- Hey, friends. So as my subscribers know, there are two things in life
that I am obsessed with. The first thing is making sure that I do not forget to thank everybody that takes the moment
of their very busy day to give my videos a like and to subscribe, because seriously, every time you do that, it genuinely supports me. So thank you so much for everyone that takes a moment to do so. But the second thing, of course, that I am absolutely obsessed with is earning money for
doing absolutely nothing. Yes, it is true, as my subscribers know, I am absolutely obsessed
with passive income sources and creating them, and
I myself have several, and you can learn more about
them by watching this video, "How I Earn $1,000 a Day Passively." So I thought, why not do a
fun little experiment today and see if I can create a
new passive income source, but this time with Amazon? Yep, because you see, here's the deal. If you head on over to Fiverr, you'll find that there are
plenty of gigs out there promising you that they will
make you money with Amazon. So I decided to do this experiment
and put them to the test. Could I really hire people on Fiverr to earn me passive income with Amazon? But, of course, before I reveal the
results of that experiment, I should probably explain just how we are gonna be earning money with Amazon, because you see, here's the thing, right? Most people think that the only way to make money with Amazon is
to become a seller on here and sell products through
the Amazon FBA program, but actually, Amazon has
tons of ways to make money through the website and services, too. So, for example, one way that
you can make money on Amazon is by writing a ebook and listing it on the Amazon Kindle Marketplace, and every time someone reads your ebook, you passively earn Kindle commissions. And another way that you
can make money with Amazon, actually, is through becoming what's called an Amazon
Mechanical Turk worker. You register, and then you can
complete small, easy tasks, such as verifying company
address information, rating the search engine results, and resizing pictures
in exchange for cash. A lot of people use this
to make money on the side. But today, we are gonna be
looking at a different way to make money through Amazon, and that is with their
print-on-demand service, Merch by Amazon. Using the Merch by Amazon service, anyone can sell made-to-order merchandise, such as T-shirts, hoodies,
and even PopSockets, and make money doing so for free. The way that it works is super simple. You simply register for an account, and once Amazon has
approved and accepted it, you can then upload either
a picture or a slogan and choose which products
you'd like to sell it on with standard T-shirts easily
being the biggest sellers. You pick which color T-shirts you like and think it looks good on, and you set a product price, Amazon will then store a digital copy of your product in its
database, and after that, you create a product
page for your new merch, you give your item a name, a
description with bullet points, and then you save it. And Amazon will create
a product page for you with your new T-shirt
inside of its website once they've looked
over your T-shirt design and approved it, which
usually takes one to two days. And so now, when customers
are browsing through Amazon and looking for a T-shirt for their friend that is a plane and aviation geek, they can find your new T-shirt when they're browsing through Amazon and just searching for
an aviation geek T-shirt for their friend because your product page has related keywords in it, so you don't have to market your T-shirt, because Amazon markets it for you, which means that you get to take advantage of the billions of customers that are coming to Amazon every month, looking for products to buy. And the cool thing is that when
someone does come and, say, buy this T-shirt from you,
you don't have to do anything. Nope, because Amazon takes
care of everything for you. Amazon will see the order
and go, yep, let's make it. One of their
merchandise-printing factories will then print the design
you uploaded onto a T-shirt and then package the T-shirt up and ship it out to the customer, all automatically, all done on autopilot. In the industry, we call
this service print-on-demand because that's literally what it is. Amazon prints T-shirts on
demand as customers order them, and after they do,
they'll pay you a portion of the profit of the sale as a commission, which they pay straight
to your bank account. And by the way, if you're
watching this video and you'd like to learn even more about setting up a
print-on-demand business, you should be sure to
download my free ebook, "The 6 Steps that 6-Figure
Online Stores Follow to Make Over $10,000 a Month," and you'll find the link
to download my free ebook in the video description below. But anyway, back to the video. And as you can see, if you set
up a print-on-demand business like this, once you've got
a popular item selling, it can make you money
passively, hands-off. And a great example of
somebody doing this right now is this T-shirt here. This is being sold through
Amazon's Merch platform, and customers love it. I've installed a Chrome
extension called Jungle Scout, which tracks and estimate
sales for products on Amazon, and using this, we can say
that it's getting between 10 to 20 sales a day on average, with Jungle Scout estimating
that it's made 539 sales in the past 30 days, which is $9,675. Well, as a T-shirt here has a
royalty profit margin of 20%, that means the creator of this T-shirt has made roughly $1,935
passively this month, just from effectively uploading
this picture to Amazon so that they can print it onto T-shirts, which is pretty neat. And so, of course, I can imagine a bunch of you are thinking, well, gee, Sarah, why is it that this T-shirt sold so well? Well, my friend, it is
for three major reasons. The first reason is because
of the T-shirt niche. So you can see that this
T-shirt here targets two niches, the birthday niche and
the video game niche. Video game birthday parties are popular, and a lot of mothers like to dress up in the theme of their children's parties. Most likely when this
T-shirt was first launched, it was either the first
or one of the first to target the specific,
yet popular, cross-niche, and so it filled a gap in the marketplace by creating a fun-looking
design, which, of course, leads onto the second major
reason why it's sold so well, because it's a genuinely cool,
fun-looking T-shirt design that fits its purpose very well. And the third reason is because, thanks to the optimized choice of title, bullet points, and description that the T-shirt creator chose that contains related
keywords to the T-shirt niche and theme, and so this T-shirt
now shows up near the top of search results for
related search phrases, and so people can easily
find it and buy it. So, as you can see, if you
get these three things right, it's a winning combination. But, of course, I can imagine a lot of you are watching
at home thinking, well, gee, Sarah, that's great and all, but how can I get these
three key things right with minimal effort? And, ah, my lazy friends, ah, that is exactly why we are
checking out Fiverr today, because on Fiverr,
there are gigs like this that promise to do all three
things of these for you. They promise to do research
and identify good niches to design T-shirts in, and
they promise to then come up with the design ideas
themselves and create them, and for some, they even promise to write your product
page, title, description, and bullet points to
maximize sales, traffic, and conversions. Basically, it's a business in a box. They give you everything, and you just plug it into
Amazon, and then you make money, or at least that's how
it's supposed to work. So let's find out if
it does actually work. For this experiment, I have
ordered 100 different designs, and I've uploaded them to Amazon following the instructions
as closely as I can that the Fiverr sellers gave me. And I'm gonna see if it
actually makes us money. So I'll also be showing you
how Merch by Amazon works and how you can use it if you'd like to start your
own Amazon Merch business, too. But yes, to start off the experiment, I came to Fiverr and I did a search for highly-rated Fiverr gigs with at least a 4.9 out of 5 star rating that create T-shirts for
the Merch by Amazon program, and I made sure to only select gigs where they did the
product research for you to find those important
gaps in the market, that as I've said, are key to making money on
Amazon, and also where possible, I made sure to purchase any
additional add-ons to my gigs, where the Fiverr seller would
create the product title, description, and bullet points for me. The first gig I ordered
had over 150 reviews and an average five-star rating. It costs $50 and I got
these 10 T-shirts here, with no optimized listing included. The next gig I ordered
had over 100 reviews and average five star-rating. It cost $60 US, and I got
these five T-shirts here, with no optimized listing included. The third gig I ordered
had over 100 reviews and an average 4.9-star rating. It cost me $80, and I got
these 10 T-shirts here, along with an optimized product listing to use for each of the different T-shirts that included a product
title, page bullet points, and description. After that, I ordered this gig here that had nearly 300 reviews
with an average 4.9-star rating. It costs me $50, and it
came with these 20 T-shirts and no optimized listings. I then ordered this gig, which this time had over 400
reviews and a 4.9-star rating. For $100, I got these 20
different T-shirt designs and their optimized listings. And then after that, I
then ordered from a gig that this time had over 1,000 reviews... Wow... with an average
five-out-of-five-star rating as well. I paid $60, and I got these 10 T-shirts. Included in the order
was also a spreadsheet that had optimized
listings for each T-shirt. And I also ordered these
10 T-shirts for $45 from a gig with over 300
reviews and a 4.9-star rating. He didn't include mock-up photos, and so these were the basic design files, and something that was
actually especially helpful with this gig was that he gave me a generic
optimized Amazon listing that you could just plug
different keywords into. So I actually ended up using
a slightly modified version of this when I was uploading T-shirts that didn't come with
an optimized description or bullet points. But in addition to this, I decided to shake things up a little bit, because while by far the most
popular items with customers is the standard T-shirts, they do have other
products you can make, too. So I thought, why not make this experiment a bit more interesting by
selling something else? And I spent $25 to order 25
different PopSocket designs from a gig with over 100 reviews and an average five-star rating. In total, I spent $460 on
all of my Fiverr products, which when you add in
Fiverr processing fees, came to just over $500 US. Now, you see, here's the
thing you have to understand about the Merch by Amazon program. When you first register and
create an account with them, you can't just come in and upload 100 different
T-shirts or products. Nope. Amazon places two limits on your account. First, they limit how many
products you can upload each day. They started me off with
just two products a day. In addition to that, they also limit how many
products you can sell in total. Everyone right now starts
off with a limit of 10. In time, as you sell
more and more products, your limits will increase. So you will go from tier one to tier two, which lets you upload 25 products, and then you'll go from
tier two to tier three, which lets you upload 100 products, and then you'll go from
tier three to tier four, which lets you upload 500 products, and then you go from
tier four to tier five, which leads to upload 1,000 products, and then you'll go from
tier five to tier six, which leads to upload 2,000 products, and then you'll go from
tier six to tier seven, which will let you upload 4,000 products, and then you can go from
tier seven to tier eight, which will let you upload a
maximum of 8,000 products. But here's the thing, right? To move between the tiers, you have to sell an equal
number of products to your tier. So if you want to move from
tier seven to tier eight, you have to sell 4,000 products. Getting to tier eight in time
for this video to be filmed and edited seemed a little daunting, but to give this experiment a fair go, I decided I had to do everything
I could to hit tier three and upload at least 100 different products to see how many I could sell. And here's how you go
through and upload a product. You start off by uploading a picture, and then you go and select which
product you'd like to sell. Each of these counts as a single product, including each international marketplace, so if you've selected to
upload a standard T-shirt on both amazon.com USA and amazon.co.uk for the United Kingdom, that'll be two products, not one. So when most people start out, they only upload their designs onto standard T-shirts in the USA, as these are the most popular item overall and sell the best. And after that, you then
just go into each one and choose which product
colors you would like for it and choose your price. Now, when I uploaded mine,
I stuck to a very low price, and that's because most
Merch by Amazon coaches will tell you to start
with a very low price to encourage as many sales as possible so that you can move up the tiers faster. I also selected dark T-shirt colors, and here are the colors. You can choose up to 10 colors. When you do, prioritize the heather colors like dark heather, heather
navy, and heather gray, and darker colors such as black. That's because heather colors
and dark colors such as black and dark heather sell the best. I know that through my own
experience of selling clothing in my print-on-demand business and also because of
marketing studies done, showing which color
clothing sells the best. By far, black T-shirts are
easily the biggest seller and make up the majority of sales, and that is why by default, Amazon actually selects black
as the standard default color. They do this to encourage
you to create a design that will look good on a black T-shirt, since they know that it sells the best. And so once you've gone in and edited and uploaded the design
that you want to sell, you create a product listing
for it by giving it a title, a brand name, bullet
points, and a description. The bullet points and
description are optional to add, but it's highly recommended
that you do create one. The brand name can be anything. Amazon will just create a
page for your brand name, listing all the products you
upload and sell under it. Now, for this experiment,
as I said, wherever I could, I just used the information
that the Fiverr gig gave me. So for this shirt here, they provided me with what they believed to
be an optimized page title, bullet points, and description. I found it very interesting that they used a string
of keywords for the title rather than use a T-shirt
slogan or something like that. Some Fiverr sellers used a slogan. Others used a string of
related keywords instead to maximize the chance
of my T-shirts showing up for as many search phrases as possible. I also found that some Fiverr
sellers made their titles way too long and I had
to shorten them myself because they didn't fit, which
is something to keep in mind if you do choose to use
one of these services. But, yeah, this seller
just had a spreadsheet that contained a title and
two bullet points per design, so I just copied and pasted them. But yeah, because I was
just plugging in information that the Fiverr seller gave me and I was just copying and pasting it, uploading this T-shirt
was super duper quick. So I uploaded my first two designs, and I hit my daily upload limit. And then I came back each day and just uploaded more and more designs until I had hit my 10
overall product limit. And the result? Well, I made no sales. Bummer. And actually, it was
even more of a bummer, because for me to be able to
carry on with this experiment, I needed to move from
tier one to tier two, which meant that I needed
to sell 20 T-shirts, but I didn't have time to wait
around for that to happen, and so I had to cheat and just go ahead and buy 10 of my own
T-shirts and donate them. And, you know what? It worked. The day after I bought my 10 T-shirts, my account instantly moved
from tier one to tier two, and I had a higher daily upload. I could now add up to five products a day. And so I decided to shake things up a bit, and since the T-shirts
didn't work out for me, this time, upload the PopSocket designs until I hit my 25-product limit. And the result? Well, one of my PopSockets got banned. Yep, I got this lovely letter telling me that this PopSocket I uploaded was breaking copyright and trademark laws. When I saw this, I
suspected it got rejected because the phrase "Cowgirl," which was being used in the title tripped the trademark filter. So I resubmitted the PopSocket, but this time removed the phrase "Cowgirl" from the title. And the result? Well, it actually got accepted. So yeah, the next day, Amazon
looked over my submission and they accepted it, and it went live. Sadly, though, this really didn't help me, because still, nobody bought
anything I had uploaded. And that was a real
problem, because again, I'd hit my product limit and I had promised that
for this experiment, I would upload at least
100 different designs to give it a fair shot,
and so I just cheated again and bought more of my own
T-shirt and donated them. And it worked. The next day, I woke up
and saw that I had moved from tier two to tier three
with a shiny new product limit of 100 products. And so each day, I came back and uploaded
another five products until I hit my 100-product limit. And the result? Well, while I was finishing uploading the rest of my designs, another four items got
banned for copyright and trademark infringement,
and they were these designs. Some of these, I could
try and get the reason why they got banned. For others, I genuinely had
no idea why they got banned. But you know what? It never seemed to impact my account. Amazon never penalized me or punished me or banned my account. They just rejected the designs. And this was actually a big reason why I had purchased a bit
more than 100 designs, because I did expect some
to probably get banned. But yes, I did eventually
get to 100 products uploaded and accepted by Amazon, and so after that, after all
that, what was the result? Did I make any money? Well, I actually did make a sale. Seeing the sale coming through while I was doing this
experiment was so fun. It was one of those, ah, look, it does actually work for a tenner. People do indeed buy
Amazon Merch T-shirts. It was this design here that sold. It was for a black two-weeks-out T-shirt. And because I know a
lot of people will ask in the comment section about which Fiverr gig made
this, it was this gig here. So I'll have a link to it in
the video description below if you'd like to go take
a look and check it out. The gig didn't include an
optimized product page, just the design, and so
the title, description, and bullet points that you
can see that I included were based off of the generic template that this gig here gave me. So I'll include the link to this as well. So obviously, when you
compare the amount of money that I spent on Fiverr gigs versus the money that I
made from selling a T-shirt, I did not make my money
back on this experiment. But I still consider it extremely valuable because I learned a lot about why some Amazon
T-shirts sell super well and others don't sell as well. The product page was
clearly optimized enough to pull in traffic and buyers, and the design of the T-shirt
was engaging and cool enough that somebody actually
handed over their money and bought it. But the truth is, is that it
was just a copy of a design that's already popular and
has already being copied by other designers multiple times. So I think that the way
that these Fiverr gigs are able to pump out
20 designs in four days is they just copy a lot of
previously popular designs to minimize product research time. However, as T-shirts like this show, the key to true success isn't in copying; it's an innovating by finding
gaps in the marketplace and filling them with new shirt designs, either through your own skills or by hiring proven
artists that create designs that customers love, so I highly recommend that
if you plan to do this, to come up with those
unique ideas yourself and use freelancers to help
turn your ideas into a reality, if like me, you aren't an
artist or graphic designer to create these cool,
engaging designs that sell, just like this shirt did. So, did my video teach you something new? If it did, please hit Subscribe, click that little notification bell, so you don't miss out on any of my videos, and if you'd like to learn more about how I run my
print-on-demand business, you should be sure to watch my video, "Five Income Sources that
I Built in My Twenties that Makes Me Over $1,000 a Day." So go ahead, watch my next video, and I'll see you over there.
