenue for a thousand viewers whether you're monetized or not because youtube pays that low for most content for most content so that's the problem it's the the problem for me is the margin the problem for me is the margins that's the issue roberto how about ad placements on your channel where do you place ads front versus back how many times during a video direct promotion subtle promotion it depends on your audience and your content if i'm being real i think that deserves its own dedicated video and it's really not specific to the subject of merch outside of marketing your merch in your videos and again uh looking at jared polin you can experiment with this you can mark it at the beginning of your videos for 15 seconds and get it over with and then onto the video if people drop off i think they're entitled and here's why i think people are entitled now again a viewer can feel however they want to feel but i think if you cannot sit through a 15 second or 30 second ad read on an 8 to 10 minute piece of content that is free and cost money to produce and was well made you're just kind of entitled so like i don't have a problem with people doing it at the beginning of their videos in some cases i'd rather they do it at the beginning of the video and get it over with so i can just watch the rest of the content and so that's fine some people the way they want to do it with their audience is they want to do it at the end of the video so they don't risk any drop-off rate because they care more about youtube promoting the video that's fine some people do that and it works even though you have the smallest number of your audience you might have the most loyal people that watch the end and they might be the people most likely to buy so it's not a bad tactic either to do it that way the middle of the video is the place with the least compromises because you have the people that you're gonna have and you have the biggest amount of them and they probably if they've been getting value can sit through a 15 second to 30 second ad read they would have to for a sponsor and here's what i believe here's the truth about making money on youtube here's the truth about making money in youtube uh ad revenue or no ad revenue if you don't have a sponsor you be the sponsor and what do i mean by that plug your merch plug your digital product plug your service plug your channel membership plug your whatever it is or plug an affiliate link to recommend people to buy uh something whether it's if you're doing audio content or whatever the microphone and headphones that you use for your podcast or whatever your camera lenses i made i made a lot of money with camera lens reviews back in the day like you can like i see no problem with there being literally 15 to 30 second plug for whatever you want to plug in every single video whether it's a sponsor or you're the sponsor every video is sponsored you're plugging you or you're plugging them and your variety of it is it's your merchandise or your product or it's your channel membership or patreon or it's your an affiliate plug or it's a sponsor plug and that's that and it's free content people can take it or leave it and people are like oh i don't want to be sold to you're sold to every day in every television show every movie every magazine and all the things and you pay for that content and you're sold to there's somebody walking around repping a pair of shoes a handbag a t-shirt a hoodie a hat and you're thinking to yourself maybe i buy that or something like that you walk out somewhere there's billboards okay content creators are just as valid for getting that money as a multi-billion dollar corporation so i i don't see a problem with being sold to for 15 to 30 seconds i have an 8 to 12 to 20 minute video so um don't be afraid to ask for the support that you want in the way that you want to ask for it and again if people just want like to not ever be sold to there are people who are either rich that cannot sell to them and they can just watch rich people on youtube and let those rich people get more ad revenue and that's fine i have no issue with it and they can just support people who are too rich to ask to sell anything or they can support people who are too insecure to sell anything which might be fine if they just want the views and that's what they did but if that person says i can't afford to make videos for you all for free anymore i'm out and they stop making then you can't complain that oh i wish that content crew was still around because you didn't support it with your dollars the way you support multi-million dollar multi-billion dollar corporations they're still around so if you're not going to support content creators don't complain when they have to go to brands and then you get more brand deal inserts and videos or when they can't make content anymore and then the free content that you enjoyed goes away because no one wanted to support it because nobody wanted to be sold to it you know it is a business it is something that people put time money effort into um and that does matter and so uh if you don't support your own don't complain you know because you're you're gonna give that money to somebody you're gonna give it to some multi-million dollar or multi-billion dollar corporation but you're not gonna give any of it to independent creators then don't complain when there are no independent voices anymore don't complain don't cry you know and that's that again that's one man's point of view it's a little cynical i get it that's one man's uh point of view and so again i think that there's a lot of room for people to at least be clever in some of their promotions one of the things i love that creators do sometimes is they'll turn the ad read or the promo whether it's for the brand or for their own stuff into a skit and i love that i love when people turn into a 15 or 30 second skit i absolutely love it when they do that that's fun or when they make jokes or when it's really just like actually a really interesting dope product um so that's always cool and i really appreciate that uh one thing i've seen people do with merch as far as photography channels the photography channels are very clever sometimes for the merch they turn a photo shoot into a merch plug which is actually really dope and i actually want to do something like that and um like i have another channel that's going to be about the camera gear and the lights and the microphones and stuff like that creator gear guide i'm going to be doing more with that this summer because i was gonna do it before but then i ended up moving and covet happened like i had all these plans and my plans got derailed by two years just like everybody else so i had this plan for this other channel and i got derailed by two years because the way i really wanted to do it was do in person um stuff and then film that and film the behind the scenes of it and then edit that together so i wanted to do like uh camera gear reviews but like film an interview and show you the behind the scenes of filming an interview and how we set up the lights and the microphones for the interview and all that stuff uh so that then okay the in-person interview goes on the podcast channel but behind the scenes of that goes on the creator gear guide so we show you how to shoot interviews and how to set up right same thing with uh photography stuff and lights i wanted to show you behind the scenes of a photo shoot and uh put that out somewhere and then we uh and put that on the creator gear cut challenge show you that instead of just the product reviews we show you how to use the thing had all these plans and then kova derailed it panda derailed it by two years right but we're gonna finally do this stuff this summer and the reason i bring this up is something clever is to do a photo shoot and include one of the wardrobe changes being the merch the merch like if you're a photography channel or filmmaking channel that works and it's oh there's the merch and so you get to incorporate that directly into the actual content and then that's pretty dope so there's there's ways to do that i also recommend people turning their merchandise into the uniform that they wear on their youtube videos and then it's easier to sell in that way as well so there's a lot of opportunity there a lot of opportunity tyler says did you discuss how to avoid copyright trademark issues with other brands yeah don't use their logos uh aaron martin what about digital products is it best to practice best practice to launch and promote it from the ground up a different channel or use my existing channel to promote i would use the place where people are familiar with you and promote in the place that people are familiar with you because to sell anything you need traffic so you need traffic and you need trust and that's how you get a transaction that's my uh money triangle my money triangle exists around uh traffic trust and transaction so we need traffic we get that through the content and so we do that we build trust through the content and then the platform that we do the transaction with has to be an easy seamless convenient thing and that's why um you know again spreadshop makes sense for a lot of people they're youtube creators because of the fact that it's direct integration and it's easy to turn the traffic into a transaction through that system so that's uh that's why that ends up working yep um yeah the profit margins do end up being significantly low when it comes to print on demand but the scale is where the opportunity could potentially lie um so it's better to focus on merch rather than ad revenue depends on your niche but generally speaking generally speaking product sales and even affiliate commissions can do better for small youtubers than ad revenue and it's not even close i would i would say if you're a small youtuber you have a better chance making a thousand dollars through product sales whether it's print on demand or digital products digital products being the best profit margin let's be real about that or affiliate marketing commissions you have a better chance of getting your first one thousand dollars your first 100 to 1 000 will happen much more quickly through selling something than through ad revenue because it's very difficult when it comes to the ad revenue to get a thousand dollars in ad revenue if you have the highest cpms you get you have to get 100 000 views if you're a small youtuber that's struggle bus territory anyway anything is if you're not monetized then you can't make money off of the ad revenue anyway it doesn't matter so affiliate and merch and product sales would infinitely be better if you're under a thousand subscribers but even if you're at 10 000 subscribers it's still hard to get between the 100 000 in the best case scenario and the one million views in the in the worst case scenario that you need to make a thousand dollars anyway best case scenario making a thousand dollars is a hundred thousand views for ad revenue worst case scenario it's a million views for a thousand dollars in ad revenue either way that's really hard let's not let's not get twisted no matter what that's hard as hell either way either way so what's easier to make a thousand dollars it's easier to make a thousand dollars selling to a hundred people it is easier to get a hundred sales to 200 sales of anything and make a thousand dollars in profit margin 100 200 sales is gonna be infinitely easier than 100 000 to a million views and it's not even close and even if you get a hundred thousand to a million views and you are going to get it that way then you stand as much of a chance of doubling your money by also converting 100 and 200 sales out of that 100 000 probably more than that out of that 100 000 to a million views it's probably very unlikely that you couldn't get you know for a product that less than twenty dollars uh with a decent margin the 100 to 200 sales to make the same thousand dollars either way so then you could double your money so it's not as much as an either or it's a matter of ease it's a matter of scale and it's a matter of probability so that's where i'm going with that math it's not an either or and a lot of you are way too much when it comes to making money on youtube or making money online period a lot of you are way too much in the either or category instead of the yes and category or even skill stacking of a stack this and i stack this and then i stack this and then i stack this which is my method my method is the stack my method has always been the stack so mine was i do tutorials sure i'm making a little bit of ad money but i was little send a multi-channel network they were taking half my money anyway it didn't matter uh but if i get a client i make a couple hundred bucks if someone says you know what i try to learn this on my own i'm just gonna pay this roberto kid like all right that made it much easier for me is people would rather a done-for-you service than me teaching them how to do it in some cases and then when it came to coaching and consulting on the social media side they absolutely would either rather pay me for one-on-one lessons instead of broad information for free they want specific information or sometimes they want done-for-you services back when i offered more of that and so then that would be like hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on whether it's an individual or a company and so that wildly scaled and was more practical than youtube ad revenue i looked at youtube ad revenues getting paid the market myself so there was the service component was infinitely and still is very lucrative for me in the service component with awesome creator academy with the coaching stuff that coaching is more revenue because we don't sell courses yet we only sell the starter kit bundles which are like 99 for the youtube starter kit and the brand deal starter kit those are 99 we don't even sell a 500 course yet we will there are two of them planned we will sell those because it's better than everyone taking my free information and then deciding to go build youtube courses off of my free information so i might as well just you know do it myself uh no no no no shade no t um so we're gonna do that but it's wildly practical to sell your time at a premium and use your marketing funnel from youtube to sell your time at a premium and that could be consulting coaching public speaking if you're an entertainer it could be concerts it could be appearances it could be events it could be appearance fees as a celebrity could be speaking engagements it could be any number of things so there's that aspect of it if you're an entertainer you can still sell a book and sell your life story to your audience your audience will probably support it make you a best seller that's leverage and that's direct profit merchandise as well so there's all these stacks why rely on ad revenue when you have a thousand true fans if you built an audience of a significant size of a thousand true fans you give the ones that have the opportunity and disposable income to support you with 10 or 20 dollars you have the people who are a little bit more flush that can spend a couple hundred dollars on specific premium experiences you have the high rollers you have a smaller amount of high rollers if you have a thousand true fans let's say more than 60 percent of them can only buy 20 to 30 or lower products great you can sell quite a few thirty lure products that's probably a hundred dollars in there out of 60 of the audience okay so you have 600 people that can support you with a hundred dollars 600 people that can support you 100 is 60 000 in a year sixty thousand dollars in a year right there let's say out of the remainder of that audience thirty percent of those people they can buy bigger ticket items so the other thirty percent those other three hundred people let's say that they can spend 500 in a year across uh multiple transactions so all of a sudden there's 300 people that can spend 500 a year well they're 150 000 they're already now worth more than twice as many of the people and then your remaining 10 of people which is only a hundred of your true fans left those are the people that can spend a thousand dollars or more well those people are worth a hundred thousand dollars so a thousand true fans is largely no matter how you slice it as long as you build the right products and right opportunities and the access and you give people the ability to spend at the level that they are comfortable with over a period of time there and there's wild opportunities when it comes from that and the buying power of your audience and your 1000 true fans is the testament and the data point you take to the brands and the brands that are then seeing the buying power of your audience and say we want in and then they pay for sponsored content and they pay at a higher rate than if they just looked at your views and your likes because they can see actual sales which is the thing they really care about so again it's not an either or situation it's a matter of the fact that ad revenue is just to sit there and make people comfortable to keep making content because at least they're getting something for it but what they're missing out on is the fact that you have to pay to reach an audience and now you don't and that's what people have completely gotten twisted and they get themselves demotivated by not making ad revenue when you used to have to pay to reach an audience at all there was no such thing as a free audience for decades for decades in media there was no such thing as a free audience none not at scale and now there is so people getting demotivated because they'll make a little bit of money in ad revenue and then being motivated by making pennies like fractions of a penny per view it's absolutely nonsense the opportunity that exists as a content creator is unfathomable and it's so twisted that people don't recognize it for what it is and they get obsessed with ad revenue you know that obsession is kind of like when you look at what the actual opportunity is you know being emotionally invested in the ad revenue becomes absurd at a certain point it's not that it's nothing and it's not that it's worthless it's not that it's not you know valuable and it's not that it's not like i make a couple grand a month in ad revenue i'm not knocking it but i'm saying comparatively to the opportunity for me the ad revenue like there was no point where ad revenue was 50 of my income there was no point where it ever became 50 of my income it stayed in the 30 and i got it down all the way down to like somewhere between 9 and 12. i think the highest it ever got to was maybe there was a theoretical point where it was like 35 percent that's it that's it stacy thank you so much for the 10 super chat really appreciate you artist haven should you put merch on your youtube community tab create a poll and have your community pick what they like you can that might be a way to do it i wish the uh polls in the community tab let us have pictures and polls it only lets you kind of do either or uh so what i like um with that is i i just straight up like the idea i mean theoretically you could do that twitter might work better um however however what i like is i like the idea of straight up if you do know what your audience likes of just straight up marketing the merch or the product and selling it directly in the community tab and the community tab is hella free traffic hell of free traffic the community tab is the most underutilized feature in youtube right now that makes money and can also just be promo and engagement the community tab is wildly underestimated for what it gives liz gordon says we have anime inspired clothing that we're working on to push organically any suggestions of how we can get better visibility there's a lot of things you could do with just the content itself and then the content will have more visibility which then gives them much more visibility however if you have anime inspired merchandise send a care package to the anime youtubers that are obsessed with specifically that franchise or that inspired that thing like if i wanted eyeballs on some merchandise and let's say my merchandise was inspired by naruto if my stuff was inspired by naruto i'm probably sending stuff to swag kage black hokage um naruto explain set the programmer probably sending them care packages and seeing if they like not asking them or not that they have to but it'd be great if they could shout out the merch but like i'd send them care packages i'd send it to my favorite cosplay streamers if they cosplay um as the characters and everything like that so i would send it to like my favorite cosplay twitch streamers my favorite cosplay models in instagram i'd be doing stuff like that i'd have a marketing budget of sending care packages to people who might wear my stuff and people ask where it came from and stuff like that i mean i would be doing that um and then if they do wear my stuff i'd be screen capping that and then i'd be like posting that in my socials and so i think it's worth it to go that route and that's a that's a way to do it so that's definitely an option let's find another song [Music] boomerang did that turning ads into little films yeah no i like that a lot [Music] yeah i'm not necessarily talking about how the merchandise is made as a concept i'm talking about like on a photography channel showing a photo shoot behind the scenes and how we do a photo shoot if you're a photography channel but photography channel might have the models where the merch or if you're a filmmaking channel you have the people in the like thing that you're doing with the film and the behind the scenes stuff wearing the merchandise that's what i'm talking about you make a cool design but i'm saying in terms of incorporating it into the content it depends on the meta of the content that you make so that's kind of what i'm talking about and then in general also just straight up where your merch in your videos wear your merch in your videos whether you mention it or not like that's what i'm talking about [Music] [Music] yes uh with nano influencers and micro influencers you might have a higher closing rate so you might have more sales and it can make you more attractive to brands absolutely [Music] yeah zane i agree um ad revenue can be very insignificant compared to the other opportunities that youtube provides a lot of people just get um caught up in the very few in the 0.1 category of youtube that make really good ad revenue uh you have these point one percenters that make it's the smallest fraction of youtubers that make a hundred thousand dollars plus a year in ad revenue make millions in ad revenue many mid-tier creators make hundreds of thousands up to a million from brand deals combined with ad revenue and combined with digital products and merchandise and licensing sure i know creators with less than a million subscribers that make a million dollars a year but their content also is really expensive to produce and they have a team and they rent out studio spaces and so they have all this overhead i know creators that make a million dollars a year and they're just under a million subscribers like 500 300 000 800 000 subscribers but they live in a very very expensive state they travel for collabs and content so they have a massive travel budget every year they have to spend like for them and somebody to come out and film with them some of them sometimes they have a crew or a team some of them whenever they travel they have to travel with their significant other or their kids it's wildly expensive people to understand that be like higher tier youtubers that aren't bedroom youtubers are it's wildly expensive to make their content so it doesn't matter if they make a million a year they only keep um they only keep a quarter million after taxes in a lot of cases and that sounds like a lot it's not on a family and it's not it's not a significant income for owning a business and and what i mean by that i know it sounds crazy to people who make 30 55 000 a year but the thing a lot of people don't know is that their local gas station owner makes two million a year but doesn't keep two million a year their local uh family restaurant makes like two million a year but doesn't keep two million a year you get what i'm saying it's radically different where income scaling comes for employer versus employee and people try to parallel it and what happens to youtubers especially with ad revenue is they underestimate it they underestimate because i've seen youtubers get hurt because the when they got their tax bill they're like wait i didn't know i had to pay these extra taxes because you stopped being an employee you start paying the full amount of self-employment taxes you also then have to pay for your own health care insurance and coverage a lot of people there's ad expenses that come with being a youtuber because now they have to account for a different lifestyle which means they have to work harder to be healthier as a full-time content creator and that there's other expenses that come into it especially if they have families the ones who have families their expenses triple overnight a lot of them and no one no one really talks about this part and people don't talk about the money because then you're called pretentious or a snob or how dare you or why can't you live off that amount i live off of less but it's a radically different situation because the the expense invested into making the money the higher uh tax rates because it's not just you might pay a lower percentage effective tax which everyone loves to talk about but you're paying taxes other people don't because people don't realize that you then are taxed six times on the same dollar so yes you're paying a lower effective rate and you're always paying significantly higher dollar amounts percentages don't matter if the dollar amount is significantly higher like no one wants like like no one would take less money to just beat their chest about a higher percentage of less money and the government certainly isn't so it's like there's but more money even if it's a higher percentage is just more money raw dollars matter percentages don't when it comes to any expense or any tax percentages don't matter raw dollars do because you don't spend percentages you spend dollars right so this but this harsh it's harsh because all anyone does is project their emotions into those arguments when it's just a rational mathematical um argument it's like don't bring was it like you know how they say like uh don't bring a knife to a gunfight well it's like don't bring your emotional baggage to like a rational argument and a financial discussion is always a rational argument the emotions have no business in it because it's it's just math it's just math math doesn't care about any of us so the math always dictates just like how we said okay it doesn't make sense to run the ads to for merch but it does for a higher yield prof pro uh profit margin item so like a digital product or something the profit margin is better so it makes more sense to run digital ads because then your cost and your effective conversion rate is just going to be different right so we figured out that that doesn't make you know a lot of sense we figure out that ad revenue compared to other opportunities that you'll make more money outside of ad revenue well it's the same thing and so it's very hard for youtubers to talk about money in a practical way one a lot of them are not there they became financially literate very slowly i mean that was true for me too but you know it's not something the audience really cares about if they don't make financial content or business content again a lot of people get in their feelings when you talk about the these higher um you know income brackets but if they ended up doing what you were doing and they ended up there then their reality shifts and what happened during the pandemic what happened during the pandemic was a lot of um youtubers and freelancers started dming me and saying hey what's going on with this thing i'm paying so much in self-employment taxes i thought i was making more money than i was when i was employee but it turns out between my expenses even with the deductions and the self-employment taxes i'm not yet and i went full time and that's why i also caution people you have to make a certain threshold of money before you become a full-time content creator because you're not accounting for your new taxes and the fact you're going to be basically taxed six times on the same dollar depending on what state you live in you're gonna be taxed six times on the same dollar but everyone thinks you need more taxes and then um you have to uh do more complicated filings so you might have to also hire a cpas certified public accountant instead of just going to h r block or whatever or doing turbo tax on your own you might have to to get everything you're supposed to get in terms of deductions or to make sure you do it right and you don't end up owing back taxes or more money you have to pay more in your financial services you have to pay for the bookkeeping you have to pay for depending on your state you might have to pay for different levels of insurance and you will most likely it's in your best interest but you'll be required to cover carry business insurance so you want to cover carry business insurance and that's some type of health care coverage on top of library so you see it starts to be this whole thing to where to be a full-time content creator you do need to make money and you do need to make significant amount of money compared to just replacing the income from your job and i did a whole video about this i'll probably do another like how to be a full-time youtuber video that gets into some of these details but it's like it's it's not as easy as people think just to even manage the financial side of it and there's almost no education around it it's all the glamorized stuff it's all the oh yay and i'm making money and uh yeah you spend money to make money but it's like but it's like people do not really understand what a burden it will be for them when they transition from being an employee to being self-employed to just learn to navigate their own finances and their new responsibilities and the um legal and tax implications of that the insurance stuff most people also they don't it doesn't occur to them that they need to either have an assistant do it or sit down in a weekend and do it and just take down all the serial numbers for all their uh purchases and put down a detailed inventory list of their camera gear their microphones and their lights so they can file an insurance claim or if they are going to travel and do collabs that they need to make sure they have travel insurance in case their equipment's damaged the airport loses it screws it up by throwing their luggage around or somebody steals it you have to have insurance because then you're out the equipment you need to make a living to do your content and you know you don't want that you want it so you need to be able to file the insurance claim it's like if you got into a car accident you got to be able to file the insurance claim a lot of people don't do these very important very basic things and one makes content about it because like people won't watch it so you know it's a whole thing it's a whole thing um but i'm not surprised that people don't understand the opportunities that exist outside the ad revenue because most youtubers will just talk about the ad revenue because it just i guess it sounds less pretentious than than like the other stuff or whatever or it sounds less greedy quote unquote but it's like but it's a disservice in many cases because people are just wildly uneducated about the earning opportunity of youtube and being a creator and all this stuff um because people just need to i guess people need to sound relatable and it makes them sound much more disconnected from their audience who are you know average joe's and jill's like you know uh middle income but it's it's important that people if they want to do this which most people um their young people really want to do this now they should know the truth about how much money you can make but also what investment looks like i mean we covered the investment back into just making good merch and that like to make really good merch for your audience may require you to spend some upfront money having control over the branding you might not use a free platform you might want to use shopify but you'll have to pay monthly fees you have to pay for software you have you know you have these expenses and then you have to sell x amount to break even on the initial investment and that's that's how it is jay-z helps thank you so much if you were an injury lawyer licensed in just one state would you create a paid course the law varies from state to state how many subs do you think i need for a course to be profitable so it's less about subs but we could use subs as a basis for the conversion rate on your audience in terms of profitability a digital course is not wildly expensive unless you want to think about what your time is and your investment is on that let's assume that it takes you uh 40 hours that you would bill for normally uh to make your course let's say it takes you 40 hours to manufacture a really good course i don't know that in your situation since you're an injury lawyer licensed in one state i don't know if it's practical to make a course about that specifically but is there something that your background as a lawyer in general qualifies you to make that's more broad and more general so i would probably use your background as a lawyer even though you're not necessarily licensed in every state and you would know better than me whether this applies but i would make something that's more general about your expertise as a professional informed by your background in law and make a more broad uh course from the perspective of someone who understands um legalities and just is a high level of um intelligence and is very successful so i would make a more broad course that might be for people that would want your perspective but i would focus more on something that might be broad market but with the background of being a lawyer it gives you an added layer of credibility and so i would use that and then i would make a course that is you know for people with significant disposable income probably nothing lower than a 300 course if you're not selling it on if you're not doing skill share and you're selling it directly make a 300 course because then you have a budget for some marketing in there built in you have um the ability to make back up the difference on your billable hours since you're a high career level your higher career level so the 40 hours you put into making a course is a significant upfront investment versus billable hours for your clients because you're a lawyer so you're high income so your time is extraordinarily valuable so you have to margin-wise you have to charge appropriately for that so it's going to be a 300 to 600 course probably with um you know some margin built in because for if you do something more broad in your case you could run ads and you could scale and that could help in terms of your audience it depends you will have a smaller audience but your audience is more affluent your audience would be more affluent your audience would also be higher in age education level would value your expertise have more disposable income so their conversion rate on your audience would be significantly higher so you wouldn't need as large of an audience your minimum viable community for you being very successful or very profitable is probably 10 000 subscribers but i think in your 10 000 subscribers you have a higher conversion rate of potential buyers than most people would just because your 10 000 subscribers are probably much more affluent more serious and um would be buyers and would be buyers uh they have the capacity they play for the stakes they have a reason to invest so i would say that somebody that's in a professional arena like you and has the credentials and credibility does very well even with 10 000 eyeballs because i think you just have a higher conversion rate around the 10 000 eyeballs that would care about your content and would also respect your credibility and credentials and who you are valuable for you're valuable to much higher income people than not so that's my advice on that one it's a good question it's a very good question actually [Music] purple girl thank you so much thanks for the info roberto you are very welcome yes um for the care packages to influencers care packages with no strings but do create the opportunity i also am a fan of handwritten notes if you're going to send care packages fit gamer dad yeah i said you have to use platforms that already have licensing or secure a licensing agreement with the um ip holder and so um you have to either secure an agreement with the ip holder or be part of a um arrangement with a platform that already has the licensing room with the ip holder which is usually like for a lot of y'all it's just gonna be redbubble it's gonna be red rule this water break brought to you by stream yard yeah streamyard is the simplest solution for online live stream across multiple platforms it's what i use and they also sent me some cool swag they've got dope merch that's keeping me hydrated right now so make sure you're signing up for stream yard for free linked in the description down below or you're getting one of their affordable plans just like i do thanks streamyard for sponsoring the video see easy integration and they got dope merch so yeah i mean so there's like um there's tons of opportunity when it comes to this it's widely i think it's more practical like i said to make 100 to a thousand dollars from the merch or a digital product that is to make it from the ad revenue um really really quickly uh this is a very good point study trade dress mark copyrights licensing for the knowledge on what to avoid and just don't copy and i also believe there's some really good information about this um on wholesale ted so um sarah from wholesale ted her her youtube channel probably has some really good information on this specific thing but like i said if you go to a platform that has these arrangements built in your profit margins are lower but they do have some licensing agreements and um therefore you negate that you can also have a direct relationship with the ip holder but if you don't then it's probably best to avoid it and you're probably better off just making original stuff yeah if you're not partnered with them uh presume that a cease and desist letter is coming yep absolutely that's why again platforms there are reasons people use different platforms the reason we use like spreadshop and spring for creators but in my case spreadshop sponsored today's video is because of the youtube merch shelf direct integration into our youtube channels at the bottom of the videos and the store tab that's why we use that as youtube content creators however some people do not and they use things like redbubble because they want the licensing arrangement with certain intellectual property that their audience loves so they go that route because that serves their purposes other people use shopify because they want the custom domain name and they want control over the look and feel and they want to source from multiple vendors they might want stuff that's fully organic or ethically sourced or any number of things i'm with spreadshop because i think the shipping is better the quality is great and they directly integrate into youtube merch shelf and they're a great partner and they they do do stuff so like you pick who your partners are for your prints on the man and your merchandise based on what is provided to you and what fits your circumstances [Music] uh james we're working on more updates for the brand deal starter kit there's actually a couple of things coming to the brand zeal starter kit um i've just been uh really busy with trying to make sure that i get out at least one to two videos a week that's the only uh reason we're delayed there aside from everything we're working on with the brand deal secrets course coming out um so we're working on updating the starter kit and then we'll get out the brand deals course and then uh we'll also be getting out some other things so stay tuned eventually we will also have a live streamer starter kit for you all uh that's coming down the pipeline as well carrot juice podcast 10 dollar super chat thank you appreciate roberto your content is very helpful and i appreciate the mentality when it comes to being creator also your openness to share information with us positive vibes to you man thank you absolutely just being smarter with money rather than saving it's a tool investing in themselves and their business is always a win yeah i mean that's what i did um ip stands for intellectual property so that's what ip means ip is intellectual property which is what we create on youtube we create our own intellectual property y'all question when you say redbubble lets you use ip do you mean the actual products that you put on your logo or like mugs bags glasses so what i mean by that is that um like redbubble has a license to where you can use art inspired by um certain intellectual property characters in anime marvel so and so forth if your stuff looks like that that you can um utilize it without these dmca copyright claims or cease and desist and all these other things but you pay an extra fee on top of that just like how if you want to do music that is a cover and you want to do a cover song there is a such thing as buying a cover license you can buy a cover license and so you can use stuff for profit but you're paying an upfront fee to do that well and usually a percentage of profits they take a percentage so when you do a cover license with music let's say you do music you went to distrokid and you did a cover license and you wanted to do a cover license where you do a remix of the sailor moon theme or um tshala hedgehog from dragon ball or something like that you buy a cover license and they take a percentage of royalties on all profit made from streaming that song or the downloads or the buys in apple and so on so forth so it's a cover license similar thing with regard to licensing for merchandise and uh print on demand if you go through a platform like redbubble and they you buy a license for that and then they take a percentage and that's how it is so your profit margin goes way lower and what you're banking on is people actually buying your thing but you will make significantly less money than if you could convince people to buy your original thing that you own all the rights to so that's how that's how it is um and so uh that's that's that's the difference at the end of the day it's the same thing with uh buying a license to use popular music on youtube you could buy a license and then you could use that song you heard on the radio or that song from your favorite artist if you buy a license but then you're spending upfront money and then you don't know if you're gonna make the money back but that's what you have to do so that's how it is with you make original stuff you ain't got nothing to worry about it's harder but you keep it all and you never worry about any of it so that's the difference that's the main difference for people so but again a lot of people again they're like okay people already know this thing or that thing it's easier to get people who care about this versus me blah blah that's why again there are very few channels comparatively think about y'all there are very few channels comparatively that make 100 percent original content most of the biggest channels on youtube are channels that in some way and and i'm talking about channels over a million subscribers there are very few channels over a million subscribers that you can name that don't rely on fair use there are very few there are there are and they're legendary they're legendary but think about it the biggest creators of all time most of them rely on fair use and don't make original content most of them they react to other people's stuff so they're not so okay so they react to other people's stuff or they review other people's stuff or they lean into a fandom or a franchise so it'll be anime harry potter star wars marvel or it'll be gaming or to be gaming using somebody else's ip it's not recycled content that i'm not i have nothing against i'm saying there's almost nobody hardly out of the sheer volume of it of channels over a million subscribers that aren't relying on fair use and not relying on other people's intellectual property now you might notice my channel has been harder to grow my channel but i largely i rarely trade on other big youtubers names for my content i rarely do collabs and i rarely use in any way shape or form somebody else's intellectual property for the most part and that's not to say that i'm better than anybody for doing that i'm saying it's safer it's infinitely safer it's easily safer it means that i don't worry about copyright claims i don't worry about copyright strikes i don't worry about cease and desist letters i don't worry about people coming and taking a percentage of anything i keep it all and that's the good news it's hard it's hard but that's the good news um scotty scotty has a question does red bubble as far as you know look out for and protect content creators from infringement so if you're talking about art theft i'm gonna dispel a myth for all y'all if you're not already an established intellectual property holder or you don't have a formal copyright with the us patent and trademark office copyright patent trademark our office you don't have a trademark on your stuff if you don't have an official government document if you don't have an official government document or you're not one of these uh media companies already i hate to break it to all of y'all there's not a single damn platform that's actually proactively protecting uh artists and creators from content theft and it's not something that started with nfts people can get off the hype people can get off their high horse people can get off they're complaining about it there's not a single damn platform looking out for artists in terms of protecting anyone from art theft and i've seen actual multi-million dollar corporations directly steal from artists uh for years now for years actual companies actual companies and brands you would know that steal from artists all the time there's not a single damn platform that actually protects home-grown inner in uh independent creators that don't already have a government filed copyright and trademark for their stuff they're they aren't doing anything for any of y'all and that did not start with nfts and crypto art for everybody crying about nfts and crypto art and art theft this and art theft that they're just leveraging nfts and crypto art for the conversation about art depth and there's not a single damn platform protecting them it's been around forever art theft has been a thing forever and it's been every damn platform an artist can post to and i remember that because i've been around on the internet since i was 13 and i'm about to be 38 i've been on the internet for decades and i've seen this i worked it like in advertising and stuff like that and i had to fight people on you know we need to buy a license for that you know we need to buy a license for that you know we can't just bite that person's stuff right like it's like no um yeah like companies corporations steal from artists all the time all the time and the only way the only way you have any protection and any recourse is to file the proper paperwork that's it that's the only thing you can really do and if you don't do that which most small artists can't afford to do you don't really have any protections that's how it is i hate to say that the closest thing that we have is youtube protecting you on your video content being re-uploaded by another person and then trying to monetize and re-upload your video whether it's 50 or 100 or something like that with the youtube uh content and copyright tool and that's about it like youtube's about the only platform with that uh if you upload your music to distrokid then yeah you know you got that and then you have a copyright id system for that but that's about it that's basically it at this point or if you upload your photography to getty images kind of kind of and that's about it that's about it that's all there and i mean and i think part of it is we haven't developed the technology to such an extent to do it for static media it's easier to some extent with the content id tools that would exist around uh video and music because that's not static content um and it's also because it's not static content it's harder it takes more effort to make a derivative of that and then to qualify for fair use to be honest uh it takes more effort there than it does for static media static media and the uh way of detecting the uniqueness of images is is wildly challenging and it's very difficult and if you've ever done a reverse google image search you know exactly how hard it is with a photo or a video doing a reverse google image search to narrow it into a specific unique identifier for a piece of content where ironically ironically for all the criticism of nfts ironically for all the criticism and nfts uniqueness to digital art making it more like physical art might actually to some extent get us to a content id system get us to a content id system that's more similar to what music and television and film has but it's not the applications of what's represented in crypto art because that's not all nfts are but a registry of some kind that exists beyond the government database with the us copyright and trademark might theoretically be able to um to do that but it wouldn't exist in the way that it is today it's a solution that would exist in blockchain technology 15 years from now it wouldn't exist today i doubt it exists in five years but you'd have to understand that crypto art is not the same thing as nfts and blockchain in its entirety it's just an execution of it that has a lot of hype right now and there are good things and bad things around that but the point is people don't understand it but the narrative of the uh art theft art theft as a narrative art theft is a reality that artists have been struggling with on every platform since the inception of the internet and beyond and artists have been stealth from on every platform whether it's deviant art whether it's uh tumblr like whether it's um any number of art competition websites digital art theft is a reality that has been with us the entire time and it's not something new that happened with nfts and there's not a single platform really protecting you but in their defense in their defense the problem is the technology that is used to protect against intellectual property theft is actually relatively new and for static media it would have to be more sophisticated because a lot of people don't realize youtube almost was sued into oblivion in 2007 through 2014 there was litigation with viacom and i think some other media conglomerates was a one i think there was like a 1.6 billion dollar lawsuit against google and youtube specifically because of piracy and free booting of intellectual property so viacom tried to take the cleaners that was seven years of litigation and for those of you not familiar if you lose in litigation you pay both parties fees uh so seven years of core fees on both ends in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit would not have been fun for google and youtube so youtube uh almost ended and that's also why if you wonder why there's no youtube competitors seven years of litigation is why there's no youtube competitors because youtube and google kept innovating while working on solving this problem and staying in court for seven years and everyone else's vc money dried up and it was don't sue me bro time and everybody was scared because they didn't think video sharing platforms would survive because they felt like it would be the napster thing all over again but youtube didn't end up like napster youtube ended up more like apple with apple music so it works out and it's because youtube had to develop the technology youtube and google had developed the technology for the content id system for media that we use today and that was developed between 2007 and 2014. most people don't know that and yet that technology still is in its infancy it's technology that is still only roughly 15 years old which is a very short lifespan for what it solves when we talk about the indexing classification and assignment of ownership um of almost all media in existence and all media that will be made with regard to video and audio and so on and so forth so it's and it's still not even always accurate as any youtuber can tell you it's not always accurate the copywriting content id system in youtube is not always accurate it actually sometimes is really bad and it's technology that's still in its infancy technically or rather it's adolescence because it's only 15 years old so you take that and extrapolate that to static media which is much more um readily available easy to generate would exist more than say music film television video um you can spin that up much more quickly than those and so there's um too much static media to index at scale very easily without more sophisticated technology and protocols and then in terms of categorizing it and assigning ownership with again and having a registry wildly difficult for most platforms to implement and most platforms don't have the money that google has and google is the first one to really significantly solve the problem and look at how much money they have and look at how long it took and look at the fact it's still not perfect so we're still ages away we're ages away from being able to protect artists from infringement and from um intellectual property theft and art theft we're we're still wildly from that because we don't have sophisticated enough technology to scale and identify uniqueness and then be able to accurately determine who belongs to what um we really don't not yet but the thing is we could with um decentralization and other things we could get there eventually but it's at least 15 years out it's at least 15 years out i mean it's just too massive of a of a scale problem if you really look at it if you really look at it again at the technology layer and the technology layer stack it's very complicated and we're we're really not good at it right now with video in youtube if you've looked at it it's not that it's like look it's it's not perfect it's getting better little by little piece by piece but it's also it's also technology that's like less than 15 years old so it's not so bad it's like you know it's not that bad um all things considered so uh you know if we're patient these platforms will get better and they'll get things right and there'll be better opportunities there'll be more protections for artists there'll be more good things than bad because technology tends to go that way over a long enough period of time but it takes a lot for technology to get there it takes a lot of time a lot of money and the sophistication that is required to address how much content is produced at scale is is just absurd at this point and um and like i don't really know how we i don't know how we really like to make the ai sophisticated enough to handle that would be making a very intelligent ai that would terrify me personally like if we get the business if we get the sorry if we get the ai if we get the ai to be that smart um to solve that problem the ai will be our new problem and that's what i'm probably the most terrified about if i'm being honest is the problems that the ai would be able to solve if we do this means that the like ai would be smarter than we are if you think about that that's like that's kind of scary that's kind of scary how smart the ai to solve that problem would have to be compared to the to an average human compared to an average human and that that keeps me up a little bit at night when i think about it is if we make something smart enough to fix the problems we want to solve we might be screwed uh dmv mtb thank you for the nine dollar super chat uh hey roberta thank you so much for your time uh spring is spring [Music] is spring.uk okay to use i'm not sure i'm i'm not sure i don't know um i'm planning on using cycling related photos where you can't tell what brand it is is that okay um with the cycling stuff i would just photoshop out the logos my friend i would just photoshop out the logos and then i think you might be okay that would be my suggestion when in doubt um when in doubt use the same rules as stock photography and you just photoshop out and you just conceal the logos you can use the um spot healing brush tool and that should probably do it or you can use the clone stamp tool and that should do it yeah i agree blockchain tech is a game changer but the case uses aren't exactly it right now no i agree but the early internet was that too the early internet was really clunky too i mean a lot of y'all i don't know if a lot of you are old enough to remember irc chat rooms or java applets the old internet was really janky if you think that we have bad first round executions or alphas of things today in technology the first round of um web 1.0 and web 2.0 was really janky like web 1.0 you had does anyone remember irc chats and java applets does anyone remember that or am i just like super old did any of you all remember that like irc chat rooms java applets excite forums do you all remember that stuff because like i'm i'm like i'm about to be 38 this year so i'm like for the internet i'm super old but i was like around when like the first executions of everything were really bad like i remember when aol was dope i remember when dial up i want to run 56k modems 50 remember when 60 56k 56 kilobytes per second was something and now everything is in like megabytes or gigabit like and we used to like be wildly excited by 56k because it was double what we used to have which was um you know 28.8 like you remember that like remember me excited about oh wow we got double and then remember when dsl was it like i'm just like i'm old man internet over here um so like yeah that's a thing like the the alpha launches of all technology today are astronomically better than the alpha launches of 15 20 and 25 years ago and so um you know the the the the problems that our base level technology can solve today like stuff that's readily available or open source would be the highest grade enterprise solution of just 15 years ago just 15 years ago like an open source solution today would be an enterprise solution that existed 15 years ago the technology that the average 16 year old has access to is better than what george lucas used to edit the first star wars films [Music] like those are like so like those are things that i constantly look at and think about is like i look at what is the solution going to be and how are we going to get there and but i also look at from the perspective of someone who's been on the internet so long that i can look at where we are today and i can backtrack to how we got here and a good example is the merch stuff you like i came from an era you guys do you guys remember when if you wanted to sell t-shirts you had to get um a silk screen machine or a heat press machine and you had to go out and you had to wholesale buy these things probably on a credit card and then you had to like sell at the flea market or out of the trunk of a car and that's how damon john and fubu got started selling out of a trunk of a car in queens you all remember that today everybody has a better opportunity to sell t-shirts then damon john and the fubu guys had back in the day in queens and it's insane what a difference it is and for zero investment up front comparatively at least as far as the actual resources so uh and usually a better quality of outcome too in terms of the product and everything so if you think about we got from selling t-shirts had to be you had to um have a silkscreen machine or a heat press machine buy bulk orders in wholesale and do all of your own um shipping and make your own labels and do all that nonsense and that if you want to try to do that online that you have to know how to code your own website to the fact that you can literally just spin up uh spreadshop zero dollars or do shopify or squarespace or anything like that i mean it's it's absurd how radically different everything is compared to um just 20 years ago just like a just one adult human being ago the world was radically different in terms of opportunity access and investment to accomplish anything to accomplish anything so um so just kind of like remember that like just kind of like remember that that's how big of a gap it is so what's possible up to another 15 years ago from now or another whole adult human from now is going to be unrecognizable it's going to be unrecognizable by the time there's another like if you have a child tomorrow the world that they will exist in when they're a fully grown human adult will be so radically different than the experience not only of that you have right now but that you grew up with that it's not even going to be recognizable [Music] uh 25 years ago was rather 27 years ago or so was windows 95 which was revolutionary from the microsoft standpoint because now you literally had um you know true the true revolution of desktop computing and a graphical user interface and not having to uh use command line and be a brainiac so that's a massive shift that's less than 30 years 30 years from to be able to use a computer you had to be a brainiac and you had to learn how to use command line to now it being so simple a child can do it and that's a massive massive transformation going from dial up 25 years ago to wireless like speeds of hundreds of megabytes per second is a massive transformation the ability to go from silk screen and hot press machines to prints on demand is a massive transformation um and i think it's wildly taken for granted just how significant it is so yeah we live a great time we live in a great time [Music] yeah but i think i covered more or less everything that i wanted to cover um to recap you know we will do time stamps but i mean you can get great merch designs for reasonable prices in fiverr you can invest in that somewhere between 100 and 500 bucks and come out with several great designs and then of course you have to sell to break even you can use spreadshop to be able to create some great merchandise gets your audience you can set your own prices and you can basically profit margin wise do really well because you can set those prices however you want you can make great mock-ups using placeit.net we'll link to the resources in the description down below for you all i mean so this is this is actually really straightforward it's not very complicated to do and like i said you can use reasonable software uh inkscape is free for vector graphics you can use canva as long as you have uh the ability to export the svg files we went over file formats and which ones you need and which ones you want to use whenever some sales tactics for you guys and how to market effectively and so i think we covered more or less almost anything you could want to know about merchandise so i want to thank you all i appreciate all the super chats i'm pretty sure we got all of them um and i think that's a really good place to bookmark the stream today i thank everybody for joining us uh i'm not sure what next week's stream is going to be next week's stream is probably going to be channel reviews with viper so he'll probably be coming back uh i also on the podcast channel will be making my return to the podcast this week so make sure you're tuning in for that uh and we're gonna basically end it here because i don't have a voice anymore but we really do appreciate y'all thank you for all the super chats thank you for the support as always more content on the channel this week i think this week we will do some content about digital products specifically a lot of you had great questions about that uh so i definitely appreciate it maybe in may we will do some stuff regarding copyright i might see if i can i might see if i can even get a bunch of the youtube lawyers on for a copyright panel it might be cool to have uh ian corzine uh uh devin stone from legal eagle and emily d baker uh join me if uh that's possible i'll see who's available uh but yeah thank you so much we'll schedule the next couple of streams but other than that stay awesome and i will catch y'all next time do we have an outro we have an outro really don't i do not have an outro overlay video so i will probably make one uh in the future but i'll make some kind of outro and then you guys can enjoy that all right stay awesome bye

Channel: Roberto Blake

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Keywords: spreadshop, spreadshirt, spread shop, roberto blake, sponsored, ad, listenable, replay, livestream, live, youtube, roberto blake youtube, lecture, sales, conversation, live streaming, youtube live, robertoblake, robertoblake2, how to sell merch, merch, how to sell merchandise, how to sell tee shirts, how to sell t-shirts, how to make money online, selling tee shirts online, how to make an online store, how to sell on spreadshop, spreadshop vs shopify, spreadshop vs teespring

Id: rC_Xkckekfw

Length: 213min 32sec (12812 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 24 2022