Print On Demand 2023 (Full Tutorial for Beginners) - Shopify, Printful, Facebook...

hey welcome to the channel my name is mike and i'm gonna make a bold statement here and say that this video is probably going to make more millionaires than any video i've ever made in this video i'll show you every step you need to make a beautiful professional ecommerce site that sells print on drop shipped products in the easiest and the most effective way possible so what i'm going to show you in this video is something that a lot of people charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars for but we're doing this for free obviously on a youtube video now the method we're going to use in this video allows you to get started for almost no money at all with the really basically the lowest overhead possible and allows you to scale indefinitely without hitting the growing pains that most ecommerce stores face so this could be a side hustle that maybe you spend one or two hours a week on or it could be a full-time replacement for your everyday job if you really want to go all in on this either way we've seen many people make seventy thousand or eighty thousand dollars per month in profit that's not revenue that's actual profit using the tools we're going to show you throughout this video so this is a full three hour video a three hour tutorial that like i said a lot of people would charge 800 or 2 000 dollars for but this one is completely free here at santro media we believe in free information that's how we got started out with a lot of our early success was from seeing free information from other people and now we want to give back with this full tutorial the free shopify print on demand course here on youtube so there's a lot to talk about we have a lot to cover in this video i'm not going to waste any more time with the intro but we're going to dive into how to make a design how to find a hands-off supplier how to make an incredible website a facebook business page email marketing strategies how to set up other marketing styles in general and of course how to get samples like like these right here including like a hat and another hat and some shirts and we'll talk about how to get samples for all this stuff because obviously that is a really important part of an online store is seeing what your product really looks like and because we don't have inventory like there's anyway we're going to get more into that later on in the video so let's go over to my laptop and i want to start off by explaining what print on demand really is okay so let's start off with what is print on demand well print-on-demand has five main steps the first is to create your store and your design and your products and figure out what it is you're going to be selling number two is actually the marketing whether that's organic inorganic direct marketing influencer marketing we'll talk about all that throughout this video step three is the customers actually go and place the orders and this is what's really interesting because the customers you might notice are placing the orders before you're placing your orders which is really in line with any style of drop shipping it's the drop shipping business model but print on demand as the name suggests means that they're going to print whenever the demand is there so customers will place the order before you place the order and then after that number five is another really significant step and that is where the supplier essentially handles everything else for you so there's some main benefits here as you might see right from the beginning the first thing is that there is very very low risk here you don't have to buy inventory you're not going to get stuck with a warehouse full of inventory that nobody wants which means that it allows you to test new designs or just really do whatever you want without worrying about too much risk additionally you don't need any equipment because you're not managing any inventory you're not dealing with boxes and shipping and most importantly you're not printing on these t-shirts you really don't need any kind of overhead at all other than maybe the cost of a domain and your and your website for a month like there's really a very very low cost you can put it on a credit card for less than even a hundred dollars easily getting started here the second main benefit of course with that is that it is really really easy to start easy to manage and it can be as lazy as you want it to be when you're actually managing the business so if you're trying to just set up a side hustle maybe you are an influencer or you have a brand and you just want to have some kind of merch but but you don't want to dedicate full-time like dealing with this whole business print on demand is perfect for that or maybe you have a full-time job and you're looking to start up just an after hours just in your evenings you want to run a store online store and sell some kind of merchandise build it up to eventually go full time this again is a really easy way to go on the side or maybe you want to have multiple stores and you can manage each of them with with relatively low effort on top that you can customize just about anything from of course t-shirts and mugs were some of the first ones in the print on demand industry but now you can customize almost anything out there that you can imagine printing on you're able to get through these suppliers and lastly you never have to deal with tape and boxes like i said so you don't have to worry about the hassle of shipping or the whole logistics side that's all taken care of by a good supplier and of course as i said the last one is that it is really quick to start so by the end of this video you'll have a store up and running you don't have to worry about hiring anybody you don't have to worry about buying any equipment it's really really simple so let's go in that in a little bit more detail starting off step number one and we're gonna go through all this throughout this video i'll show you exactly what you need to know how to do this and i'll actually do it in this video as well so you can see where to click what to do and how to actually have it properly set up so you can start making sales and have beautiful products and a beautiful website by the end of this tutorial so starting off with step number one that is to create a store and so creating your design we're going to talk about how you can do that there's a lot of great free tools out there and if you want to do free tool that's also really easy we'll talk about how to do that the next tier would be maybe a paid tool that's a little bit more difficult but still you're doing it yourself or you can outsource entirely and just pay somebody else to make your designs for you the creating design is called white labeling so this is essentially where you make the design you put it on somebody else's a manufacturer's product and instead of the manufacturer's label on the product as your label on the product so we're gonna be using shopify in this video which is one of the easiest and most powerful and obviously most popular ways to make an online store you need absolutely no coding you don't have to know anything about websites at all it's all drag and drop it's very very easy clicking just following through you can do this like a monkey can make this website there are very easy integrations with hundreds of partners so you're not limited to just using shopify it connects with facebook and instagram and and mailchimp and a lot of other apps out there that make it incredibly powerful it's very responsive meaning it works both on a mobile and a desktop so you don't have to worry about making multiple websites and it comes with a 14 day free trial and lots of fantastic themes that are both free or paid so we're gonna actually get started with centralmedia.com shopify pod pod means print on demand but we'll get to that in just a second after we're done explaining the rest of what we're going to do in this video the second step is to market your product so as i said you have some other options here you can do direct marketing you can do organic marketing we could be marketing through google ads facebook ads facebook organic instagram organic and of course influencers as well and we're going to talk about how to actually set those up throughout this video all of those are really powerful ways of marketing your product and the idea here is that print on demand as i said is great for a pretty wide variety of sellers whether you already have a market whether you're an influencer or an instagram like whatever you might be some kind of brand or if you're a band an artist or or anything like that it would be a great way to kind of monetize your audience you don't have to worry as much about the marketing because you already have that audience or the other side is anybody looking to start up a business on the side or full time this is a great way to essentially just focus on the marketing and you can actually do the paid marketing and still get a lot of traffic through instagram or through influencers which i think is one of the most underrated ways of doing this among many others as well going on to step three this is when customers order the product as i said they're ordering the product before you are so essentially it is kind of like a pre-order but you want to make sure you're finding a good supplier so they're still getting it in a pretty reasonable amount of time within four or five or six days is what you really want that turnaround time to be now this makes it very very scalable because you don't have to pre-order anything the customer is giving you the money before you're actually ordering the product which means you don't have to take out business loans you don't have to worry about inventory it really makes it much more scalable and the only cost you really have are going to be the marketing the website the domain and the basics like that uh then we have step four which is when you order using your preferred preferred supplier uh we're gonna be using printful in this video they're one of the easiest ones to work with they're one of the most popular as well and for good reason they give you really fast shipping times very very impressive because for a long time drop shipping one of the main problems was that these are coming from other countries around the world they're shipping and they take so long to get there and nobody's going to be happy if they order your product and it shows up three weeks later when amazon shows up later the same day so print on demand of course it is a little bit more customized here it's gonna come in about four or five maybe six days and i think most people are going to be happy with that amount of shipping it generally is pretty reasonable and i've never seen anyone get too upset about that we choose a supplier with low or no fees printful obviously is completely free it's always free to use there are no fees at all there's no like freemium or subscription models like it's just it's free to use printful and that's why we like it especially when you're getting started out and if you want to use printful we'll talk about how to actually set that up going to centralmedia.com printful we we talked to printful we got you guys a discount link so if you're actually using the code santro 5 you get five dollars off when you're using printful then after that step five is when the supplier or printful in this state in this case is going to handle the rest they're going to be doing all the shipping for you all of the logistics and really that only leaves you with the marketing the designing and maybe the customer service on the back end if you're doing any kind of returns or refunds or something like that so kind of to summarize what we're talking about in this video we're gonna go step by step through making the website making the design setting up printful setting up the products and actually getting good pictures of the products before you even have them but additionally once you have them actually getting some samples in your hands and experiencing the product because that's something i think a lot of people overlook a lot of times people just set up the site they set up print on demand and they start selling without ever getting samples and samples are so so important because without actually having the physical product you don't know what your customers are actually getting it's very easy to have some type of gap between your design and the actual product and so seeing how it actually prints making sure you don't print on a seam or print something weird or or have it slightly crooked like you don't want anything to not look good so having samples i think is really really important we're gonna talk about how to get your samples additionally we'll talk about how to manage the shopify store how to manage your orders how to partner with printful as i said before as well as after that the next most important step would be the marketing and i already mentioned that earlier and we'll get through that later on in the video but of course there are both pros and cons with using this style of business now in general the the pros can outweigh the cons for many people out there of course this video is not financial advice i'm not telling you what to do with your money but definitely something to consider so the pros like i said it's very low risk it's very very easy to get started meaning you don't have to lose or risk a lot of money it's very cheap and easy to start there is really no overhead like i said the shipping and fulfillment is not your responsibility making it a very relatively passive business once you have it going and is quick and easy to launch meaning that at the end of this video you can have a full store up and running ready to go ready to start earning you money and you're just going to spend whatever time and money you're doing within this hour which is really not much then the cons of course you do have some limited customization meaning that you're kind of limited to whatever products they have whatever packaging your supplier is using and without being a large enough dealer with them or a seller with them it's going to be hard to get them to really customize your package or at least do so with a reasonable price you also have somewhat narrower narrower margins because you are working through someone else who's who's doing a lot of the shipping and stuff like that and of course you are a little bit less in control but all of those are compromises that i think are really fair compromises especially when you're starting out that give you very very little risk and you can test the waters figure out what designs work what marketing works and eventually maybe in a year or two years somewhere down the road once you have a booming uh essentially booming product and brand you can then start doing a little bit more stuff in-house you can start getting some inventory once you have stable numbers and you really have a good idea of what kind of inventory you'd want to buy so that's why this makes it for a great on-ramp to a long-term business that can last you even decades down the road so step number one is actually to set up a free account with printful then we're going to set up an account with shopify but it's just easier if you set up the the printful account now so if you go to centralmedia.com printful so let's do that right now so centralmedia.com printful then just p r i n t f you can also click on the link in the description as well or copy and paste it to a new tab and that's going to take you to this page here and the reason i recommend doing this now setting up your free account here is because later on this will actually be an app in shopify so it's really easy to use but i think it's just so much easier if you set up the account ahead of time and then within the shopify app you really only have to worry about setting up the product so we're going to go click on sign up and i'm going to sign up with my email and so then it's going to ask you what you want to do with printful i'm just going to say start my first online business and then it's going to say we're going to say finish here and our account is now set up and like i said printful is completely free to use which is one of the reasons we like it uh before we go any further i just want to kind of show you guys some of the fundamentals here first you're gonna have to verify your email then we'll go through actually creating the product we're gonna do all of that later on in the video once we have it set up through shopify um if you do it through here it can get a little confusing later so let's just start off by verifying your email i'm gonna go over and do that all right so now our printful account is fully set up as you can see we're going to come back to this a little bit later but let's open a new tab right now and copy the link in the description for shopify or you can type in centralmedia.com shopify pod you want to make sure you're going through this link so you're getting the full free trial and on top of that you can see exactly like you can actually follow along because it's going to take you to a slightly different website right here where we are going to get started with our shopify site so make sure you're using the link in the description either click it copy and paste it or type in centralmedia.com shopifypod and that's going to bring you right here so what we want to do is actually go and type in our email address so i'm going to type in and then we're going to say enter it's going to ask us for a password and it's going to ask for our store name as well and for store name you can really call it whatever you want uh for this one i'm going to call it central merchandise all right central merch i'm just going to call it central santromerch.myshopify.com we can change the domain later i'm just going to start you off with the myshopify.com domain which again obviously you don't want that but but naming your store is going to be relatively important so now they're creating our store just a couple steps here you're gonna have to wait maybe a minute until it's actually set up and we're gonna go through before we start building the store i want to give you guys the layout of the land here and show you what shopify is really all about so that further on down the road if anything happens or you want to change anything you'll have a good idea of of where things are on shopify and how to actually manage your settings and things like that now before we actually get to the dashboard they're going to ask us a couple questions so are we already selling i'm going to say i'm not selling any products yet maybe i'm new and or do you want to sell products through drop shipping yes i do in addition your shopify store uh where else would you like to sell online so we're gonna sell on facebook we're gonna sell on google let's just do all three i'm gonna select all of those and that's really not going to change a lot for me we could skip this if we wanted to but it's just going to add a couple items to my dashboard to make it easier to set these up in the future so what's your current current revenue i'm just getting started in which industry i'm going to do clothing for this video but of course we could be selling really whatever we want i'll show you what the printful library really looks like in a minute but let's go and continue now we have to type in our address obviously so we can get paid so make sure you're using a proper address not a po box a lot of po boxes are kind of weird because they only work with us mail meaning you cannot get anything from fedex or dhl or anything like that so make sure you're using a proper business address it might be your house it might be like a ups box is something some people use but it has to be a real physical address all right and now it's going to bring us to our dashboard like i said so the dashboard is going to essentially show you a little bit more about what is drop shipping that's what i said because we selected that yes we're doing drop shipping they're just going to give us a little bit more material related to what we're trying to do hopefully this tutorial shows you what you need so you don't you don't require that anyway but they have this nice little checklist down here of about what is that seven items right here eight items that we're actually going to go through in this video and then of course scrolling down this might look a little bit different depending on how you selected or how you answered the questions earlier on in like about a minute ago so i'm not going to focus too much on the dashboard here but otherwise on the left side we will see our orders and when people are placing orders they are going to be showing up here you don't really have to worry about shipping orders out so you don't really have to worry about this tab too much unless you have somebody calling your customer service line and they want a refund do they want to talk about their order ask where it is things like that that's where you'd actually go to see the orders the products you can manage you don't need inventory but you can manage your products all right here we are doing print on demand don't click on that yet we'll show you how to do that in just a second but we have customers and this is going to essentially show you who bought from your website or your store and you can see a little bit more about the customers this is great for remarketing to them or just getting a general idea of who might be buying from your store the demographics of them maybe where they're from things like that you can learn a little bit more about your customers finances we'll talk about this later on in the video as far as your net sales and your profit margins analytics is going to be a huge one as well and this is one that i'll cover a little bit in this video but because this is going to be a new store this is something that you'll probably experiment with a lot more in the future once you actually have some traffic and some sales it's a really great tool to go and look at what the conversion rate is what's doing really well where the problem is so if you see everybody's adding to cart but for some reason not checking out maybe you have a problem with like the shipping maybe they're worried about something when they get to the checkout page and you might want to change a couple things in there but it's really a very very powerful resource in optimizing your store further on down the road marketing is going to be a huge segment of this tutorial where we're going to talk about how to use facebook marketing instagram marketing uh email marketing a lot of other things and there are quite a few other apps in here that we will talk about later on discounts is again a really powerful tool we'll talk about that as well where you can get different coupons for uh sales that's a percent off a dollar off free shipping things like that and of course much much more in the app segment down here but what we want to do first before anything else once we got down to this little apps tab is actually go and add uh the printful app so they actually have a whole bunch of suggestions here i'm going to go and find the printful app so the way you can actually find printful i was never a big fan of the way shopify sets this up but if you just click on show more apps in this collection it'll take you over to the shopify app store and from here you can go in the top i mean you're not interested in any of these six right now we can go to the top we can go to categories we can go to sourcing and selling products and we can go to drop shipping and from here you see printful is one of the top options as i said printful is a really really popular one so i'm going to click on printful and once i click on that it's going to ask me if we want to install it on our store so right there we're going to say add app we're going to add the app and it's going to ask us to confirm things it says you're about to install printful print on demand on your shopify store so we are actually going to go and say install the app and after a minute it's going to scroll and it's going to it's going to do that now we're actually going to sign in now this is what i said before you want to make sure that you've signed up before it's just a lot easier to do so i'm going to click on continue right here because you already have an account continue with your shopify centralmedia.com account say continue that's exactly what i want to do connect your store to that so we're going to click on the big red button there and just like that our store is connected you can see it's a very very easy way to set that up and then from here now that this is embedded in our store we actually have a nice connection so any products we make on here should very easily sync over to our store so from the shopify home page one really really important step we need to do before we can do absolutely anything with our website nobody can buy it nobody can do anything like we need to make sure that we select a plan shopify does have a 14 day free trial which is a really really great free trial great way to set things up and get everything set up before you start paying for it but i recommend setting it up as quickly as possible to go to select a plan this way you don't end up forgetting and losing all your progress additionally it's also a way to start making money immediately so you don't have to wait until you finally set up your store and pay for it before you can start making money so they don't want you to be able to just set up a free trial sell a couple items and then close the store you're not actually able to sell anything until you pay for the plan so out of these three plans the most popular one and the one we're going to choose is the cheapest one i'm all about saving money for you guys and the way to do that is obviously with the lowest plan here the shopify basic because you don't really need the other things yet you don't have five locations you don't have maybe you have five staff members and you can upgrade here but but in the beginning you really don't need that stuff but additionally as you start to scale you want to keep these in mind this is a really big one here because as you start to sell more and more product 2.6 versus 2.9 percent might be a difference of more than 50 per month and if it is then it's going to make sense to go with the higher plan and end up paying less in those fees additionally 3.6 versus 3.9 percent uh and if it's american express that's about the same as domestic so that's great for international um and of course in person it's a little bit cheaper here so as you scale you want to keep in mind keep doing the math there's great calculators out there that can help you decide based on what your revenues are which plan is actually going to be the most profitable and the least costly for you obviously when you're starting out and you i i would assume have almost no revenue you'd want to choose the basic plan and so that's what we're going to do in this video i'm going to choose the basic plan uh you can choose how long you want the billing cycle you do save a lot of money if you go with two years or three years three years is pretty bold that's that's really confident that you're that your brand is going to really thrive for that long and it's also almost a thousand dollars i would really recommend either yearly or buy yearly um two years does save you a huge amount of money so that's usually the sweet spot i go for where you're paying you know 500 but you're getting a store that is fully set up for two years and you're saving a pretty decent amount of money now this being a tutorial i'm not actually selling anything on this after this video i'm going to close the store when we're done so i'm going to go with monthly just so i can you know not spend all of my money on this tutorial uh because it is a free tutorial which by the way if you guys are enjoying this tutorial consider liking and subscribing down below we're paying to set all this up and showing you this as free information really appreciate the support of the channel and this is something that as i minded mentioned in the beginning of the video a lot of people charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars to learn how to set this up and step by step how to make an online store we believe in free information at central media we're not selling a course at any point in this video so at this point i really want to start talking a little bit more about what products we have available and how to actually make those products so from the left side you can see we're at stores so right now we do have a store we can actually go and add a product so i'm going to click on add product and from here you have a lot of categories on the left side so we have men's clothing and you've got t-shirts jackets hoodies sweatpants underwear i mean if you guys want to make look at this if you want to make underwear with your brand on it you can do that so i mean it's crazy how many options you actually you actually have of course we've got hats as well so if you want to make like a five panel hat super easy just brand it and there's a lot of different ways you can brand with printful as well it's not just printing they also do embroidering and a lot of other things a lot of other techniques as well i'm not an expert in in some of those different techniques most of the stuff i've done has just been printing but let's close hats and see what other ones we have we've got accessories which could be bags it could be phone cases if you want to make an iphone case with your brand on it again very very easy even a biodegradable case right here with your brand on it and they're selling for 10.25 you would then mark that up with your brand on there and you're now selling a case even if it's only 20 you're selling a phone case that's custom for your audience that looks really cool and is ready to go uh with just a couple clicks of a button we've got face masks obviously being 20 22 that's something that they added pretty recently we've got key chains footwear shoes you can even get shoes and shoes are really cool because there are different ways to customize like the full shoe design not just the little print on there and they're really not even that expensive 31 dollars when you're doing that you can see how you're easily going to be getting some pretty decent margins on something like that of course that's all just in accessories right here below that we've got tons of other things like home home and living so if you want to have towels and blankets and pillows you can have postcards drink wear a lot like okay you guys get the idea there's a lot you can choose from here for the purposes of this video i'm going to start off just by making a t-shirt just a pretty basic t-shirt i think this is what a lot of people would probably be interested in making so we're going to go and click on t-shirts now t-shirts you'll see that we have a lot of t-shirts to choose from and so it can be a little tricky to know which one's actually the best one um so i recommend reading through all of them looking at the colors available looking at the reviews of them and understanding which ones are actually going to have decent quality this one right here has a lot of five star reviews and it's a pretty low price as well so i'm going to start off using this t-shirt right here so once you click on the shirt you'll see that it's going to ask us to design it we can drop our design in there we can choose what colors are and sizes are available but again i know it's going to sound like we keep going off track we started with the store we went to the shirts now we're going to go over to the design and we're going to circle and tie everything back together in just a little bit so when you're making a design i already have a design i'm going to use i'm just going to be the logo of central media but i'm going to show you guys a couple ways you can actually make a design of your own so the first way which is the easiest and the freest way to do this is actually using canva.com so we have a link you can use in the description below or you can just type in honestlyjustcanva.comcanva.com [Music] can log in you can create a free account and then from here it's really easy to make a logo as well as really anything else so this is also a great tool i recommend it for marketing materials for instagram posts uh for advertisements for you know youtube channel art like they really have a lot of templates and it's really easy to make pretty much anything you want so let's start off using canva i actually have an account so i'm going to sign in and from here we can say create a design so the first design let's just say it's going to be a logo 500 pixels by 500 pixels and this is something that we will need to use really throughout the the entire video all right so before we actually make the logo we can get some inspiration on the left side from these templates but for the rest of this video i will be using the central media logo just because that's what i actually am interested in doing but if you want to say for example we're making a product for like people who love house plants the first thing and this is a nice tip here is if you have an idea of a niche that you think is going to be interested in your merchandise you can first check a couple places the old school way was to check facebook for facebook groups but honestly facebook groups are not as big as they used to be like i personally don't really use facebook groups for anything i don't know if you guys do it's really a generational thing so what i like to do is i like to go and check on reddit and see how big the groups are so if you look up reddit and you check out houseplants let's actually do that right now so if we say reddit houseplants i i'm pretty confident there's going to be a very large community so reddit houseplants you can see right here we'll check out how many people are actually involved in this and there's one million members so obviously a very very large community and that's just one of the houseplant communities i guarantee there are many many more out there so that's how i already know there's going to be a pretty significant interest on here additionally we can go to youtube and type in house plants and see if there's a lot of influences here you can see that first of all we have a lot of ads on the top which means there's a lot of money in house plants and then down here we've got some really big channels that are all verified all talking about house plants obviously this is going to be a really really big niche that a lot of people are interested in so there's a couple ways like i said youtube reddit are really really popular ones but you could dig into different discord groups and find out if there is enough interest in your niche and when in doubt i would recommend niching down even more so if you're looking at tropical house plants or succulent house plants like i would recommend really niching down because the internet is so big these days whatever it is that you're interested in that you think you can make your brand about there's almost definitely going to be a fairly large group out there and the more niched down it is the more it's going to resonate with that group and the more likely they are to spend more money and buy more of the products you're selling so just for the example right here to make a logo i'm going to do house plants we're going to say that maybe house plants in general we want to make some merchandise about that have some kind of little fun saying on there so let's make a logo for a houseplant brand so we're gonna go down here and see if there's any that actually inspire us none of these are really jumping out this one's a nice little simple one right there so we might want to start with that and the idea here is that you want to choose one that is close enough to what you want you can start with and then you can actually fully customize it change the colors the font things like that but just to give you a nice starting point maybe this one right here nice earthy design so let's say if we wanted to do something like this so we can go and change everything else so let's change the text on the top by double clicking and we're going to say house plant so we're going to say house plants and click off of that and on the bottom we can say something like um we could say like better living better living house plants and in the middle we can say so let's just call this let's just call this like plant friends plant friends and then we can change the color of the whole thing but let's change this little icon on the top and so from here obviously it's like a honeycomb and a coffee bean those are not the icons we want but fortunately canva has a lot of free ones that you can use if we go to elements if you have a canva pro you're able to access even more but if you don't you can just use quite a few free ones as well so right here i think that maybe this one would be a good one that we could use i'm just gonna set this on the side and use it in a second a nice little plant and now let's search for uh plants see other plants we have actually i really like this little pot that's a good one i think that'll blend in really really well and uh other than that let's just say maybe a hanging one we can have a hanging one up top and a little one on the bottom so let's actually get rid of that one i like these other two and of course we can change the colors of them as well so they're kind of more in line with each other so i'm going to change the colors of this one so we can have our main color which is this orange i want it to match the terra cotta instead which i believe is one of these colors let's go and add it based on the color so we can go and match that color there we go it matches it and then we can make the next color here which is this one we want it to be similar to this actually we could just keep it flat like that okay so there we go now we have the two little icons i'm going to shrink this down and make it hang from the letter p right there let's actually delete this little honeycomb so we're going to put houseplant right there all right so this is by no means a great logo but you can see that just in a minute or so i made like a relatively decent-ish logo it's clearly off balance and i would probably change the aspect ratio of it just a bit to make it more square but but still we have something that is somewhat ready to go so let's go and click on download and when you're downloading this you can choose the size of it you can choose transparent background which is what i'm going to do of course white background would work as well but depending on what you're printing this on transparent background is usually a little bit more versatile so i'd recommend downloading twice one with transparent and one without transparent we're going to be using png because that's going to be the format that allows you to have that transparent background we don't want to compress it and we're just going to say download now something to note is the little crowns on the right side these are things you can only do if you have a canva pro or so don't worry about it if you don't have that you can always just use one of the other tools we're going to say download right now and this is going to be our first design so this has been downloaded now i want to actually make a shirt out of this logo i think it looks really cool and so rather than leaving it as a 500 pixel by 500 pixel like that's a really tiny image that's not going to stretch out well on a shirt and if we save this as an image file when you when you blow it up it's going to look really really bad but the way it's the file is actually saved or the graphics saved in canva is using something called vectors which means that as you scale it it's still going to look really really good so what i'm going to do right now is actually click in the corner and highlight everything here we're going to click ctrl c or command c if you're using mac so we can copy this and then we're actually going to go and duplicate this tab so just open canva again in another tab we're going to say file create new design in our new design we want it to be let's just say a poster 18 inches by 24 so very very large it's always better to start with something large and shrink it down when you're using this on for example a t-shirt like i said because when you're shrinking it down it's still going to have really good quality if you stretch it out it's going to get really bad so i'm going to paste the design right here i'm going to click on the corner and stretch it way out and you can see like i said because we're doing it like this if we zoom in with a little slider on the bottom you can see we still have razor sharp detail on the entire image and now it's saved as a much larger image that we can then save and put on the t-shirts i'm going to click on download we're going to save this as a png again i will i will use transparent background i think that's going to probably look best on multiple colors of t-shirts and i'm going to download this right now but of course there are other ways to make your design as well the next one which is not going to be free to use but it is going to be free because it technically is your time that you're using and this is actually using photoshop or any of the adobe suite adobe really gives you a ton of versatility and so although it is easier to use canva and for most beginners i would recommend starting with that if you want something of a more complicated design you might want to be using adobe photoshop or what i tend to do the most is i actually start off with canva get some inspiration get a reasonable design so maybe like this and then i would move it over to photoshop and that's when you can really tweak things change how it actually looks change the font a little bit more and really customize it perfectly to have exactly the design you want and of course the third option is going to be using something like fiverr or upwork five or if you just go to fiverr fiverr.com and there are two r's on that you can see that we have right here uh we can go to logo design we can search and you have a ton of people who have made logos now i would have to sign in of course but you can go and pay someone five ten twenty thirty dollars to make a pretty decent logo with a very quick turnaround as well it'd be ready within maybe a day or two uh maybe even slightly more than that but but still a pretty easy way to make a logo without spending a lot of money or a lot of time but whenever possible i generally recommend making it yourself guys because you are going to have a better idea of what you want and it's going to be easier to not have to communicate back and forth with somebody about about what you want but you know the options there if you really don't have time and if you're really bad with with designing all right so once we've made the logo as well as several designs i think for a lot of stores it's probably a good idea to make like four or five designs to start with because you don't know which ones are going to be the best sellers you don't want to just make one design and then end up not selling it and you wonder if it was because of the product or if it was because of the marketing or or if it was just because it wasn't a good design so remove the third variable there just making multiple designs again it's really low risk so just make four or five designs that you think all look really nice and list them all on your site as long as they're relatively different maybe they have different colors different words different pictures whatever it might be i'm gonna go with the first design which is just our logo for the purposes of this because you know it's going to be a little bit simpler just to show you guys exactly how we're doing this all right so now let's circle back to where we left off with the unisex staple t-shirt the bella plus canvas 3001 and we want to be sure we're choosing first of all printing not embroidering because embroidering a very large design would be incredibly expensive and incredibly complicated you don't want to do that we're going to choose printing and then here we can choose what colors the t-shirt is going to be available on our store with i'm going to choose just black and white but you could select all of them if you really wanted a massive variety i think it's a little bit too much let's just go with black and with white so you don't have to worry about the graphics blending in with some colors or other ones like black and white are pretty universal they're probably going to be pretty strong sellers and so that's going to be my main option here we can choose the sizes again i don't really need some of these really extreme sizes they're going to be very very large so let's get rid of 2 3 4 and 5 xl i'll just go with the main five right here that's more common to be seen on a lot of shelves in stores and so you know there's a reason that the general bell curve fits for the most part uh most people are going to be within those sizes which does mean you will potentially be losing customers with the larger sizes but for the sake of simplicity that's what i'm going to go with right now so now as far as the actual design we can add text on here clipart we could design it right here but that's going to be a little bit tackier that's more if you have like a work volleyball team and you want to make fun shirts like yeah maybe you do it like that but since we're trying to make a brand out of this i'm going to choose a file we do already have files that we can upload obviously the ones we just made on canva of the files we already had remember house plants was the one that was a tiny little 500 by 500 logo whereas the untitled one i just didn't name it has significantly more pixels and is a much larger design which we're going to start with that and we can shrink it down as needed so i'm going to click on open for this one it's going to be absolutely massive and we are most likely going to have to shrink this down so i'm going to click on select it's going to put that right here and you can see that's like the entire shirt right there which is really really big you can see if we drag it it fits almost perfectly but i can shrink it down very slightly and center that right here and there we go so now we have the first shirt ready to go we can see what it looks like in other colors as well so we can see what it looks like on the black one uh it still looks pretty decent i think the colors could be a little bit lighter like the brown text it's gonna be a little trickier to read but still i think it looks decent enough especially with good print quality that both of these are going to look reasonably good this is printing on the front now you don't always have to just print on the front generally i prefer to print on the front of almost every t-shirt i never really do prints on the back but you could do an outside label if you want to have something on like the top back um some people do that again it might look a little bit more premium as your brand can be more recognized by other people but again i don't do that you have inside label as well which is going to be like on the upper inside of the shirt you can add this it's going to add a couple dollars to the the product price so i'm not necessarily going to do that if it's like merch you don't have to do that but if you're starting a brand so again there are two main reasons you'd want to be doing print on demand either you are selling merch as you you are like a creator an influencer or something like that an artist i wouldn't really do the inside label if you're really constructing a brand this is where i would recommend putting your logo on the inside so i dropped a design in there and here again we don't want the massive one let's actually go and upload our little logo so it's a nice little size that's what we needed anyway so it makes sense to use the houseplants logo so you can see right here this is going to show up right there and it's going to show us like made in nicaragua in nicaragua that's going to show the size the material and like the ironing stuff like that and now your logo is going to be ready to go in that little box right there so i think honestly that looks pretty good but of course as you can see it added about a dollar or a dollar 74 to the product just by doing that if you don't want it just click on the little x and that's not going to be there the left and right sleeve again we could add things here but you'll see that if we drop our design in here if let's just add again the same little logo it's going to add a dollar 74 to print it on there this could be something that you want to do if you're willing to spend that extra money and you think it's really going to improve your product but it's not something that i'm going to do on this product right here so going back to the front this is the first product you can see it looks pretty good so we're going to go and proceed to media so now we can choose the main mock-up image for each color now we can do it together like this or kind of a little bit of a bug in the interface the white there's a white square there so we click on that it says white so we could choose a separate one for each color so we could say uh for black let's start with that one i would say i don't i really like this picture but i don't like uh the way that that looks the really dark background so instead i might say that for black maybe we would choose one of these other characters down here maybe this one looks pretty good and then for white separately let's go to select white i think that this might be maybe like this one right here so you can see here here are the two main mockups we have and we can choose this is the main mock-up image overall and now we can say proceed to details of course it doesn't really matter that much which one you choose and i can show you later on where to find other mock-up images that you can use around your site some other free tools and so here we're going to actually describe the product so uh the overall description language i think obviously it's going to be in english uh the product title we might want to change this product title so it's not just short sleeve unisex t-shirt instead we could say uh plant friends i don't know why i chose that by the way it was just like whatever it came to mind uh plant friends uh uni a short sleeve unisex t-shirt okay we're just gonna leave it as that and the description we can add a little bit more here if you want of course we can also add this over in shopify we can have a size guide attached to this if you want people to have a decent idea of maybe like what size they should be wearing i think for t-shirts it's pretty standard pretty common i think that won't really be an issue and we can add tags here if we want we can add it to collections i'm not going to add it to collections just yet we're going to make our collections over in shopify and now we can proceed to pricing so here you can see that we have quite a few configurations obviously being um so let's close out of that obviously being the different sizes we have and so the differences with sizing are are really not especially uh large you can see that the price is going to be what about 50 cents difference is the suggestion there so overall you can see that we're getting about a dollar 55 in in in revenue right there which is very very low so i think instead we'd probably want this to be a little bit higher let's say you set retail for all of these to be if it's 12 maybe you want to sell it for like 27.95 27.95 apply and that's going to give us a 15 profit on all of them which is you know a pretty comfortable profit once you factor in marketing and things like that you probably want to be aiming for something at least 10 but of course this definitely depends on what kind of marketing you're doing of course if you're an influencer and you have a massive audience then you know maybe you want to give back a little bit have slimmer margins you're not paying for marketing it's just going to be on your on your brand on your instagram your whatever it might be and so you know it depends you can choose your pricing right there now we're going to go down here and once we're done i'm just going to assume that all of these are the same even though extra small is technically cheaper i'm just going to make them all same price and we can submit this to the store so now we should have our first product it's going to be uh you got to wait just a minute and then we're going to actually add another one right now so obviously the little plant friends one was just an example now i want to make one maybe not a t-shirt maybe instead like a hoodie or a crew neck and i want this to be a central media one so let's actually wait just a second and then we'll add that all right it's been about maybe 20 or 30 seconds and i didn't click anything the page just loaded to this and you can see if we scroll down this is the first product we have it's synced there's 10 different variations meaning five sizes two colors and uh nothing was not synced nothing was ignored we can edit the product if we want uh we can also edit in shopify it's going to sync over to our shopify store and we can check that right now actually so if we go over to shopify let's refresh this and so now that we have the app it's all integrated in here we should be able to go back up to products we see right there it's there if we go up to products there it is it's now synced inventory is not tracked this is obviously not a problem because you're not holding inventory it's something that they're managing all of that on the back end so you don't have to worry about tracking the inventory but here we can actually customize this a little bit more within the shopify dashboard so if we click on it you're able to edit a little bit from from the shopify end of course the description like i said uh it did give us those two pictures but if we want to have more either right here or other places on our site there are quite a few free tools to do this i think canva is a pretty strong first option as well but there's also a website called place it that a lot of people in the industry use so if we just go to placeit.net i don't know why they chose dotnet.com it's just like a little squatter domain so placeit.net will take you to this and you're actually able to choose a lot of different poses and people doing this now of course you wanted to be relatively consistent with this like you don't want something that looks completely different completely different place and it's going to be really obvious that you did something like a place it for example but if you find something that's relatively similar similar vibe uh to what your your product's going to be then i think that's really not that's really a big positive there's if we go to mockups apparel and go over to t-shirt videos or actually t-shirt photos first t-shirt videos we'll see that in a second you can go down here and you'll see that we have i mean obviously like this is what i mean like this right here is going to obviously be very different from the first two photos so maybe you don't want to go with like an aarp style photo instead we have like this this young guy walking out looks like really confident we want something that portrays a very similar even though it's almost a bit ironic i think plant friends would probably look better on this but regardless it's just it's just a mock-up for a tutorial right here so let's go and find another photo that we think would would look good and so maybe something like uh maybe like this one right here if we want to go with that let's just take a look in right here right now and see exactly what we're dealing with so if you click on this this pose this this shot right here you can actually insert your image so we're going to upload our design so we're going to upload from our device we're going to select this one it's going to crop it in a little bit we're going to say crop and it's going to place it on there and it already has like the wrinkles and everything so it already looks really good and so now we are we're all set to go so the only other thing you'd have to do is actually go and download this and of course there is a white mark all the way a watermark on here so you will have to purchase these if you want to use them so you can only buy this one it's eight dollars or you can pay 15 a month and you get unlimited mockups this is something that i mean obviously this is just a tutorial for me so i'm not going to pay for this but as you're starting an actual store this is a really powerful tool here having mockups and only 15 a month even if you only pay for it uh for a little bit and you get all the photos you want it's really a powerful tool that i highly recommend and again a lot of people in the industry do use this just because they do such a good job you can see that i personally think that this already looks pretty realistic right there now it's not perfect and something i highly highly recommend as i said earlier on in this video is that you do request samples especially if you have a camera or a friend who has a good camera and you have and you have you know some experience or at least you know a quick google search on how to take good photos then i would really recommend getting samples and taking your own photos it's going to be more realistic you can have a more consistent setup across all of your different products and additionally it's really going to be exactly the feel and the style you're looking for for your product without having anything even remotely fake or suspicious about it so that's what i would recommend again they do a really good job here with place it so this is a really strong first option but once you know maybe in a couple weeks once you get your product or a couple days when you get your product and you really have your store finalized i recommend taking your own photos or videos especially videos to make sure that you're able to really optimize it but for now i'm just going to go with i mean obviously i don't pay for this i'm not going to get this right now i'm going to close out and some of the other options we have here i mentioned videos as well so if we go over here to apparel we go to t-shirt videos especially because we are selling this t-shirt right now you can go down and this is actually even more impressive when you find some pretty reasonable videos here like maybe this one right here so if we click on that and we can actually put our logo on here it's very incredible what they're able to do these days so let's insert our image let's go to recently uploaded uh we're not logged in so it doesn't remember what we uploaded let's go and upload a new one we're going to upload our design we're going to crop it and you'll see it'll show up usually takes about a minute or two until it actually shows up and obviously being a video that's being fabricated remotely so some cloud computing here it's going to take a little bit of time so we can actually come back to this in just a minute but going back here some other things we can change on our shopify product page of course like i said we can add this to some different categories and i realize i haven't actually shown you everything that's going on with the product customization so of course we have the title we have the description within the description something that a lot of people don't realize you can do is this is actually a full-blown editor so this text editor you can add links in there you can add images in there you can add videos in there so if you want to insert a video into the description which will show up on your product page that's something that can make it a little bit more robust and really fill it out a little more i recommend if you have a lot of things like this we could go through here and start adding some bold phrases so something that you know we really really like so we could say like pre-shrunk maybe that's like a really important saying or really important phrase we could add that as a bold thing we could say like authentic so we can add bold to that and just really start highlighting uh like ring spun cotton that sounds like a good phrase we can start adding some bold to that and additionally if there's anything that we think we want to talk more about like our story we want to give more of a background on this or maybe something about like a warranty return policy you can highlight so let's just say this right here maybe that we want to talk about an about us page we can insert a link and we can link over in the same window or in a new window to another page either on this site or on some other website if you have like a medium.com article if you have a site here i recommend doing it here and so later in the video once we make an about us page and things like that we can actually add links come back and add links to the descriptions like this so if somebody's reading the product they can click on that and go over and learn more about your product or about your brand and it's something i can really build a nice strong brand around everything going on going down you have your media of course as i said you can add more media if you either get that from of course you can get that from printful or of course you can get some more media from it for example and then going down we have our options so we have two colors and we have five sizes there so these are all the variants and we can choose like the different colors for each one as well it automatically chose the colors and the sizes and kind of match them together but if you want to say like maybe for a bit extra small maybe this guy doesn't look extra small so you want to find a model that is extra small that you could have wear the shirt and it'd be a more realistic representation of what the customer is actually going to get so again that ties in with buying uh one of everything that you're selling and really making sure that it looks good and lastly we have the website seo i'm going to click edit on this right now and you can see that right now it says plant friends short sleeve unisex t-shirts now we might want to have the brand name over here so i usually think that that looks good when you have the brand name in the google search results so we could say central merch central merge since that's like the store that i'm running right now and of course we can have our description here that is going to show up in google that's way too many characters so let's just leave it at uh maybe like right there so that's what we need and of course you want this to be this has 195 to 320 characters really about 155 to 200 characters is the sweet spot and that's really what i would recommend so you can flush it out more if you want but not all of it's going to show up especially on like desktop or mobile searches like each one is going to show up slightly differently and of course down here your url handled this is sometimes called the url slug so we could call this plant friends plant dash friends dash shirt plant friends t-shirt so that's the url right now and now we can actually save this but actually one other thing on the top i forgot to talk about the right side over here we have a couple more options not especially exciting but of course you can have if it's an active or a draft so if you're making a new product but you don't actually want to sell yet you want to tweak it you want to like really make sure that you buy a sample and test it out before you put it live on your store so this is going to be like further on down the road once you have traffic on your store you can make it as a draft instead of an active product and then further on down here we can see we can have product organization so if you want to type vendor collections we will add this to collections a little bit later we can add tags on here in case people are searching on your website i usually try to avoid search features anyway on the website but you can add tags just in case someday you want to have search features so we could say t-shirt t-shirt shirt and we could say t whatever we'll have those three those four things so we're adding all four of those and of course the store this can be a default product as well so now we're done we can click save on here it goes back and now the first product is really finalized okay so now that we have our plan set up of course like i said we still have the free trial so what we want to do now is actually set up that domain so the domain is going to be a hugely important part of this what we want to do is go down to settings from here we can go to uh on the left side domains click on domains and then within domains right now we just the primary domain is centralmerge.myshopify and this is not obviously not good so if we go to a new tab and we go to domains.google.com it'll show us this google domains which is a great way to research domains find similar domains find the pricing on them and so if i just want to say like central merch centralmerch.com it's going to show us that centralmerch.com is available and through google it's 12 per year now i'm not going to do this through google you can buy it through namecheap or squarespace or or really dozens of other sources and then you have to point to dns and it gets a little bit it's not exactly user friendly for beginners and i think the easiest way to do it and it doesn't really cost any more money is just to buy directly through shopify that's what i've been recommending it's just so easy but the point of going over to google domains is to just a search and make sure that it is available like if we looked up centralmedia.com you'll know that like that is already taken it's this domain that we used on this channel so it might recommend like central.media or or centralmedia.one usually.com is going to be the better option here but it's a good idea to at least check google domains and see get some other ideas for similar domains but because santra or because centralmerch.com is available i'm going to go here and say centralmerch.com it's available for 14 per year so approximately the same price that we saw on google and substantially easier just to buy it directly here way less of a headache i promise i've done that so many times for myself as well as for other people and it's it can be a huge headache depending on where you're buying and where you're pointing to so we're gonna buy it directly through shopify they make it super easy and now we're going to actually go and verify all of our information i'm going to blur that out so you guys so i don't dox myself here personally i usually recommend that anybody starting a new store you're probably using your home address or your own phone number your personal phone number i think it's generally not a good idea to share that publicly and i think it's a lot better to get to who is privacy so you're paying a little bit extra and then instead of your name being online it's going to be kind of hidden so no one can see your name your address and your phone number and your email connected to the domain it keeps you a little bit more private and kind of out of the way of scammers and things like that so the next thing is actually to check our email and verify the email that we have the domain with so i'm going to do that and now i've verified my information the domain is ready to go and it should be set up so if we go back to our tab we can refresh this and now the little warning went away so we can actually go and visit our site by clicking on centralmerch.com fair warning it's going to be ugly because we didn't actually customize this yet but we do have kind of a website here so centralmerch.com is something that is existing now it's password protected because we didn't actually unlock it to the public which again is another one of the reasons we wanted to upgrade our site in the first place that's why we chose a plan a while ago and so we can actually make it public in just a second i'm going to close out of some of these tabs here we don't need all these other ones open though and so from here i know google and so from here i'm not going to go through all the all the settings right now i'm going to close out of this and kind of start working back through some of the main stuff on on the site so we now have a first product we now have a domain on here we have we don't have a theme we're going to get to a theme but i want to at first make a couple more products because the theme is really built around the products you have a lot of it kind of auto populates so once you have good products good collections the theme really ties it all together and it makes it a lot easier to visualize and pick a good theme for your site so i'm going to go back to the apps down here we're going to go back to printful we're going to click on printful it's going to take us back over here actually i already have the tab open anyway i'm going to just use this tab though and from here we're going to make another product so let's go here and say add product and the next product like i said i probably want it to be a hoodie or a crewneck of sorts we're going to go to maybe like go to hoodies right here and of the hoodies let's just say we want like a pretty basic one again you want to make sure you're getting one that has really high reviews really good quality fabric and a pretty good price as well so it looks like the first one is one of the best sellers here between these two i think that i mean this one has some i don't know it looks similar enough but this one has more reviews so i'm going to choose this one right here so we're going to choose it and again we're going through really the similar same almost the same process here exactly and so out of the colors i'm going to go with white on this one just because the branding for central media would look better on a white background we are going to get rid of 3xl and 2xl you guys really get the idea here we could choose embroidery or we could choose printing i'm going to be printing on this one and we can choose the file now the file i'm just going to choose the central logo so we're going to actually let's go to upload let's go upload the red button up there and i'm going to choose this i'm going to choose this one right here we're going to say open and from here it's going to upload that the logo is going to be ready to go and we can select the logo so select it it's going to place it in the middle and it's kind of like a not it's kind of an unusual shape so we can actually add another image on here as well so if we want to have like central media and we want to have maybe the secondary logo we can add another image on here if we choose another file let's go and choose a file click upload and i have this one as well so this one has i believe no background here this is why i choose to have no background in case you have multiple images they can kind of overlap a little bit without having like a weird white box around them so let's go and select this one now and we can put this one like right below it so central media we want to make sure that this is the proper size in the print area it's like right right there let's lower slightly there we go and so let's don't show that again i it's just trying to warn me that all right so i think i have a design that i kind of like here everything's centered uh i think the sizing looks decent and now we can actually go and proceed with the media if we zoom in it said it it had to enlarge the photo a little bit i think it still looks pretty good though so i'm not gonna be too worried about that and i'm going to say proceed in general like i said it's almost always or actually it is always better to start with a very very large image and then shrink it down so now we can see the mock-ups we can have wrinkled ones we can have flat ones we can have people wearing them so maybe let's just go with like this right here just have a female wearing this as opposed to before we only had males wearing the t-shirts so it's probably good obviously depending on your market to have both sexes wearing it so people can see how it would fit and so i'm going to go with maybe this right here or maybe this guy wearing it i'm going to go with this so we're going to proceed with details now we can choose the hoodie so i'm going to say unisex hoodie we want this to be santrel media media unisex hoodie and again i'm not going to change anything else on here we can add tags all over on shopify we will proceed to pricing uh here our revenue is only we're only getting three dollars profit out of this uh three dollars revenue really because we're not spending the rest and so again we probably want to make this a little bit more than 29 maybe we can make this like 39 and actually make them all 39 make them all 30 39 and there we go so now we're making 13 profit on each of them they're gonna be a little harder to ship anyway and if we're absorbing free shipping in there uh you usually want a higher price as well so we are going to submit this to the store so you can see four sinks those are just the four different sizes we chose and let's actually quickly add two more products on here i'm going to just click add product the next one let's do something a little bit different maybe accessories down here and we can choose maybe this is going to be a phone case so let's not reload the site let's go and choose iphone cases and we can just say iphone case maybe a biodegradable one would be really cool i think i mentioned this earlier in the video i always think biodegradable products um are really cool these days and as far as phones we don't need all these different iphones let's deselect all of them and just stick with the iphone 13 regular which is also the same as the pro by the way and or same size at least as the pro and we can choose our file let's choose the unfortunately there's not really a color we can choose from let's choose a file we can upload and again i'm just going to use one of these central icons here we're going to go with this one here it's obviously absolutely massive so we want it to be a little bit smaller than that so you can see more than just the letter l on there so let's go and shrink this one way down shrink it way down again and maybe i want to even rotate that 90 degrees now obviously dark on dark doesn't look good but with this one fortunately we can also print the background color as well so let's make the background white now it actually looks substantially better central media and a white background on the phone i think that looks cool okay so we can proceed you guys know the drill we're just going to kind of populate this and get a couple more products this one that's the main mockup but you can actually i think this is really cool actually let's have some other ones maybe if it's sitting on like a table i think that that looks really cool i kind of like this more of a 3d angle right there so let's say proceed to details that's the main mockup image even though it's not showing hours right there so i'm going to say proceed to pricing and the pricing on this a five dollar profit whatever twenty dollars for a phone case let's submit that to the store as well this is gonna take a minute to actually generate this and we're gonna make our fourth and final product then all right so even though before it didn't render our our design on the phone case you can see right here now it is doing that so it should be all set there is one configuration and it's synced so if we go over to shopify and we go back up to products it should show all three of our products there we go we have all three of them and again remember when you're doing this always go back and check out each one make sure it's set up properly in shopify so just like we did before you can go and customize the description i highly recommend you do that for every single product don't just use the description here because first of all pretty much everybody who's using printful is getting a really similar description which is not good for for google to to see that and additionally you kind of want to make sure that you're you're putting your own spin on it you're having your own branding in there you tell your own story and you want the products to be like you want the the niche or your marketing to to really resonate with your product and just seeing like this it's useful information but this paragraph i think up here is really what you might want to change so of course going down here uh everything looks good so far we want to update the seo on the bottom so it's not like a bajillion characters right here and you can shorten that i think you know of course let's say central media hoodie there we go and i'm going to save that so now we'll click back all right let's make a fourth and final product right now going back here let's go and place a new product so we're going to click on new product uh from here i don't know it really doesn't matter what we're choosing we can go down to brands and you've got some kind of bigger brands here so if you want something specifically from uh like flex fit or something like that uh you could get i believe that's gonna be a hat so you can choose a flex fit hat or a visor or a bucket hat or whatever you want let's see if we can find something a little bit crazier on here if we go down to home and living i bet there's going to be something interesting there maybe a flag would be interesting you can print all over a flag so that's one of the big things as well i didn't mention earlier whenever it says all over print especially on like shoes or clothing it means that it's printing like all the way up to the stitching it's not just like a rectangular print area actually prints like all over a flag is going to be a lot easier to do of course but but it's a really cool it's a really cool option especially if you're trying to make a unique brand and you want like shirts or shoes that that have all over print and speaking of shoes let's see if we can find some shoes i thought i saw those on here a little bit earlier there we go shoes and i believe we want the men's high top canvas shoes there we go so now we can choose our design here as far as sizes go i'm going to just say we only want size i let's just say all sizes actually and now we can choose our design all right so i just made like a crazy pattern on there uh i'm gonna put it as the mock-up with some some people's feet there this is gonna take a while for it to actually like create these i bet but we're gonna go proceed to details um and again just whatever you wanna have here uh men's high top canvas i'm going to say central media this as it is and submit to store so we have all of our products ready to go we're ready to move on to the next step here of actually building out the theme on our website all right so if we go back to the shopify product page we can refresh this and now we have all of our products so we have products a lot of these are not in collections and i mentioned that collections are going to really help when you're making the theme as well so let's go and click on collections and from here let's just say we want to create a collection the first one is going to be like summer attire or let's say let's just say fall collection and so we could just actually call it santro now just called fall collection and we can add some dummy text in here just whatever we want uh and i mean obviously you don't want it to be that you want to flesh it out to something real and we can say manual you can automate this if you have a lot of products and you want all the t-shirts to be added in here you can go and automate this and of course it is using the tags we had earlier so the tag would be equal to shirt or t-shirt and that's how you're going to do that i'm going to go back to manual so i can manually add them you'll see how we're doing that in a second and we do want to have an image so having an image again this is where place it would be super useful if you go back to place it you could have like a photo with multiple people like this one would be perfect for a fall collection where you have some type of outerwear and you're showing uh the t-shirts underneath right here and there's different t-shirts different people like i think that looks that would look really good maybe not this exact one but you get the idea of where that would be useful for for the collection so i'm just going to use like a dummy photo right here not a dummy photo but just our logo i'm just going to throw that in there as the collection image and the last thing i want to do is actually change the website seo as i said before i always like having the double bar and then the brand name uh central merch and i'm going to save this we already have a pretty good url slug down there so i'm going to save it and now we have our first collection this technically our second collection the first one that we made though is ready to go the one by default was just called home shopify already made that for us but if we go back to collections we now have our file collection with nothing in it so let's go back to products and let's just say we want to add the t-shirt the shoes and the hoodie all to that collection so if we go to more actions we can add to collections and we can add it to our fall collection and i'm going to say save and now all three of these are added to that fall collection so from here we're all set now we can finally get to customizing the theme of our website so if we go just back up to home you'll see that little checklist i've said in the very beginning was going to be really important to us we found products or we made products in this case and now we're going to customize the theme after that we're going to talk about pages navigation we already added the domain i always do that in the beginning just because it really bothers me when it's not to clean the proper domain and of course we have to review shipping but we kind of already did that so let's go and customize the theme so customizing the theme this is going to first of all we have a password on here password protected so let's disable this password and that way when somebody goes to our site so for example right now with the password enabled if we go to centralmerch.com centralmerch.com you'll see that it says opening soon we can add an email in there so that you're on a list so you're notified when it's launched but it's password protected more or less so let's go back here and disable the password click on save and now our website should be live so if i go back here and just refresh this or delete the word password and then refresh it it takes us to our website but you know obviously it's not looking good because we didn't do anything yet right now it just shows our products and that's just about it we're gonna actually choose a theme right now and really set this up to be a beautiful looking website so let's go back to where we were if we go on the left side go down to sales channels online store go to themes and from here don't click customize that's going to customize the theme that it already came with instead we want to go down here and explore some themes from the shopify theme store now you can just check free ones right now or you can check the entire entire store and within the store you can filter out the free ones if you want so that's usually what i would recommend doing anyway so let's go down here and see what kind of themes we actually have so we're selling stuff obviously everything on here is for sale or selling ones but some of them are a little more expensive some of them are like 280 dollars for a theme but it might be a really nice looking theme alternatively some of them might not be so if we just go to all themes you can see literally everything right here the free the paid the full layout this is how i like to look at it so as far as industry goes let's go down and find some that i think would be most related clothing that's exactly what we're selling so out of these this one looks really nice first of all but let's see if there's any free ones within here so if we go free clothing ones uh it looks like we already have a bunch of pretty decent ones down here and you can view them a lot of them have like multiple styles of them so two styles three styles um but you know most of them are showing up here already so let's go and see which one looks like the best one for our brand so i'm going to say this brooklyn one i think looks pretty decent we can view the demo site right here and when you're on the website it shows first of all like two main a bit of a slideshow right up top you can go down and see the featured collections they get bigger when you hover over them down here you can see some of the products i think this looks really good this looks really professional and the fact that we could just slide our photos into here and our products into here and instantly have like a really nice well-made website i think that's pretty solid especially for a free theme so let's go and choose this one right here we're going to click on add theme i forgot to check mobile usually i check both both desktop and mobile but it's going to look good on mobile we'll see that in just a second so we're adding it to our store and this is where i usually get a lot of questions people add it and then like hey mike why why is it when i click customize it's still the old theme why doesn't it look like the new theme yet and the reason is because you actually have to go down here to the theme it's still installing right now into our theme library and click on actions and click on publish this is going to make this your new theme so it's going to replace the old one with this new theme it shows us right there we're going to say publish it's exactly what we want to do and the theme is now published so if you go up here the new theme as i said is brooklyn so if you click on actions there's a couple things you can like rename it or whatever you want duplicate it download the theme file in case you're trying to back up your website and stuff like that or edit the code if you want to add something a little bit more specific but we're gonna do just the basic we're gonna customize it so clicking on customize brings you into their theme editor and again it looks kind of boring at first but you saw what it looked like with the sample photos before and we can make it look just as good if not better than that once we start adding our own collections in here and really utilizing this editor so on the right side this main block this is all of our website this is pretty much an interactive version you can see everything on those so you can click around and see what it looks like and whatever you're doing this is not the editor on the right side the editing is all done from the left side here and from the top so i want to start off with the left side and kind of break down what this is actually made of so this is using a very common layout some people call it a strip layout what they're calling these are actually sections you can see sections like this is all one section here that's actually one that you can't change we'll customize if you can't remove it we've got this section here we've got the little collections down here there's another section we've got the featured collection that is a section and each one has a corresponding list on the left side so corresponding settings to that so first we have our slideshow we have rich text which is this section right here and let's hit back and then of course down here the collections as well so let's start off with the collection list this is the easiest one to kind of visualize and customize as well the collections list section uh we want to change this and maybe instead put five different collections here so clicking on the left side first of all you want to make sure that it's selected and you have the full list of them and just click on the first one okay so if we click on select collection we can go and make this first one maybe accessories and so we can say select let's go to the next one and we're going to select this one as the fall collection maybe right there uh actually i want the fall collection to be a different one so let's choose this one let's change this to actually hot sellers and then we'll go back and make the next one and click back so now we have all of them right here they're popping up when you hover over them you can click on it it'll navigate you over to that collection which is really nice and if we go to like hot sellers for example it'll show us the ones that i put in there this is not actually dynamic so i chose the hottest sellers uh which are the ones that i would predict would be the best sellers on there being the hat uh the hoodie and of course the t-shirt but we can actually change this a little bit so on the left side you'll see again we have the three things we've got our header up there i'm not going to customize that right now we've got our footer and we have our collection pages and so within here you can choose if you want grid style or collage so grid is just going to look a little bit simpler i think collage looks pretty nice and then we can also show the product vendor if we wanted but i'm just going to leave it just like that i think it looks pretty clean as it is with the theme that we chose here so let's actually go back to where we were uh not by canceling let's go up there and click on our logo and it'll take us back to the home page so now we have the collections list down here fully it's all ready to go we could add collections to there if we wanted to or you could get rid of them if you didn't have five say instead you had four we could just go and click on the little eye icon and that'll get rid of it or at least it'll hide it or of course we could click that and show it again and you can rearrange them so if you wanted this one to be over here you could just click on the six dots and slide it up or down and that is going to swap whichever one and it's essentially going to slide it back and forth i'm going to put it where it was i think this looks pretty good that's a good first collections list so let's close this little stack right here and go back up to rich text now rich text this is something that this high up in the website i think is kind of a waste of space i don't really like it there it's nice to have some kind of separation but maybe you'd want to get rid of this now of course this is before we get rid of it i want to show you we've got a heading on here so you can add some basic stuff so we could just say like about us or our mission our story let's do that our story uh and we just have like a little story thing right there about us uh make it slightly longer and there you go you have your story right there maybe that would be the way to do that but again i don't know if i really like that there so i'm just gonna hide it by clicking the little i icon as well then going down here so we've got the banners we'll talk about that in a second we have our collection list and then below that we have our featured collection so the featured collection is just going to showcase whatever products are in your favorite collection so i'm going to say selecting let's just do i think the hot sellers would probably be a good one showing our featured collection our favorite products that we want to showcase on the home page and i'm going to say select and being that i think this is probably going to be our best seller by far i would probably even put this above the collection list i think people are more interested in this than they are the other collections so let's click on this and slide it up above here and now we have that rearranged we now have the banner on the top we've got our featured collection with our favorite products and then we've got other collections down below below that we have an example product so maybe one product that that really sells well so a featured product and so this we can actually select the product let's say out of all of our products i really like the t-shirt or i really like the hoodie i think the hoodie is probably going to be our best seller it shows the price people can literally just buy it directly from here and so we can say select so i mean you've seen it's only been a couple clicks of the mouse and we already have a pretty filled out website at least on the home page that's why i was saying before it's really important to build out your products and build out your collections so that when you actually customize the website it's super easy to do now all you need to do is the top section and maybe rearrange these a little bit if we want vertically so again i think it looks like a lot of gridding up at the top so maybe what i would do is i want to move the featured product a little bit higher so i want to say featured product can go right here so now we have actually a little bit too high i want featured collection above that so we've got our featured collection our favorite products we have our one favorite product and then below that a couple other collections followed by a subscription to our newsletter we'll talk more about email marketing later on but that's a really good start there there are other sections you can add as well so you can add a map on there showing your physical location that's not something that i mean we don't have a physical location we can have a slideshow on here if you want to have uh maybe some more photos of models wearing your clothing again you could either use i know i keep saying this you could use place it or what i really recommend doing is actually getting the physical products buy some samples of them and then test them out plus it's cool to have your own products anyway and actually get to wear them and wear them around but you know you can see right here we can put blog posts down here we'll talk about blogs in just a second as well but i mean overall i think this is a really good start to the homepage so let's actually go back to here go to the header or not the header sorry let's go to the slides and we need to make two slides for the top you can make more if you want or you could just have one up there i'm just going to choose one photo for the first slide so you click on slide i'm going to select an image and again realistically you'd want to have like all your products set out on a table very aesthetically or something like that i'm just going to choose i mean whatever image i have right now so let's just select like a random portrait of of of me and just pretend i was wearing like the clothes that we want to talk about and let's have the position of let's click on this we can actually see what we're working on let's choose the the position of this to be exactly like it is or maybe we can move it a little bit we can reposition the image just a bit we can change the overlay capacity so we can have it a little bit more opaque or a little bit less opaque and again it's really annoying i have to keep switching back and forth so let's keep it right around maybe 33 i think would look pretty good right there and then as far as the text goes we're going to have to make it left aligned here so it shows up reasonably well uh so you can see right there an introductory hero banner is what it's called and so we're going to be like central merchandise is what it's going to be so let's change the text to our so we can change it to premium quality uh central and of course we can have a button down here just say shop now but it's not showing up because we don't have a link on there so i'm going to go and link it to maybe a collection and the collection could just be maybe homepage homepage i'm going to say instead we want to link it to yeah sure the fall collection so that way when somebody clicks on this they'll be able to shop and go to the collection but the button i don't like the color of that we obviously need to make that like i think a white button with some dark text would look really good so make a white button with some text that is a lot darker so we'll say the text and icons can be black the button label could also be black so let's go back and see what that looks like actually text icons that was above that's this text there we go and so now we're ready to go so that's the first block again really not good you want a better photo where everything's like over to one side it would just look so much nicer but this is just a photo i have on my laptop and and just for demonstrative purposes that's what we're going to do now the next slide again this is cycling through these let's select another image all right so now we have our next image and let's change the text on here let's make it a little bit less of an overlay opacity i kind of like it when it's white actually if we bring it down to zero i think we'll be able to see the text if we just make the text slightly darker and here we could say that this is going to be fall collection we're going to say um yeah fall collection whatever um learn about our or shop we could say shop the fall collection and we could say um view the collection and we can have this link over to our fall collection right there and of course we want to change this text to probably black might be a little bit more readable and now we have everything ready to go with this one obviously completely different style and you want to have the right photos this is really the tough part where you want to have great photos for your banners because this is such an important part of your website but you know all things considered this looks reasonable enough and of course i should have mentioned this before always save your work as frequently as possible you do have some like i don't know you never know what's going to happen you don't want it to accidentally you know crash your computer dies whatever and you lose all of your work the last thing i want to show while we're still on this page is actually up on the top right if you click on the desktop icon it looks like an imac you can go and check out mobile instead and see how everything looks there so for the most part i would expect everything will still look really really good with the exception of possibly the banner on the top you want to make sure like this right here the word fall and fall collection in general is really tough to read so you want to choose a different photo that doesn't have that problem it doesn't have that issue but for now i'm just going to stick with this because you guys get the idea of how to actually utilize these settings now we can customize the header if you click on header we don't have a logo right there so let's select a logo i'm just going to upload the same logo we've been using the santro logo of course right now it is just using text which works fine and it is easier to read when you have darker backgrounds but i'm going to select this logo for now and leave it like that another logo we can change the width of it there we go and we can have a transparent header or non-transparent header obviously with this with a with a darker color text on the logo uh we don't want a transparent header so you can actually read it and it doesn't interfere with that photo there now transparent headers look pretty nice a little bit more of a modern spin on the website but it is it is what it is i think in this situation it's going to look better just like that and then down here we have our menu so right now it's using um just the main menu right here and so the main menu is something that we can change we can choose what's going to be shown up there so it's not just home catalog contact but i want to come back to that a little bit later once we start having some policies and another page to tell like about us or our story or something like that the secondary sidebar menu the footer menu we don't really have to worry too much about that right now and i don't want to enable search so i'm going to leave that unselected and like i don't know i don't really think search is that necessary on a lot of websites especially smaller ones like this if you have it well laid out so the other thing you'll see right here announce something here we can show or hide that announcement um it looks a little cleaner if you don't have the announcement but the announcement is something that maybe you want to have and you want to change it every now and then so you could say uh get 10 off with code mike and so we just want to have that on the top so people know they can get 10 off it's a little bit more of an encouragement to buy the product but we actually have to make that right now so a couple things on our list we want to make a discount code the code mike to get 10 off and we want to make some new menu items uh such as policies and an about us page so let's click on save and let's work through those one at a time let's start off with the coupons and the way to do that is to actually exit right here on the left side go down to discounts and we want to create a discount code now there are two different codes you can have discount codes just regular ones or automatic discounts automatic discounts essentially well they're gonna automatically apply to a customer's cart so that's a nice thing if you have some kind of sale like a buy one get one or something like that but i'm just gonna do a regular discount code kind of encouraging some purchases here and we're going to create the discount code so we're gonna make the code code mic and this could be a percentage which we're going to do 10 off it could be a fixed dollar amount off it could be free shipping we want to probably do free shipping anyway and it could be like buy one get one or something like that buy two get one and so we're going to stick with percentage we're going to say 10 percent off and this applies to all products we don't need to have a minimum requirement this is something that i usually only apply if it's a fixed amount like get 10 off and it's a 10 purchase like you don't want that you might say 10 off when you spend more than 50 or something like that and you could limit the number of times it's used per customer or uh in total so if you say like hey this is first hundred people to use this will get ten percent off and that's something that you're doing on social media then that's how you'd go about doing that additionally you can have a start and an end date i'm just going to have this one run indefinitely and i'm going to save the discount code so now we have one discount ready to go if we just click on discounts you'll see that one is active it's running when we're done with it we can always go and deactivate it by deleting the discount code so i'm not going to do that right now we'll leave it active right now or we could disable in the top right as well and so right now we have one discount code active okay so that was the first thing we wanted to do the second thing we wanted to do is actually add some policies so the return policy uh your privacy policy all those things like that very very important and of course depending on where you are definitely dig into that find out what your local laws are what the requirements are for disclaimers and and things like that and really work according to your local laws so going down to settings we can start off pretty easily just by scrolling down to policies and policies one thing i really like that that shopify does is it they have templates built in of course you want to read the templates because you are defining how you operate as a business but it gives you a huge jump start just to say create from from template and there's our refund policy ready to go same thing with the privacy policy same thing down here with the terms of service so again just populating these is so easy to do and of course shipping they don't actually have a template for that one but i'm going to say save and you want to have your shipping policy as well maybe find a template elsewhere or write it up on your own now we have our store policies ready to go so those two things were super quick to bang out and next thing i wanted to talk about so let's just close out of this the next thing was changing the menus on the store so i talked about how we had uh that one menu up on the header we might want to add some other items now besides policies the other one i believe i said was another page that would be uh maybe about us or something like that so if we go back to online store we can go down to pages and right now we only have one other page which is a contact page i haven't edited the contact page yet so who knows what that's going to look like but let's create a new page so we're going to click on add page this one's going to be our story from here we could just paste some maybe some dummy text for now so this would be like our story we'd maybe have some pictures in here so maybe i'm going to add a picture right there the image is going to be maybe maybe this picture of me and we want to add some alt text alt text is essentially going to be how you like what you're telling google the photo is so you could say um founder of our clothing brand if it's a photo view for example we can insert the image and now it's inserted into essentially into the page it's a really bare bones editor here you'll see that you can change a little bit about it you can change for example like if you want it to be a header or something like that so we could say a little bit down here like if you want another section so we're gonna have our title we're gonna say our story a little paragraph an image and then below that we wanna say maybe like how it started and so we could have howard started we don't want that to just be paragraph font uh text instead we want it to be maybe a h2 a heading two and then we can go down here have some more stuff down there more paragraphs and then maybe below that we want to have uh like our mission maybe so our mission and then below here another paragraph and our mission again could be a secondary header an h2 so we'll do that and so you get the idea of how you're really going to be building this out so let's go and say this is this is the website seo let's save it now we have the our story page ready to go so we can view the page by clicking view page and again one thing like kind of one of the shortcomings of shopify is that it's not the most robust for making secondary pages but you know it gets the job done and for the most part people can look at this and say like oh that's what your website or that's what your brand is really all about so going back to where we were let's close this out we have everything we need to make the new menu so going back let's click on home so let's click on online store let's click on navigation now and so we have the two menus we have the footer menu uh which i don't want that was the one that was just searched that was a little search icon that we don't need there and we have the main menu now i want to make another menu here so we're gonna click on add menu and this menu is just gonna be let's call it top menu this is going to be the one that i'm actually going to start using and we're going to click add menu item so the first one could be about us and like i said that's going to be our story so if we go down to pages you'll see the our story page is available i'm going to add this one and we can rearrange these in a second which one's on the top and where they actually go we could say hood or we could say best sellers and this could be a collection this could be our hot sellers collection let's go and add that and we can add another item maybe this is going to be home even though you can click on the the logo on the top and go home sometimes it's nice just to have a home icon there so people know how to get there and then last one let's just say policies our election state policies just so people can find it very easily and go down and click on policies and for this one we're going to say actually we're going to choose one at a time so let's just say terms of service and so we're going to say let's just say policy let's just say refund policy and i'm going to call this one refund policy actually so we'll say add and now like i said you want to rearrange these a little bit so i'm going to put home up here so home i'm going to have the second one as best sellers i'm going to have about us as the last one kind of sandwiching refund policy together there obviously don't want people to refund but it's something that you do want them to actually be aware of so we're going to save this menu and this is the one that we want to have across the top bar so if we go back up to online store and we click on customize here you can see that if we go back to the header on the left side click on header and we can go and adjust what the menu actually is so the first menu is set as main menu which is up here i obviously don't want that one so we're going to change it out we're going to change the menu and instead use top menu as this one and you can see all the stuff is all across there so we're going to say select that i like that one way better and then down here we have footer menu which is right now just i think it just says search on there i i really don't want it it just says search i don't really need that so instead i'm going to change that one to what there was before which was the main menu and so when someone goes to the bottom they should be able to see a couple other items besides just uh what we have on the top so with two different menus to kind of navigate around the site i think that's a little bit more useful and we could say announcement bar is on the homepage only yes everything looks good let's save it we're ready to go and now our first page our homepage really looks pretty good so let's actually go and view our website if we go in a new tab and go to centralmerch.com you'll see here's our full website so if somebody clicks on shop now and i recommend clicking on all your buttons and making sure everything works it'll take you to this collection there's a little bit of text there you can see all the different products people can go and check out like the hoodie for example and again if they like this they can go they can see other photos or similar products down here they can see we only have one photo for this one they can check out medium large and they can say buy it now or they could add it to the cart that way it'll take them to the checkout page it's going to ask for their information and stuff like that so let's actually abort this right now let's go back to where we were and check out other parts of the site so scrolling down you can see we've got our collections on the top or we can go through our two things our fall collection view the collections i think the website looks pretty decent right now okay so let's make sure we saved everything let's exit this and there's some really important settings that we need to set up now but let's go back to home and you'll see on the bottom here or in the middle of the home page the other things we want to do so we have products we have a theme that's customized we have our domain uh we want to add some pages i already did add one page that was our story but oh let's go down and set up payments right now so if we set up shopify payments there's a bunch of ways you can accept payments on here uh paypal after your first sale paypal will email you instructions and you'll be able to accept payments with paypal uh that is going to be a really popular way that people like to pay of course amazon pays a really big one you want to activate that and really just clicking through these it's just going to ask for information about you shopify payments does have a fee 2.9 plus 30 cents per sale so it can add up a little bit but remember that was the one thing that can change a lot with um what plan you actually chose so 2.9 right now i believe it's 2.6 percent if you have a more premium plan um and eventually they don't even charge for that with the higher plans so let's go and complete account setup and so from here they're going to ask for like what your business type is your business details your personal details uh product details as well so like what kind of what kind of products you're selling and of course uh the customer billing statement as well so how it's gonna show up in like their credit card statement for example so i'm just gonna say central merch would be just fine let's get rid of that central merch so that's that's going to be great so when peop when people check their credit card statement and they're like why what is this thing that just says like shopify or something like you want to make sure that it is your brand so they don't dispute charges that they legitimately did try to pay with right like you don't want people getting confused and accidentally disputing charges so i'm actually not going to fill this out right now because again this is not a real store so i'm not actually going to going to do that right now but let's click on back or actually click on the x up here and so that's how you actually go about setting up your payments the next thing i want to talk about is actually setting up your sales channels now if we click on setup sales channels this is what i mean this wouldn't be there in the beginning if in the beginning we selected remember the the first little onboarding questionnaire we had and asked where we wanted to sell and i said everywhere i wanted a buy button i wanted google i wanted facebook i wanted everything there you don't need all of those though you could sell just on your store and just have it already set up like it is but if you want to sell through facebook or sell through google shopping or just have a buy button for like a point of sale type thing this is going to be how you'd actually go and set those up so we can add other sales channels right now if we want to add um for example maybe like point of sale would be if you have a little market maybe you sell things online but you want to have a market as well and in this market uh like a real physical in-person market you are selling things and you want to track inventory and on top of that you also want to track or you want credit card payments that's how you add that being that this is print on demand that doesn't really make sense to do that ebay does make sense but again you want to keep in mind the shipping times and things like that and your ebay ratings but you can go down here and add whichever ones you want if you want to add pinterest and sell things through pinterest that's a great way to kind of it's kind of i don't know a lot more people use pinterest than you might realize i thought nobody used it but it turns out like my mom and tons of other people are using pinterest all the time so if we just go to for example facebook we can click on that and it is going to have us it's going to redirect us over to here and ask if we actually want to set it up so i'm going to say update sales channels so we're ready to go with facebook and now it's going to have us it's going to kind of walk us through some of the setup with instagram shopping this is going to be a really really big one especially uh i mean i don't know i think instagram shopping has become huge in the past couple years i've seen so many products sold i have so many friends that just browse instagram and end up buying a ton of stuff like wallets and clothing and pretty much everything they have a lot of their kind of random purchases come from instagram so that's why i would probably say that's the first one i would recommend setting up and so of course this is going to walk you through everything you need to have a facebook business page and it's going to walk you through everything step by step so the next thing we want to do is actually go and set up our facebook business page now i know this might sound like maybe you don't want to use facebook for this maybe you think it's a little antiquated depending on your your market niche that might be true but facebook's still a really good on-ramp to the meta business suite we'll show you that in a second because it allows you again a really easy way to get set up you can make your business profile and then you can make a business page on instagram as well as other facebook platforms as well so let's start off with the facebook business page first you want to sign in to your facebook account on just facebook.com i know a lot of people want to make a separate business account but the way facebook is set up with your terms of service you can really only have one personal account or one account per person and you can make a business page but it's going to still somehow be tied back to your personal account so that again just sign into your personal account we're going to separate this as best we can later on i'll show you how to do that but let's start off by clicking on the little grid icon the menu on the top right and you'll see down here we can create a new page so click on page and we're going to add a couple things here starting off with the page name so i'm going to call this central merge we need a category and so here i'm just going to choose maybe clothing would be a good one a clothing brand you can add up to three so maybe we'd have like apparel would be another one apparel and clothing whatever and maybe one other one clothing company men's clothing store whatever you want to call it i don't know you really only need one now it's going to ask for a description i'm just going to put in some latin dummy text there we're going to click on create the page right now i must have used this before so so we're going to click on create the page and it's going to ask us to then add a picture for the profile as well as for the wallpaper and you can see on the right side this entire time as we're building this we're going to see uh what it's actually going to look like on desktop as well as on mobile so going back to desktop on the left side you can see we have the images it's now going to ask for a profile picture so i'm just going to upload my profile picture for santrel so we're going to say this one right here basic just the logo that we were that we're using and actually and then it's going to ask for a cover photo in this one i don't actually have a good cover photo so i'm going to use one from a previous video i made like a coffee shop video before just a just a wider photo you need like a really long one but this is where it really would be beneficial to essentially have your products like i said and take pictures with your products maybe a bunch of people wearing your different shirts your different clothes apparel whatever it might be just kind of show your entire library of products in one single photo and so especially if as you were the founder like i would recommend having you in the picture if you can i think having a founder that is really tied into their brand can really strengthen the story in my opinion and make people more interested in your story in your brand and more likely to buy of course so we're going to click on save hopefully that picture is big enough it looks like it probably is and there we go so now we have everything set up now the next thing we want to do right here you can say it says create username this is something that sometimes facebook lets you do it right away sometimes you have to get like 100 likes on your page before they let you do that i'm going to click on create username hopefully they let me do it right now and i'm going to say central merchandise merchandise and we're going to create the username it looks like right now they're not letting us oh yeah there we go so we can say create username and hopefully this lets us there we go so now it's ready to go so now that's good because that is going to allow us to have a website here we can say facebook.com slash central merchandise it's going to take you to this page right here it's easier to get it more as a shared page like you can share it as a link more easily and additionally you just it's easier for people to find it if they can search at central merchandise they can tag you more easily everything about it having that little name right there that will handle i think makes things a lot easier and i recommend trying to get the same thing here as you can get on instagram so really what i should have done before choosing this is i should have gone over to instagram and confirmed that that handle was available of course you can always change handles if you need to but still it's nice to set it up right the first time so now that we have this the next thing we want to do is actually add a button so you can see the little blue icon here add a button this is going to be your call to action remember when people come to your facebook business page you want them to do one thing and you want them to either schedule bookings if you're like a hairdresser or something like that or in our case we want them to go over and buy our products so i'm going to add a button and the button we have let's see what buttons we have available so we're going to go down here and say shop on website that's exactly what we want so we're going to paste central merch right there and actually instead of just going to our home page if somebody's here and they decide they really like what we're selling you could send them to your home page or you could send them to maybe your your top sellers your hot sellers page and so that's what i think i would rather do right here just because you have a better chance somebody's already invested in your brand they're already interested enough to click the button maybe you want them to be a little bit closer to the checkout page by sending them right over to your best products that you have so i'm going to save that right now and that's going to be the button of course i always recommend sometimes you can you know mess up when you're copying a link or something when you click on edit shop button you can go down here and say test button so i highly recommend testing it sure enough it works it looks like right now it's actually only taking us over to our home page so that's not exactly what i wanted so i might want to go back and make sure that i actually pasted it in correctly so going down here you can see we have some other things of course manage your page and instagram together with meta business suite we are going to do that in a little bit but let's go down here and make sure that we have everything figured out and really completed within the facebook business page so right on the top left you can see that they're kind of recommending a couple things right here they're recommending that uh we go down and uh add a profile picture we already did that we can go down here and provide information so like what your website is what your location is your business hours things like that i think that we definitely should be doing all of that as soon as possible so the little about window in here the little info knowledge panel is essentially going to be as fleshed out as possible so let's go and add our website we're going to click on that and our website this time i'm going to just make it centralmerch.com so centralmerch.com let's get rid of everything after that and we can save that that's all good to go so i can just close out of this close out of that now we have a website location info we can click on this and we can say that we don't have a location so that's not going to be a problem and so we can close out of that that way it's not going to say like oh we don't know what the location is because we do it's just it's online so they're not going to actually ever visit as far as the hours go we can go and say that this is always open 24 hours a day and before you laugh and say like why would a website ever be closed some websites are closed certain times like that's not i mean maybe for religious reasons or something like that there are sites that that are closed on like sundays or whatever so always open i'm going to say that so people know and we can go down here and otherwise they can link what whatsapp i'm not going to do that right now i don't have a phone number right now with this if you obviously have a help or customer support you might want to set up a phone but otherwise i think that we're set up for this step here and then down here we can invite 10 more friends to like the page that might be a good way to kind of bootstrap or really accelerate your page a little bit more get a couple likes on here and welcome people to your page you can create a welcome post i am going to do that right now you don't want to have no posts on here even if you don't plan on using facebook in the future which i recommend still using your facebook business page but even if you didn't it's always important to have at least a couple posts some paragraphs a welcome page just to tell people what it is and make sure that they know you're still in business and like what's going on so i'm just going to paste some latin dummy text here there we go and i'm going to post that generally it's better if you post with a picture as well but i'm going to leave it just like that when you look at this page you might notice something's off we don't have events we don't really care about photos and things like that so we can do is click on more and go down to edit tabs because a lot of these tabs might be completely irrelevant you might not need to use any of these or there's some that you really do want to use so i think shop is a good one let's keep shop up near the top we don't have events so i'm not going to have events right now reviews we can leave reviews on there if you want people to do that but it's less likely somebody's going to review your clothing brand when they order online like reviews is going to be more so for restaurants and things like that so i'm going to disable reviews offers might make sense if you have some kind of discounts but you really want to make sure you're keeping up with that it's something i don't think i'm going to be very good at doing so i'm going to turn that off we're going to turn groups off community video is about that's all going to be there and then job openings again i don't plan on having that in the beginning so we're going to turn that off as well so it's a little bit simpler now we kind of got rid of a couple of those but it did bring us into this page settings interface by the way which i'm going to go through these on the left side because there are quite a few other very important things that you want to make sure are configured so if we go up to general you have a lot of things here i'm not going to go through all of these but i want to make sure that you know where it is and you read through all of them to make sure you understand what's going on so for example post and story settings you can have that posting to stories is always on so for example right here the profanity filter is turned off maybe that's something that you really you know you want to make sure you don't have to moderate that much so you can turn the profanity filter on so i'm going to save the changes now we have profanity filter is turned on that way people are not going to leave hateful comments or mean comments that might offend other potential customers on your page so that's just one of the things you might want to go through and read all of this and really figure out what matters to you we can go down to messaging i'm not going to set this up just yet but this would be a great way to set up for example a greeting so when people get to your page where they start messaging you you can have a greeting that says hey this is mike thanks for getting in touch with santro merchandise we'll be happy to help you what questions do you have i usually reply within one to two days it's a good way to make them feel like they're actually being greeted at the door of a store kind of it's a nice feature to have that i usually enable on on most of my facebook business pages and of course there are some more automations as well so once somebody says something you have automated responses say like hey thanks for your request uh we're going to contact you later or you could say like hey um unfortunately we're away from this right now send us an email and that'd be more of a greeting i'd recommend that but regardless the messaging is something that i recommend setting up and i did talk about that a little bit more in detail in my full my full tutorial on how to make a facebook business page i'll have that linked in the description below continuing on with this tutorial page info we already really did a lot of that already there's not much more i want to add on here we can look at our price range um so i'm going to say right now we're like moderately maybe a little bit expensive on our price that way people know when they see that and we can go down to templates and tabs we already edited the tab so that's not gonna be a problem we don't have to worry about ticketing notifications advanced messaging there's some more stuff on here that you really should be reading through but then we can get down to instagram so instagram right now we don't have an instagram account connected to this so what we can do now is actually open up our phone and make an instagram account and then connect it to this that's really going to be the next step here so that we can have everything really tied together right now we opened up instagram we're going to click on sign up and we're going to sign up with email i'm going to use the email that i used earlier now we're going to add a name and a password and now it's going to want to create a username here again remember what we had earlier on the facebook business page was santrell merchandise so we're gonna say central merchandise we're gonna say next that one is available and now we can sign up and of course like it says there we can always change the username later if you decide you wanted something shorter maybe central merch or just central or something like that so central merchandise is what i'm starting with and now it wants to know if we're going to connect to facebook i'm going to skip this for now it's not really that important that's just so you can find other friends so i'm going to say skip because this is really treating it as if it was a personal instagram which we are not doing right now so we're going to add a photo so we're going to add a photo we're going to just take a photo i'm just going to use a photo from maybe this hat right here there we go so we now have a photo we're going to say okay and we don't want to post that i will post it as a photo that's fine as well and so now we're going to say next so now there we go we have our instagram pretty much all set up now we have a a name a handle and of course right there it says name michael bryan i actually do want to change that i should not have said michael bryan as my personal name earlier instead we want to call this central merchandise so that is going to be central merch central merch we're going to say ok and we'll say ok again now something else to note is that we can actually add quite a few other things below in our little bio as well as a website so i'm going to click on edit profile you want to make sure that you have a website there that's obviously incredibly important here as well so we're going to say https and we're going to have a little colon slash and centralmerge.com centralmerch.com we're going to say ok we're all set and of course we can always add our bio as well so we want to go to bio we can say we sell sell we sell amazing clothing with lots of style and we can add other little emojis down here so we want to have like clothing clothing maybe we sell like t-shirts uh maybe we want to add like i don't know pants and hats and stuff like that whatever you want just some different little emojis down there and i mean you can beef that out however you want everybody has their own style their own flavor of what they want on their on their account and then down here you can see switch to professional account and that's exactly what we want to do next which is going to allow you to make this as an instagram business page which shows you more analytics and more things on the back end than you'd otherwise see from a personal account so as you can see here we're getting professional tools and of course these are things like analytics you can learn about who's following you you're able to promote posts if you're trying to run ads you really obviously need to have a professional account to run ads and we can see of course we have other new contact options where people can email us or call us or do other things by having a button right on there so it's going to ask what essentially describes us and we're going to be a clothing brand so i'm going to have that yes displayed on the profile so people know what santro merch is we're going to say done and it can take up to 30 seconds for this to actually finish and now it's going to ask if we're a business or a creator it's really not a big difference here and you can always switch between these later i'm going to say business for now because creator is really going to focus a little bit more on dms and kind of organize them slightly differently and now it's going to ask us to review our contact information that looks fine we can display the email on there that sounds good to me we're going to say next i'm going to skip the phone number and the address for now because that doesn't really affect the business for what i'm saying and now we're going to actually log into facebook to connect to facebook so a facebook business page can actually be connected here this is very important i'm going to do that right now so we're going to go and sign into our facebook account so so once we say continue it's going to say to enable connected experiences add your account to the accounts center so that's exactly what we want to do we're going to say okay and we're going to add central merchandise it's going to allow us to add it to the account center which as you can see here is going to i mean also use the information to improve and experiences across whatever is facebook's asking if they can have a little bit of data from you we're going to say okay we're going to add that you could also say not now but we are trying to integrate everything so doing that now makes the most sense now it's going to ask which facebook business page we want to connect to i've made a couple in the past as you can see for different tutorials but we're going to go down here and say central merchandise right there and make sure no other ones are selected we're going to say next and that is automatically going to connect to the facebook business page that we just created so i'm going to wait uh probably a couple seconds until it actually connects it and then we'll be essentially ready to go now it's going to say step one of five is complete and this is going to be setting up your professional account we can do this a little bit more on our on our desktop but as you can see right here i mean the five steps are showing you really are basically going to be like grow your audience uh it's going to ask you to like invite friends and stuff like that we're not going to do that right now we can learn from professionals we're going to show you some little tutorials hopefully you don't need that and some other things as well but right now we're pretty much ready to go on the instagram front i'm not going to do anything else there right now so we can actually close this and we're ready to go back to our laptop so what we want to do is actually go to business.facebook.com and i i've been using this a lot for quite a few other things so it might look slightly different for you but essentially we want to make sure that we have a a meta business suite so a business account here and then everything's tied in through that so right now you can see it's going to show the most recent stuff up here which is going to be the central merchandise facebook page page as well as the instagram page we just made both of those and they are already tied together so you can create a post and send it out to both them which is very convenient you can create a story and send it out to both you can create an ad and send it out to both or if you don't already have this and mine kind of automatically did this but on the left side you have a whole bunch of different business accounts those are the ones that i've used before but you can go down to the bottom and say create a business account now i've reached the limit for mine because i've just made so many different tutorials but you can go and create a business account and that's going to be essentially this one's already bundled into i believe central merch on the top so we do have a business account but if you don't you can click on that you're going to add your name your first name your last name your email and it's going to ask you to choose the assets you want within that business make sure with the with the little check boxes you select both the instagram and the facebook page so that they are both within that business but you can go into that business and this is where you can actually change a lot of things you can get your ad account so you can go to ad account settings uh everything's gonna be tied in through that you can get your facebook pixel set up with this and everything is really going to be operated through the facebook meta business account so this is a little bit more advanced for this video i can actually make a full tutorial on how to use facebook ads in the future if you guys want to see those uh whether that is for instagram or facebook or anything else that they're using in their network but in general this is going to be how you get started and then going to add account settings it'll really walk you through a lot of the next steps so you can add a payment method and you can really start to set up those ads but ad campaigns like i said are a story for another day you can watch that full tutorial after this one so that's our facebook business page and our instagram page that's gonna be great for marketing but it can also connect through facebook as you can see on the bottom left here where you have all these different options through whether that is uh connecting the messages on here like i showed you in the greeting for example on facebook messages or messenger that's going to show up here so you can actually go and continue setup and all of these really walk you through it you just go and sign into your account everything is going to be pretty easily set up but you can sell your products through facebook sell your instagram sell products through instagram create ads and of course manage the conversations those are really the four big things you would want to do with the facebook or the meta platform now and so all of those you can find down here on the left side in sales channel so if it's not showing up you can click on the little plus and make sure that facebook is selected as a sales channel right now we obviously have it so it's already there now you can actually switch between your sales channels on the left side from sales channels right here of course the online store has been the one we've been customizing this entire tutorial we have a buy button and this is something you can embed in a blog for example so if you have another website as you can see obviously blogging is not really the strong suit of shopify like shopify is great for selling but sometimes it's easier just to make a wordpress site and have a massive library of blogs uh rank better in google there and then just have a little buy button embedded in there so if you want to create a buy button you can have a product buy button let's just go about doing that right now really quickly and so if we want to have like the plant friends one we can select that uh it's going to be ready to go we can mark it as let's mark it as available and so now this is what the buy button would do essentially bring up this little page right here that shows you like the product uh you can choose the price you can choose a size you can add it to cart and once you like that and i don't really see a whole lot that i want to change about this it's just a simple little buy button i'm going to click on next and then you have to copy this code and paste it over on wordpress or squarespace or wix whatever you might be using and so depending on which platform you're using there's going to be a different place you actually want to paste that but that's the code that you'll actually be looking for right there to have that buy button embedded that points over to this store so i'm going to click copy code and now i'm going to exit so now we have online store and buy button set up like i said google and facebook are two sales channels that are super important but they take a little bit more time and i'm going to make a separate tutorial on how to actually set up a google store but there are some other things we need to talk about some really important things i'm going to talk about everything on the left side here so we're going to talk about some different marketing strategies as well as different apps you can get some really big ones that will help really really help your store succeed and the second big thing i want to talk about is actually settings now in the settings there are tons of things that you really want to customize to make sure that not only the customers have the best experience but also you and then the third thing i want to do is actually get some demos some actual products that that we are having made from printful we want to actually get some samples in our hands to make sure that the products look as good as we expect them to so those are the three big things we're going to talk about for the rest of this video i want to start off with what i said on the left side right here so starting off with home we talked about what's up there we already talked about orders we already well orders we don't have any yet but we said that this is where you'd actually find some order information we talked a lot about products we don't care about inventory transfers we talked about collections gift cards is one that we did not talk about so gift cards could be something that you might send people maybe on their birthday you give them like a 15 gift card or you could give them like a 15 off as a coupon either way gift cards are cool because there's something that you can actually sell on your site and have it listed as something one person can buy and then send by email to a friend uh so that they can actually get some of your products from your store and so if we want to add a gift card we could either issue a gift card like i said to send one directly to a customer um this could be maybe as a refund or this could be like if they're outside of the refund time and you just want to help them out anyway or it could be something that maybe you have like some kind of contest and you want to send a gift card to somebody who uh maybe won your contest on social media that's how you do that but we're going to add a gift card product so people can buy it and give it to their friends and family and so there's going to be central merch gift card sounds good santrel merch gift card and paste that in here we can add some media if we want if we want a little picture for this so i'm just going to make the picture like maybe the little house plants icon we had before and we can have some different denominations as well 10 25 50 100. i think that looks fine for for this uh and the seo again i always like to have um the store name so santro central merch even though it's kind of duplicatory there so actually in this situation maybe i wouldn't add that just because we don't want the same words twice in the same title google might be a little bit weird about that so we are going to save this gift card it's not in any collections or anything it's just ready to go as a standalone product and i think that is that's pretty much all we need to know for that customers we don't have any of those yet but we talked about that eventually you'll see more customers here you can also import customers or add customers if you bought some if somebody bought something in person and you have their information we've got finances actually by the way don't add people unless you have their their consent of course nobody wants to be signed up on your email list without voluntarily doing that and that's also not something you're allowed to do so finances overview we talked about this analytics of course we talked about marketing is going to be a big one now there are some big marketing apps that we talked about earlier um i mentioned mailchimp way early on and of course we talked about setting up facebook and google but let's talk about email marketing right now and this is something we have a full tutorial for really in-depth stuff on how to use mailchimp but mailchimp is a really really popular app that so many companies use so many brands use to actually market their products through emails which is essentially a free way of marketing so email something that everybody has you don't pay to get it to them and once you have their email you can send them like messages uh updates about different products new releases things like that of course they're able to unsubscribe but these are people that are already very interested in your product you don't have to worry about paying per click you don't have to worry about like facebook ads and google ads when you're using email marketing so it's incredibly powerful it's something that i think everybody should at the very least consider setting up for your store so if we click on the view more marketing apps button right there you can go down here and see i believe we should be able to find mailchimp if we go to um so if we just so if we just click on the top search and type in mailchimp we can see mailchimp right here so i'm going to click on mailchimp and we are going to actually add the app to our store and then we can actually go and create a new mailchimp account and now we can select an audience because we didn't actually make one yet uh just the basic audience is going to be the default central merch and i'm going to sync the audience right now and we're going to continue to overview now now that we have an account right here set up for mailchimp you can open up mailchimp separately and really do a lot with this from email campaigns to automated campaigns when somebody makes a purchase they can be emailed different things certain amount of time afterwards or when they sign up for your newsletter it can be they can get an email a welcome letter they can get one on their birthday that maybe sends them a coupon code and that's what i talked a lot about in my mailchimp tutorial it's something i think is incredibly powerful and i think when people are you know it's their birthday or the day before their birthday and they get an email it says happy birthday and in there it gives them a discount code or some maybe fifty dollars off a purchase of a hundred dollars like they're going to be more incentivized to buy themselves a birthday gift from your website now when it comes to email marketing the next thing i want to do is actually set up mailchimp so if we go to uh centralmedia.com mailchimp that'll take you to mailchimp's homepage as you can see right here and we can actually sign up for free now mailchimp is great because it allows you to start off essentially for free and you can pay as you grow so that it's very very scalable from the very beginning and this is a great way to essentially send out email campaigns whether that is for people who already shopped on your site and you want to send them more things because they already already collected your email or if you create a newsletter or some other type of a value ad where people are going to sign up for an email subscription from you and with that they're going to get something interesting maybe it's like a weekly recipe maybe it's like some different styles or some blog posts whatever it might be having a very creative and adding value making a useful email campaign can be really powerful way to not only hook an audience and grow your brand but also could be a great way to tell people about when new products come out when new sales come out and really drive conversions up with a essentially free version of marketing instead of running ads you can just remarket to people who already showed interest in your brand so obviously mailchimp and email marketing is a very powerful tool even today in 2022 still something a lot of companies spend a ton of money and effort on so let's start off by signing up with our email and we're going to create a username it's going to be central merchandise that will bring you to this page here which asks you essentially what mailchimp plan you want to sign up for and so there are different ones that are related to more than just how many contacts you have you can see that the free one it does kind of limit you on what you can do so with an online store i would generally recommend if you can afford it go to the standard one or at least the essentials because it's going to give you a lot more functionality with sending emails as well as things like the customer journey things i'm going to show you in just a minute but for the purposes of this tutorial i'm going to start off with the free one which is good for 2000 contacts and 10 000 email sends on the free plan but if you look at standard for example depending on how many contacts you have the price does change per month so if you have 75 000 contacts it's almost 500 a month but again that's with 75 000 people who are potentially customers hopefully that would be worth it by the time you get there but i'm going to go again with the free plan right now we're going to click on next and it's going to ask for some of my basic information we can select import my brand which is going to bring in as much as they can from your actual website and now we do actually need a physical address i'm going to add my address now we're going to say we do not have any contacts we're starting from scratch and we're selling products so i'm going to say you own your own website or ecommerce store that's how we're selling it and we're going to say continue we have an ecommerce newsletter maybe that's our main plan and we're going to say continue from there and it's going to take you to the dashboard now the dashboard of mailchimp has changed quite a bit over the years it used to be really really intimidating it's actually maybe intimidating now that there's an error occurred so i'm going to try to refresh this hopefully that fixes the problem it looks like we have to go and verify our email again so they send we're going to send an email code i don't know why it just got weird about that now we're on the dashboard and it's going to allow you to connect shopify as you can see right here which is exactly what we want to do and i'm going to go through a lot of things on the left so you can see your audience this is where you manage your contacts how many people are in your contact list what audience groups there are what tags they have things like that we have campaigns which is going to be essentially how you send out emails you can make email templates so if it's like maybe a weekly recurring email a template would be a great way to make that and then you essentially have the same format every single time it goes out it saves you a ton of time i love doing that we've got automations which are incredibly powerful customer journey essentially means maybe when somebody signs up for your email list you wait one day and then you send them a welcome email and then you wait two days and you send them a discount code and then if they open the email this happens and it's kind of a lot of if then style stuff so as things happen you can have other events triggered from that and it's really a powerful way to automate a lot of what you'd otherwise be doing essentially manually to really drive up conversions and find the perfect secret sauce to get more people to buy once you capture their email so of course retargeting retargeting ads is another really powerful one so once somebody either adds something to your cart or they or they just add their email on your site somehow or once people purchase things you can retarget and advertise back to them again because somebody that bought your product once is more likely to buy it again than some random person we've got website down here of course this is going to be if you want to set up a mailchimp website that's not something that i mean i would really obviously be doing because we have the shopify site so that's not really that important we've got content studio integrations and we can search or create on the top and so starting off with integrations this is going to be perfect we can actually integrate with shopify if we just scroll down you'll see shopify right here so we're going to find we're going to connect to a new site we're going to connect to our shopify store we're going to add the app we're going to connect it to this one right here obviously the store that we already have so you can see that the sync was successful and now we have a lot of things in the sync that you can transfer between the two for example promo codes is a great one where you can have promo codes obviously sync between these but let's go back to mailchimp right now and talk about some of the other things we have let's start off with create when you click on create you have a couple options you can create an email obviously that's the main purpose of mailchimp in general you can create an automation we're not going to use the website we're not going to use a landing page we're not really going to use creative assistant either but you also have sign up forms and this is going to be an important one so while you can capture emails through you know whenever somebody buys something on your site you can also have a sign up form as well and put that at the bottom of your page anywhere on on your shopify site if you want that so we're going to go to sign up form and say let's make a either embedded form or a landing page let's go with embedded form so a form that we're going to put into another website in this case in our shopify site and so we can set this up it's very very easy to do so we'll click on begin and it's going to ask first of all we want an email address that's going to be the first form field we want we can go and see other form fields we can add first name last name and maybe a birthday maybe we want to send somebody like a birthday email and say happy birthday here's a discount so they can buy themself a birthday present on our on our merchandise store so click on back to main menu so now we have our fields that was easy we can go to settings and we can choose what is going to be titled so we're going to say subscribe to our newsletter i don't know hopefully you have a better name than that but if that's what you want that's what it's going to be and we can of course do things like you know disable javascript a little bit more advanced we're not going to do that for now and we can go to referral bridge as well uh write a referral badge sorry referral badge and choose the style uh either light or dark uh i we could get rid of that if you upgrade again it's because we're using the free version of mailchimp that is going to be there as a professional business i would highly recommend you remove that which is why i was saying the standard version of mailchimp is probably the better option so we'll go back and the other thing was tags actually which you can choose for each one if you want to have a custom tag so we're going to say let's say tag is uh newsletter and we're going to create that tag so anybody who signs up through this is going to be tagged with newsletter so that's going to be the reason that way when somebody sign up signs up through this it's going to be a different category or different tag from people who come in through you know your checkout page for example and that way you have two different tags on there so you can send an email just to the people tagged newsletter because they're obviously more interested in the newsletter whereas other people were more interested in something else that is the the basics of what we want to do we can say continue and now we're ready to go we just copy the code and we can put that anywhere we want on a lot of other websites whether that is in the html or paste in the header it's just one of the many ways you can actually go about doing this so let's go back to mailchimp exit to here so if we go back to our dashboard we can click on audience and within audience you have audience dashboard which is going to show you a little bit more about your contacts and things like that let's close the pop-up you can click on all contacts it's going to show you everybody in there right now it's only me we can see signup forms which we did actually make that one we can build other forms as well to embed embedded forms or just form like if we just go to this right here again a slightly different style of how to make a form but really really similar idea just instead of html you're going to have this and it is going to integrate a little bit more easily with shopify so there's probably a better way of doing it realistically but here you can go down to form builder and you'll see we have email address first name last name we hid the regular address but instead of hiding that of course you can always go and just click on that and say delete it we don't want that so we'll type delete and similarly with phone number maybe we don't want phone numbers so instead of hiding that we could just delete it i just don't really care we don't want that that's not going to be something we're ever collecting maybe so here we go we've got email first name last name birthday that's what we had before but you can add other things as well if you want to make a custom field for example you can add that you can have so let's just say text we want a field that's going to be maybe like what's your favorite color which would be a text or it could be radio buttons it could be like is it blue is it green is it red whatever so we're going to say this is text we're going to click so we click on text there it is we're going to call this favorite color and the field tag is going to be color or you can really make the field tag whatever you want it's going to be all caps no spaces just letters and we can make this a required field you have to tell us your favorite color before you sign up uh it could be a visible one we can have some help text and say what is your favorite color and we can save that field so now we have that in our main form so whenever we have forms included anywhere it's that's going to be something that is at least an option for people to input their favorite color here it's mandatory but if we decide later on we don't want it to be mandatory we can always change that as well so let's go back to audience now we have audience we have our form we have our so we can see our contacts we've got sign up forms we already made that one tag which was going to be anybody who signed up through that form would be tagged as newsletter you can make other tags as well or you could of course bulk tag contacts and things like that we can do surveys i'm not going to talk about surveys right now but let's go down to campaigns or actually before we get into campaigns i want to talk a little bit more about upgrading so of course you don't have to upgrade like i said there is that free version but i showed you the first limitation is that your form is going to say mailchimp on it so if we go down to upgrade it's going to allow us to choose some of the other plans that if you go to compare plan features they will remove the water marking so you don't have that on there so looking at these of course we have like seven marketing channels single email automation like they're really bare bones basics with the free version if we upgrade to essentials you get a b testing which is great you can send out different styles of emails and see which one has a better open rate and things like that we've got other email templates custom branding so earlier we saw the mailchimp logo we can remove that and put our own branding on there and of course we do have some support there on the standard version up here so above essentials you have journey automations which i wanted to point this out because this is the next thing i really want to talk about would you know being how you can actually set these up and this is only available with the standard one and then of course premium is a slightly larger one but if you have more contacts that really might become worth it especially over 10 000 it really starts to become more worth it with some of those extra features on there so let's close out of this and like i said the next thing campaigns is great but i want to talk about automations automation is a really powerful thing that mailchimp does and it's not exclusive to mailchimp but i really like the way they set it up so they have a couple options here some kind of uh encouraged ones that are almost like templates pre-formatted ones you can have a welcome one so to say hey like welcome to the email list thanks for subscribing uh this is what we do and that's going to automatically be sent only to the people when they just sign up it's only going to be sent to them once that way you don't send it to everybody it's only going to go to people when they sign up you can recover lost customers so when somebody maybe is in your checkout page and they abandon it that could be a good way to do that you could send multiple offers to an abandoned cart so that's kind of the same thing i was just talking about actually this is really what that would be you set up this one for that you can email tag customers so we talked about people tagged with newsletter you could do that right here's an automation or you can create repeat customers as well or you can just create one from scratch so if we just want to say a welcome one that would be a great one and they'll show you right here an example of the journey essentially is like this so they sign up when they enter their email they click sign up they get a welcome email and then you say you want to wait maybe two days after that they get another welcome email they wait two more days and then based on what they did before if they opened it or they didn't open it you can do certain things you can have the contact uh you could tag them as something as like a high engagement medium engagement low engagement and the benefit of this is when you have something sent out and you only send it to your highly engaged contacts if they're all using gmail or most of them probably will be using gmail google is going to recognize that a lot of people are opening this email and they're way less likely to flag it as spam and they're way more likely to actually show that email to whoever you're sending to it's something that you don't really think about if you're not dealing with email campaigns much most people think oh you send out emails and everybody gets it at the top of their inbox that's not actually true a lot of emails get either flagged or shoved in a little promotions category or otherwise hidden from people because google's objective is to declutter your inbox and make it a user-friendly experience so by separating the highly engaged from the less engaged it's a very powerful tool in my opinion and it's a great way to essentially improve your email strategy further on down the road so if we wanted to actually do that we could say build a journey right now and this is going to be of course for our main audience central merchandise we can say continue and within here it's not going to actually let me implement this because we don't have we didn't upgrade so we can't actually do that but i just want to show you guys some of the other powerful things you have on here besides tagging and things like that we can add if we click on plus you can have an if-else rule so if something happens like i said before if they opened it for example that'd be a good one you could wait for a trigger which maybe could be when they open it maybe it could be like their birthday or something whatever it might be you could have a time delay you could have a 50 50 split which is kind of a way to do like a kind of a b testing a little bit or you know you can be creative and do whatever you want with that and then the actions you'd actually do so those are more of like the the logic behind it and then the actions could be send an email send a survey add them to a group unsubscribe them so if somebody doesn't open like five emails you just kick them off to list if you want to really improve your open rate like i said before so those are some of the really cool things there again customer journey i think is a really really powerful tool so before we can actually go and create an email because we don't have an audience it's not going to make it very easy for us to do that so i'm going to go down to audience i'm going to click on all contacts and i'm going to enter like one or two random contacts just for the purposes of demonstration right now so you guys can see how you'd actually go about sending an email so if we just go to context you can say add contacts let's add a subscriber manually and say that they're going to be just me mike at centralmedia.com and we could add tags here if you wanted to so maybe they're going to be tagged as newsletter um and we're going to say yep of course they gave me permission because i'm me of course and we're going to say subscribe so there we go we have one subscriber that's me well technically i'm both subscribers and let's add another one as well so it's going to be okay so if we go back to all contacts you can see i just added two more contacts there myself and jordan and so we've got birthday we've got favorite color and where they're actually subscribed from so tags and things like that so that's what we need we need some kind of audience before we can actually go and create an email so i just added that manually just to show you guys obviously you'd want to wait until you have an actual real audience before you create an email and send it but you know what maybe you want to do this just to test it out and kind of hone your skills in before you have to send it to a real audience but let's go and say create and from here we're going to click on email we have three options we can create a regular email which is what we want to do really demonstrates a lot of the tools here and it's going to be good for a one-off email campaign we can send a plain text email i'm not sure exactly like when you'd want to do that i think most people are probably going to be most people watching this video are going to want to send a regular email not a plain text email and then we have templates as well if you want to create a template eventually i recommend doing this saves you a ton of time for weekly emails or anything that is even a little bit recurring just adding your branding in there i think makes things a lot easier so let's click on regular email the email campaign we can call this fall collection fall collection number one we're going to say begin and so this right here is going to ask us okay first of all who the recipients are right now it's going to all contacts but you can say edit recipients and instead only send it to people that are tagged newsletter for example that's what i said before it's easier to kind of parse out who your audience is and send specific emails to specific groups or maybe it's people that are highly engaged or or unengaged or things like that you have options on how to actually send that out so uh the audience i'm just going to go with newsletter and we can personalize it and say it's going to be to them so we can set up to their first name so we're going to say save and there we go so now we have where it's two who it's from this is going to be just from from me that's fine but you can have it from anybody if you want it to be from like a different alias of your email that's an easy way to do that so maybe like newsletter at centralmedia.com or no reply or something like that we have the subject so the subject has to be something that you really want to hook people on because again the game here is to have a high open rate you want people to open your email as much as possible so we can call this um like a great email title just for the purposes of demonstration and the preview text is actually very interesting below that it kind of like a google search if you check an email it has the title and it has like a little line below that and this doesn't actually have to be text in the email but the preview text is going to show up as like a lighter font and so again you want to add something a little bit more engaging here to get people to open the email don't write that but that's just an example of what we're going to what we're going to do for the purposes of this video and then of course we have the actual email design so when you click on design email it's going to ask if we want the new builder or the classic go with the new builder it's very easy to use in my opinion they're both very easy to use but the new one is a little bit easier and because it's a new one like getting used to it early just makes sense don't bother getting used to the old one because it's on the way out so essentially the way this works is it's kind of similar to what we're seeing with like divi and squarespace i don't know if you've ever used either of those but you have all these little elements here stacked up vertically and a little plus icon where if you click on that you can add something in between those elements so between the paragraph and this image we can add anything in here so maybe we want to add a spacer so we can click on spacer and now we have this spacer right up here so if we want to edit the spacer we can click on the little six dot array on the left side it has the settings we can change and we can change the height of that spacer for example we don't want a background of that and it's not dynamic so there we go we have a spacer if we want to add something else say right above that we click on the plus and maybe this is going to be a paragraph so we can add a paragraph in here and we can type whatever we want so we can have some latin dummy text again and you'll notice that the style of this is not exactly consistent so what you can do on the left side is change the font to whatever font you want you can change the color of the text to again whatever color text you want we can have links as a slightly different color so maybe links are going to be maybe like a blue color on there we can have the background i don't want a background right now it's just going to be the same as whatever it is and we can change the padding and make it dynamic content or anything like that so there we go i'm going to change the size and make this all size 16 font and let's say we want to add a link in here so maybe this right here we can link that to our website maybe on our website specifically a single product so there we go now we have that link there it's going to be underlined and people can actually go and check that out of course all the normal stuff with editing text is here we've got bulleted lists numbered lists bold italic underline all that basic stuff and that's going to be essentially how you'd edit text we have up here is our logo we've got a title here so the title is just essentially a paragraph they edited the text slightly differently we can add something so let's go and click down here let's add something above that we've got a spacer up there we can add images dividers buttons whatever you want products is a big one so i'm going to add a product right now and we're going to say connect existing product so it looks like right now our connection is in progress while that's happening i'm going to go back and add some other things to this builder right here so you kind of get the idea of how we go about adding everything and your template's going to be fairly similar you can change the background of everything there are also templates as well i should have mentioned this before but you can see if you want one to look like any of these they don't really have a lot because again we're only using the free version of mailchimp but if we wanted to add maybe this template here we can apply it and we can sure let's continue with the existing content now it's going to have a background that's slightly different and change the layout marginally compared to what we had but that's essentially how you'd go about editing your email i think you guys get the idea if you want to add an image you can just click on that and it's going to be on the left side click on add upload an image or select an image and you can change you know if you go through and kind of mess around stuff a lot of it is really intuitive like i said mailchimp really came a long way with how their editor looks it used to be absolutely impossible to make anything with so let's click on continue our email is ready to go we have an audience we've got a title we've got everything we need to but of course right here it says we have some issues right here so we want to make sure that we don't have like the basic text they're gonna let you know that you forgot to change that but i'm gonna forget i'm gonna leave it like it is okay so now we're ready to go it says that right now it added the referral badge on there if you upgrade you don't have the little mailchimp badge on your email again one of the reasons to upgrade i'm not doing it in this video because it is a tutorial and now we can actually go up here and say we can either schedule it or we can click on send if you just click on send it's going to just send it to everybody so i'm going to click on send now and the email went out so just like that you're able to send out emails mailchimp like i said i have a full tutorial if you want to see some of the more like more in the weeds on this stuff but in general that's going to be the basics of how you'd actually set up mailchimp and use it to send campaigns and emails out to whoever your subscribers actually are back down to apps there are some other apps that are very very popular obviously we don't need oberlo we're doing drop shipping through print printful we can see get customers don't really care about that find products or stand out really the ones that i wanted to talk about let's go back to just click on this and go back to the shopify app store the next one is called sms bump so let's go up to uh categories and let's actually just click on shopify app store just so we can see all the apps so we'll just go up here and type in sms bump hit enter and you'll see sms bump is incredibly popular 2 000 reviews with 4.8 stars and sms obviously being a text message means that you're able to send messages text messages to whoever is shopping on your on your site on your store and this is going to be great for building a subscriber list so you can tell people like hey just so you know new collections out do you have an actual fan base additionally it could be other things like telling them when their order's ready or shipped or anything like that and so it's a really great thing to have i'm just going to go and add this app and again this could be a full tutorial for another day as well but i want to i kind of want to kind of get past this right now and start talking more about getting the products getting some samples so you can actually start taking those photos i talked about and improve your website and also just to kind of double check and verify the quality of the products as i mean we saw reviews we know the products we chose were good but you really want to make sure that the products like that your design looks good on them so from the dashboard if we click on orders on the left side we can go and click start new order we want to obviously order a sample they're going to give us a discount here as well plus the five dollars off i talked about before if you're using code santro 5 so we can go and create your order and so it's going to ask which products we want we're going to go and click on add products add product and of our products let's just say i mean obviously i want to try all of them i'm going to choose the hat right here we're going to definitely choose the hat and test it out make sure that looks good i'm going to choose let's add another product to this order as well so we can say my product templates or synced items rather these are the products that we already have i want to check out the hoodie so we're going to check out the sweatshirt and of these i'm going to go and say size large we're going to choose that one so that brings us to the total of 39 or 27 dollars actually so obviously these are not selling at the price you listed on your store these are selling at the price that it would cost you when the customer buys uh the final product so let's add another product and see um from synced items let's just order i don't know maybe like 100 worth of our products and see what they actually end up looking like so the samples are in like we talked about in the very beginning of this video you might have noticed i had this hoodie on and so i think this is really important for a couple reasons the first of all you can find out what the quality of the material actually is so for example like the hoodie that i got really is a nice quality you can see like really thick strings on here it's really warm it's really soft it's really comfortable similarly the hat seems to be like pretty durable really nice quality as well i've been wearing this for actually a couple days now but it's also good to see what part of your design printed well and what part didn't print well so for example if you look really closely you can see like the word media some of those really thin lines i would maybe want to make those slightly thicker or otherwise kind of focus on some larger things that would really print more consistently additionally you notice that some things for example like the blue stitching here might not exactly match the blue on the print so sometimes it's important depending on your design to get these samples and see what it actually looks like in real life how it feels and make sure that you're getting the best quality product it matches the price and nobody's going to be disappointed further on down the line so a lot of this really ties back to which products you chose so i think the ones i chose are really good quality but also what design you chose to print on there what colors you're printing if you're choosing to use ink or if you're choosing to use embroidery like this and so it's something that again i know i keep emphasizing this but i really want to make sure you guys do get these samples to make sure that you're getting the best quality for your customers but on top of that i can actually go now and take some real pictures of me wearing these products just around doing whatever and use those throughout my site so i don't have to keep paying uh for other models to be wearing it and also it's more authentic i can find exactly the mood i'm looking for for my images and capture that with my own camera or you know maybe a friend's camera even an iphone something like that would work well enough to get some really good quality photos with this merchandise

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Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media

Id: LCKePqdHgs0

Length: 149min 0sec (8940 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022