- So then chances are, if
you are watching this video, that means that you were interested in starting the fun creative side hustle of creating your own t-shirt business. And fair enough. Did you know that the
online indie t-shirt market is rapidly growing? In just five years, the
indie t-shirt market is tipped to increase by over 50%. Yep, instead of wearing
generic branded t-shirts such as Nike t-shirts, increasingly younger
consumers are preferring to wear t-shirts that are personalized to their interests, passions, and hobbies. So for example, let's say
that Zack was into hiking. Well, instead of buying
a generic Nike t-shirt, chances are Zack would much rather instead wear this cool t-shirt
featuring a map of different national parks throughout the
USA that he enjoys hiking in, as it's more personalized
to his interests. And so here is the interesting
business opportunity for me and for you. See, you might be sitting at
home or on a bus somewhere behind a screen thinking to yourself, well, geez Sarah, that's all good and all. But won't big brands like Nike just create their own
cool hiking t-shirts? Well, I'm sure they'd like
to but frankly they can't. There are billions of people in the world, and surprise, surprise, the amount of different
interests, passions, and hobbies that billions of people
have is, well, staggering. And if you don't believe me, check out the Wikipedia
page just for hobbies. Big brands like Nike
simply can't make t-shirts to cover over 7 billion humans' worth of interests, passions, and hobbies. Which is where the indie t-shirt creators such as myself are coming in. We're driving this growth and carving out a new type of clothing niche, where instead of creating a brand, you serve the customer by making t-shirts featuring cool art and phrases
that they identify with. And so on this video, that's what I'm gonna teach you. I'm gonna teach you how
to open step-by-step your own online niche t-shirt business. But you see, that's not all,
because as part of this video, I have also set myself
an additional challenge. I'm gonna show you how to
do all of this for free. That's right, for free. The only thing you will
need is either a credit card or a debit card with 50 to $100 on it, although as you'll see, we
won't be using that really to pay for any expenses. Which means then that, while my longtime subscribers will know, I run my t-shirt business through Shopify which I do think is a great option if you have a startup budget. Shopify is not free. (chuckling) Shopify starts at $29 a month. And so since this tutorial was all about starting your own online niche
t-shirt business for free, Shopify is not gonna work well for us. But that is okay. Because as I've discussed in
this video here on my channel, these days you've got lots of options for setting up an online
store, including free options. One website is a site here that my subscribers will
recognize called Teespring, otherwise now known as Spring. And thousands of people have
used Spring or Teespring to open online t-shirt
stores like this for free. And it's pretty popular,
each month it gets around 15 to 20 million visitors a month. So that's pretty cool. And this is a website that
I'm sure my subscribers will also recognize called Redbubble. Thousands of people
have also used Redbubble to open online t-shirt
stores like this for free. And Redbubble is actually
even more popular. Each month it gets around
25 to 40 million visitors. So that is pretty good, and definitely better than Spring anyway. But did you know that there
is another website out there that gets 10 times the amount of traffic that Redbubble does, that people are opening online
t-shirt stores on for free? And that website is Etsy. If you haven't heard about Etsy before, it's an online marketplace
that lets you list and sell handmade items or items that
you yourself designed to sell. And so even though, as you'll
see as part of my tutorial, you won't actually be hand-making
the t-shirts yourself, but instead working with
a production partner, t-shirt businesses like
ours are still allowed because we are designing the picture or slogan on the t-shirt ourselves. And this means we can still sell on Etsy and take advantage of the enormous amount of traffic and visitors that come here. Each month, Etsy gets around
350 to 500 million visitors. And you know what? Sales and visitors to
Etsy are only growing. Etsy stores, including
Etsy t-shirt stores, just keep making more and more money! Which is why Etsy share price is extremely high at over $200. It's because Etsy stores are doing really well and killing it. And I can see it in my viewer stores. The successful subscribers
that open a store on Redbubble tend to earn hundreds of dollars a month, whereas on Etsy, they
could earn thousands. It's not rocket science. It's just that, well, there
are far more customers and thus more money to be made on Etsy. There is, however, just
one problem with that. Usually Etsy, yeah,
just like with Shopify, it's not free to sell on it. Nope, Etsy usually charges 20 cents to list an item for four months. So what gives, Sarah? I thought this was a free tutorial. And 20 cents, that ain't free, yo! Well don't worry, my friends,
because I've got you. If you come to Etsy and do a search for 40 free Etsy listings, you'll see people have created
dummy Etsy product listings that if you open will
contain a clickable URL in the product description. This is the Etsy referral affiliate link. As a special offer, Etsy gives
all of their store owners a referral affiliate
link that if you click, will give you 40 free item listings as a way to entice you to
register and create a store. And as a thank you, that
Etsy store will also get 40 free item listings if you've registered for a free store through their referral affiliate link. So it is a win-win for both of you. So you can just do a
search for this on Etsy and click on any of the referral links to get 40 free item listings. (chuckling) No 20 cent fee required. And setting up an Etsy
account is super simple. However, as part of the
registration process, you are required to add
an item to your store. And so this means that before
we can open a store on here, we're gonna need items i.e.
t-shirts to list and sell. Which is why, to keep
things nice and simple, we're gonna set up a store on Etsy after we have designed
and created a t-shirt. So let's begin this tutorial at step one, create a t-shirt design. Now you see, here's the deal. I bet a bunch of you are
sitting at home thinking, well geez, Sarah, I'd love to
start my own t-shirt business but I'm not an artist. Surely I have to at least hire an artist to be able to create
t-shirt designs, right? Well, my friends, the answer is nope! Nope, you do not need to
hire an artist at all. Because you see, here's the deal. This simple word-based t-shirt
has made roughly $40,000. And the reason why I say that is because of the reviews. To work out roughly how many sales that item has made on Etsy, I take the reviews that item has, which for this is 224, and then divide that by the
store's total number of reviews, which is 4,028. So that came to roughly 5.5%. But we can guess that most likely then, if it makes up 5.5% of the reviews, it's probably also made up around 5.5% of the store's total sales. And since we can see this
store has made 30,117 sales, 5.5% of that is 1,656 sales. So if we then times it
by the product price, we get over $40,000, all from this one simple two word design. And so no, you do not need to be an artist to start a successful
t-shirt business on Etsy. Trendy phrases, combined
with trendy fonts, work awesome too. And anyone can create
those sorts of designs using this app here, Canva. Now Canva has two versions. They have the free version
and a paid pro version. Unfortunately, we will need
to use the paid version because it has two exclusive features that we will need when designing
and creating our t-shirts. However, you can still do this for free because Canva has a huge
30 day free pro trial. So go ahead and sign up
for the free pro trial and then we can get started
creating our first design. So we're gonna make
our Canva design canvas to be the full size of the
printing area for our t-shirts, which is 4,500 pixels by 5,100 pixels. So we know exactly how much
space we will have to work with. And remember, you don't have to fill up all of the space and use all it. It's just nice to know how much space you do have to work with. And you can change the
background color of your canvas if you're gonna be working
with white text, like we are. Don't worry, as you'll see, we will remove this
background color later. I'm just changing it to black now so that I can easily read my white text. And with that, we can
get started designing. If you'd like to use pictures
or icons on your t-shirts, Canva has a bunch of
pre-installed pictures. Something to keep in mind is that artists who have drawn pictures
that have been pre-installed all have the ability to add what is called an image license to their pictures, which tells you what you can
and can't do with the image. Luckily, Canva does make it super simple to check the image license for each picture that you want to use. Just hover your mouse over the image and click the little three dots and then click the little information box and the image license will pop up. And so, as you can see, we're
allowed to use this image for merchandise such as t-shirts that we make and sell, which is great. We can't, however, upload
the image by itself and sell it as a digital download. So that's also good to know. So that means then that we
can use it on our t-shirt that we're creating and selling. So I would just use it as an example. Something else I'll also do when designing a quick t-shirt for this tutorial video is show you how simple it would have been to find a trending font, similar to the one that was used earlier in that "Ew People" text-based t-shirt that we calculated to have
made around $40,000 on Etsy. As you can see, Canva has
tons of fonts installed. So the best thing to
do is to search through different font categories. So to find a similar font, I'm searching through the
handwritten font styles. And also something to keep in mind too, is that when you do find a font you like, just like with pictures, artists design and create these as well. And so just like with images, fonts will also come with
your own image licenses where the artists would tell you what you can and can't do with it. Now, unfortunately,
Canva doesn't have a way for you to easily find these, but luckily with Google,
it's actually really easy. So let's say that you'd found
this font here, Amatic SC, and you wanted to find out what
the font license was for it so that you could check
to see if you could use it on commercial products that you sell. Well, checking is super easy. You just head on over to Google
and type in your font name, followed by the phrase "font license." And in the results, you
should be able to find a page that features your font,
along with a license for it. And so for this font here, Amatic SC, we can see that, yes, this is a font that Google has created. And with their license they have given it, we're allowed to use it
for commercial purposes such as making and selling
merchandise with it like t-shirts, which is great. And so once you've selected
the images and fonts that you want to use in your design, you then just drag and drop
them around the canvas. You can change the colors, letter spacing, all sorts of things using
Canva's in-built tools. And if you're stuck for ideas
on what t-shirts to create, something I often recommend is that you create a design on something
that you yourself enjoy. So for example, I, myself love traveling, it's a big hobby of mine. I'm a massive transport geek, actually. Like, I know all the different commercial aviation plane models and so, it'd be pretty easy for me
to make a t-shirt design around the hobby of traveling because I can use my wants and desires to help me inspire a t-shirt
that I myself would buy. Whereas while, I do hike whenever
I'm made to by my friends, and I do enjoy it in the moment, the reality is is that I'm
not much of a hiker at all despite living in one
of the best countries in the world for it, New Zealand. And so, it would have
been much harder for me to come up with a cool t-shirt for hikers like that t-shirt from
the start of the video because I wouldn't have been able to use my own wants and desires
to help inspire me to come up with a t-shirt design that I would have bought and worn myself. And so these days, I
pretty much just stick to making and selling
t-shirts around things that I myself am interested in because it's much easier
to become inspired, to make an awesome design that way. And so that's why I'm also really baffled when people seem surprised that so many print on-demand stores can successfully coexist together. I met some people that
say, but why would you ever teach others how to
create and sell t-shirts? Aren't you just creating
competition for yourself? And it's just such a strange thing to say because, as you did see earlier
at the start of the video, just how many different
hobbies there are in the world, how many different
types of pets there are. Like, just take dogs, for example. Think about how many different types of dog breeds there are
to make t-shirts around. There are billions of humans in the world and we all have our own
interests, passions, and hobbies. I'm not an expert in all of
these things. (chuckling) And I doubt that you are an
expert in all of them as well. To be able to meet the
human consumer demand for clothing personalized
around people's niche interests, hobbies, passions, we honestly
need a staggering amount of stores and clothing lines to exist. We aren't all interested
in the same things y'all! But you know, anyway, back
to the tutorial video. So now that we've got a simple
trendy design to upload, it is time to save it. And to do this, we need to
utilize some of the features that are only included sadly
in the pro Canva account. When saving the file, there
are two important things that we need to do. One, we would need to increase
the image size by three. This is a pro account only feature. This will increase the image resolutions, that when our design is
printed onto a t-shirt, it will come at crisp and sharp so that our customers will love it. The second thing we'll want to do is make the background transparent. This is also a pro account only feature although there are free tools online that will do this for you. But no matter what though, we need to use Canva's size increase tool in the pro account so,
we might as well make use of their background
transparent feature too. By making our background transparent, it will remove that black
background and make it empty so that it won't print onto a t-shirt. Now, if we didn't make the
background transparent, the design would come
out looking like this when it's printed onto a t-shirt. So it is crucial that you make sure that you tick that transparent box. Even if you're using a white
background, get rid of it. Now because we increased
the image size by three, it will take Canva a while to
process the image and save it. That's fine though, just be
patient and don't click away. And once it's saved, that's it! You're ready to start
selling it on t-shirts. Which means it is time to
also move on to step two, create your t-shirts to sell. And to do that, we're gonna use this website and app here, Printify. This is what we in the industry call a print on-demand app. As my subscribers know, I use two print on-demand apps. I use Printify and I use this
one here called Printful. This one, Printful, is
more expensive though. And so while I think Printful is great for established t-shirt brands like mine, since they have some
cool additional features that established clothing
stores will appreciate, I think if you're just starting out that most people will prefer
Printify as it's much cheaper. And as you'll see, it's
still a great place to source high quality t-shirts. So if you haven't seen Printify before, the way it works is you can
choose from over 200 plus blank products in the merchandise catalog, such as a t-shirt, and
upload your design onto it. Printify will then store a digital copy of your t-shirt on its servers, you can enlist this t-shirt
for sale in your online store such as the store that we're
gonna set up with Etsy, and Printify will track the sales. And so then every time someone comes and buys say this t-shirt
from you and your store, Printify will see that a customer ordered the t-shirt from you and go, yep, let's make that t-shirt. Their merchandise feature will then print your design onto a blank t-shirt and then package the t-shirt up and ship it out to the customer. So you can see why this
is called print on-demand, because products get printed onto products as customers demand, i.e. order them. Printify's app will
then notify the customer that the t-shirt has been shipped, and send them a tracking code. So as you can see, Printify essentially lets you sell t-shirts on autopilot. And by the way, if you're
enjoying this video and you'd like to learn even more about setting up your own
print on-demand business, you should be sure to
download my free ebook, "The 6 Steps that 6 Figure Stores Follow to Make Over $10,000 a Month." You'll find the link to
download my free ebook in the video description below. But, anyway, back to the video. To get started, just go ahead and create a free Printify account for your store. Setting up is super simple. You just fill out the boxes. Printify has two versions. They have the free account, and a $29 a month premium account. Now I personally use the premium account because it saves me $1.20
for each of my t-shirts with the premium product discounts. So obviously as your t-shirt brand grows, like me you'll eventually want to switch to the premium account once
the $1.20 discount per t-shirt saves you more than $29 a month. At that point, it's
literally a no brainer. But when you're first just starting out, it's best just to stick
to the free version. But yes, as you can see, Printify has lots of different t-shirts that
you can make and sell. I highly recommend when starting out to first upload unisex t-shirts
so that it makes it easier to market to lots of different people. Now out of these unisex t-shirts, there is one that my subscribers know that I absolutely love. And that is the Bella+Canvas 3001. This is probably the
most popular base t-shirt for print on-demand stores. And that's for several reasons. One reason is that Bella+Canvas do most of the t-shirt production
process in the USA from your Los Angeles warehouse, rather than a shady offshore factory. Outside of assembly, the
majority of the t-shirt creation process is made
and done within the USA, supporting local jobs. And a second reason is that
it's super comfy to wear, which means then that
customers will love it and be more likely to come
back and buy another one. And the third reason is that
it is a classic retail fit, which means then that if
customer would usually say buy a medium t-shirt from
a large chain like Kmart, then a medium in this will
probably fit them great as well. Here is the thing you have to understand about Printify though. Printify are themselves just an app, they are not a merchandise factory, unlike Printful which is both. Printify do not produce any
of these products themselves. And so they let third party
print on-demand factories connect to the app, and you can choose from these factories and pick your favorite one to make and ship your
t-shirts to your customers. Because it sees mostly
customers based in the USA, I strongly recommend
selecting a USA-based factory to make and ship your products. And out of those, the
one I recommend the most is Monster Digital. They're one of the most expensive, but their t-shirt print
quality is fantastic. Monster Digital are a printing factory based out of Miami, Florida. And again, because this
tends to confuse people, they themselves are not Printify. They are an entirely separate business. Printify is just a revolutionary app that was created to make it super easy to connect with external
print on-demand companies, like the Monster Digital, and order t-shirts to be
made and shipped with them. So remember, when we use Printify to order t-shirts with Monster Digital, it is not Printify
making and shipping them. It is this business here, Monster Digital. So once you've selected them, go into the t-shirt settings and choose which of the color
t-shirts that you would like. As you can see, Monster
Digital has lots of colors. In general, though, I do not recommend overwhelming a customer
with lots of choices. I recommend choosing two to
five of your favorite colors. And when choosing colors, I strongly recommend
prioritizing dark colors if your design will look good on them, as darker colors tend to sell the best. So I'm gonna choose here the navy, dark heather gray, asphalt,
dark gray, and black. And after that, just upload your design. Earlier when we created
our design with Canva, we used the pro feature to
increase the image size by three. Because we did this, it now means that when we upload our image to Printify, it's gonna tell us that
it's in high resolution. Which means that when it's
printed onto a t-shirt, that as a design it's gonna
print boldly and sharply. If we hadn't increased
the image size by three, and we'd kept it at one time size, then Printify would have told us that our image resolution was low, and if we tried to print it, it would have come out blurry and ugly. And once it's uploaded, you
can then resize the image and move it around until it's in the spot that you'd like it to be
printed on onto a t-shirt. And then once you've got it looking the way that you want it to look, just go ahead and save your product. Printify will now store a digital copy of the t-shirt that you've
created inside of its database. And so now that we've uploaded our t-shirt and designed it and saved
it to our Printify account, we just need to go in and edit
the product details for it. We're now gonna go in and give our product a title, description, and price. Later on the video, I'll be
going over some best practices for choosing a product title. So be sure to keep listening. Choosing great titles
that are keyword-rich can help you get a lot of
traffic and sales on Etsy. And there's something else
I need to discuss as well which is pricing your t-shirts. So when you're choosing
your t-shirt price, t-shirts on Etsy tend to
sell between 20 to $30, with 22 to $25 being
the most common prices. So I'm just gonna go ahead and list this t-shirt for sale for $22.95 as that is a pretty
standard price on Etsy. And when pricing your items, make sure to not use a round number. So don't price it at say $23. Be sure to price it at
something like $22.95 or $22.99. And also something else that you'll notice when adding in prices, is that Printify will warn you that 2XL and 3XL t-shirts will cost you more when
customers order them. That's because larger t-shirts
require more fabric to make. And so they have higher production costs. Despite this though, I strongly recommend that you keep all of your
t-shirts priced the same price. Understandably, most people
would probably be offended if you charge more for a 2XL
compared to a small t-shirt. And so in the t-shirt industry, we charge the same price, no matter what size the customer orders. We just accept that we'll have a slightly lower profit margin
for 2XL and 3XL orders. And really, the vast
majority of your orders will be Small to XL t-shirts anyway. So usually you'll be making the full profit margin regardless. But yes, once you've finished editing your product details inside of Printify, it's time to move on to the next step, creating an online store
for free with Etsy. So go ahead and do a search on Etsy for 40 free item listings. You'll find tons of people
have set up filler products that contain a signup link
in the item description with the affiliate URL that
you can just click for free, and use to get 40 free
item listings. (chuckling) You don't need to buy anything. So go ahead and just
choose one from the list and select it to open a store with that. You'll then be asked to
enter the email address that you want to set up store with, with your name, and to create a password. Once you've done that, you will then need to select a store name. Now honestly, on Etsy, your
store name doesn't matter. I've seen some terrible
store names do really well. Just like with YouTube, some terrible YouTube channel names have done super well too. But if you have a brand name
for your t-shirt store in mind, you might as well use it here,
as long as it's available, and then you can move on to the next step. Now on this page, you're
gonna be asked to create at least one product listing. Sadly, this is not optional. I'm honestly not quite sure why Etsy requires that we do this, and I wish we could skip
past it but we can't. So for now, just pick one of the t-shirts that you created with Printify and create a listing for it, filling out all of the required
boxes and nothing else. And I say only do the bare minimum that you need to create an item listing because, hilariously, we're actually just gonna be deleting this. Printify has a direct
integration with Etsy. Using their integration, we'll be able to not only list
our Printify items on Etsy with practically the push of a button, but if we add in our t-shirts
and using the integration, Printify will be able to track and manage our sales and orders too. So I suggest that you put in
as little as possible here in the sections that
have asterix beside them, because you need to fill out those parts to complete your listing, but everything else is entirely optional. And so, since we're just gonna be deleting this item listing anyway, you might as well just
skip over those parts. Yes, once you've gone in and
added in a filler item listing, we can move on to the next part which is setting up how
Etsy will pay you money. For that they need to know
if you have a company or not, and what your home address is. Only Etsy will know this, it
won't be released publicly. If you don't have a company, don't worry. You don't need to register
a business to sell on Etsy. You can just list that
you're a sole proprietor. For most places around the world, you don't need to sign any
papers or register anything to be a sole proprietor. And after you've entered
in your home address, Etsy will then request
information on your bank accounts, such as your bank account number. This is because each time a customer buys an item from you on Etsy, it's not technically you
that's collecting their money. It's Etsy or PayPal, if they choose to use PayPal
instead of Etsy Payments. But for most customers, they
tend to choose Etsy Payments. And so every time a
customer pays for an item of yours through Etsy Payments, they will securely collect that money, remove the processing fees, and then pay out the rest to you directly to your bank account. So I went ahead and filled that out. Etsy then asked me for
some identification, like a photo of my driver's license. I'm not sure if everyone
gets asked to upload this, or if this is because
I live in New Zealand, but if they ask it for
everybody, I'm not surprised. All payment processes such
as Stripe, Etsy or PayPal, need to be able to prove to authorities that you are who you say you are just in case you go ahead
and defraud customers. But I'm sure none of you
are gonna defraud customers, of course. (chuckling) But Etsy, unfortunately, don't know that, so they have to get your
identification regardless. So once you've gone ahead and submitted a photo or some form of ID, you'll then just need
to verify your email. And once you've gone
into your email account and clicked that little
email verification button inside the message that they've sent you, Etsy will then ask you to do the final part of your account setup, which is to add in either a
credit card or a debit card. That's because, of
course, once we've used up our 40 free item listings, each additional item listing
will cost 20 cents each. And so we're gonna need
either a credit card or a debit card to pay for it. So that is one reason why
at the start of the video, I said you need either a
credit card or a debit card. But there is another
reason and it is this. See when a customer comes
and buys a t-shirt from you, Printify will see the sale and go, yep, we'll send this order over to Monster Digital for you automatically. But before we do, you'll need to pay us $9.21
plus $4 for shipping to us, so that we can pay that money
to Monster Digital please. So you might be thinking,
well, that's fine. Because hasn't the
customer already paid me $22.95 plus shipping for anywhere on Etsy? I'll just get them to
remove the money from that. But you see, here's the thing. You can't because it isn't Printify that collects the money the customer paid. Because we're opening up our
store on Etsy, not Printify, it is Etsy that is collecting the money that the customer paid us, not Printify. And so Printify has received no money to remove the cost of
production and shipping off of. And so we need to cover this upfront. Now for me, I usually use a credit card to pay for the expenses. And it's really nice because credit cards give you rewards for spending money with them. So I accumulate miles that
I use to take business class and first class flights around
the world with, (chuckling) when there isn't a global
pandemic, of course. Etsy takes about a week to
process and send you your money. But credit cards give
you four to five weeks to pay off your charges. So you can easily pay off
these Printify expenses before you incur any interest. And you get free credit card rewards! So I'm glad that Printify
don't remove the cost of production from my customer's payment, because if they did, I wouldn't be able to use
my credit cards instead to earn all of these travel
rewards for effectively free. And so, because you
ultimately are profiting each time a customer is
buying an item from you, I don't really consider this
a traditional upfront expense like say paying for an item
listing with no sales guarantee. And see, I think of it
more as a cashflow snag, which luckily, having either a debit card with some extra cash on or
a credit card like me sells. And once you go on in and add in either a credit card or a debit card, that's it, your store is live. You can immediately go in
and start selling t-shirts. You don't even need to add in
a profile picture or anything. But, of course, (chuckling) it's still a good idea to go in and fill out your store profile because customers are
much, much more likely to buy from a store with a
profile that's filled out. So for example, I strongly
strongly recommend that you add in a store profile picture. If you have a logo for
your t-shirt business, this is a great place to upload it. If you don't though that's okay, because like me, you can just find a free photo online to use for it. I found this for free on Pixels
and I just uploaded that. Something else I strongly
recommend that you upload is a photo of yourself. On Etsy, people prefer a
more personable experience. They like knowing the
person behind the shop and prefer buying from
small personal indie brands. If you're presenting yourself
in a more down to earth way, rather than trying to pretend that you're some big t-shirt brand, will actually help your sales
on Etsy rather than hurt them. And when you can, I highly recommend uploading a store banner, a simple banner that features
photos of your t-shirts works really well. And many big Etsy stores have
simple banners like this. Later on in the video, I'm gonna show you how you can get cool photos
of your t-shirts, like this, without having to actually
buy them from Monster Digital and do a photo shoot yourself. But yes, while all of these optional profile modifications are great and genuinely help your sales,
marketing, and conversions, and I highly highly recommend doing them and I highly highly
recommend going and watching YouTube videos that are all about creating an optimized Etsy store profile, there is one thing in it that it is not optional for us to do and that is that inside of our
Shop Manager in the settings, we need to disclose that we
are working with a print shop or factory to print t-shirts for us. We need to tell Etsy
the name of the company that we're working with, but we can hide the
information from the public. So rather than put Printify down, we're gonna put the name
of the printing factory that we're using through Printify, which is Monster Digital. Publicly, the only information
we have to disclose is that we're working
with a t-shirt printer to make and ship the t-shirts. And we need to give their location, which in this case here is Miami, Florida. And don't worry about
this impacting sales. Etsy customers do not mind
print on-demand stores. They won't be turned off the fact that you have a t-shirt printer that is making the t-shirts for you. You also have to disclose to Etsy why you're working with Monster Digital, what your role is in the
t-shirt design process, and you need to disclose how
much of the production process Monster Digital handles. So for us, we're working
with Monster Digital because we obviously don't
have a t-shirt factory to make and ship the t-shirts ourselves. And if you've been following
along with this tutorial, you can select that
you're the only designer. Although if you're working
with another designer to help you come up with your t-shirts, just slate that option instead. And when Etsy asks how
much the production process Monster Digital handles, (chuckling) select that they handle
everything since, well, they are actually handling
everything for us. But yes, as I said, while this is the one absolutely necessary
thing that we have to do, I still recommend going
and watching YouTube videos about setting up a beautiful
optimized Etsy store profile. And once you've done that, you'll be ready to move on to step four, listing our t-shirts for sale. And luckily it's super simple because of the Printify
and Etsy integration that both companies have set up. Make sure you're logged into both Printify and Etsy in separate tabs, and then come to your
products inside of Printify that you created and
click "Not connected," and then click Etsy. Confirm that you've allowed
the two to be connected, and that's it. And they'll be able to
publish all of your products including your t-shirts that
you've made on Printify, on Etsy. And to do that, you just need to go back into your products inside of Printify, and there will magically be a new button next to them, Publish. (chuckling) Just click that and Printify will publish the product you've
selected straight to Etsy. It may take a minute for it to load up, but just be patient. Because once it's done, that's it! Your product is live. Remember how we had to upload a picture, and the title and do all that stuff when setting up a
product manually on Etsy? You don't have to do any of that because Printify just does it for you. All parts of your product listing we added are brought over to Etsy including the product
colors, product sizes, price, the mock-up photos that
Printify automatically creates. But best of all, Printify
is now tracking the sales. And so whenever a customer comes and buys a t-shirt from you, Printify will see the sale and go, yep, we'll let Monster Digital know to make and ship out that t-shirt. And so Monster Digital's
printing shop will then do that. They'll print your design onto a t-shirt, package the t-shirt out, and then ship it out to the customer. All completely hands-off. Printify will then send the
customer a tracking code, so the customer knows the item
has shipped and can track it. So, now that you've set up
your t-shirts with Printify, you could then go and
delete that filler t-shirt that we created earlier. And then you can move on to step five, marketing and selling your t-shirts. So here's the deal, right? Here's how most people
use Etsy to find items. Let's say that someone has a friend that has a golden retriever
and they want to get them a golden retriever
theme t-shirt as a gift. The way that most people would do that is they come to the search bar and type in golden retriever t-shirt gift or something descriptive
like in the search bar. And when they do that,
Etsy will search through all the t-shirts that have
been uploaded to the website, that it believes are related
to that search phrase, and show them. And so, if you want to
market your t-shirts, you need to kind of tweak
your t-shirt listings so that those Shop for
Related Search Results is the best way to get sales. This is called SEO, otherwise known as search
engine optimization. There are lots of tweaks you can make to your t-shirt listing so that they will show up higher
in the search results. In fact, there are so many
tweaks that you can make to give yourself a big
edge over the competition, that there are lots of dedicated
YouTube video tutorials to this one specific topic. And so, rather than just
repeat what these videos say, I highly recommend that you instead go and watch them for yourself
and support those creators. But to get your Etsy SEO
learning train started, I'll show you some of the
tweaks I made for this listing to make it more Etsy SEO friendly. The one tweak I made was I used lots of keywords in my title. Keyword-based title like this actually do really well in Etsy. So don't be afraid to use lots of relevant keywords in your title. And one way I came up
with some keyword ideas was with this tool here, the
Etsy Keyword Dominate tool. This usually costs money but, as this as a free tutorial video, you can get two keyword searches a day. So, it's great to take advantage of. And something else I did
which is really important, that a lot of people massively neglect, is I went in and I added lifestyle mock-up photos to my listing. Now you might not think that this wouldn't improve
your SEO, but it does. And that's because people
are far more likely to click on a product listing
that has a good photo, and are far more likely
to buy that product too. So if your listing has
positive stats like this, Etsy will push it higher and
higher in the search results. And luckily, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't need to buy a
t-shirt from Printify and Monster Digital and do a photo shoot. And that's because this app here, Placeit. With a Placeit account, you can upload your t-shirt designs onto the website, and Placeit will digitally
put it onto their library of thousands of t-shirt lifestyle photos that you can use to advertise with. Now normally, Placeit costs $15 a month, and it's awesome and
I highly recommend it, but they actually have some free photos that you can use to get started. And it was with those
free photos that I use to create that store banner
that I showed you earlier. I have a link to Placeit
in the video description. As I said, it's super simple. You just select from one of
their free t-shirt photos, pick which color you
want the t-shirt to be, and then upload your design and place it where you want it to be on the t-shirt. Placeit will then generate
your lifestyle photo that you can use to market your t-shirts and drastically increase your conversions and click through rates. And thus get more and more sales and more and more money into your pocket with your brand new t-shirt business. So yes, it turns out that with some clever use of tools and apps, anyone can go out there
and start an online hustle with a t-shirt business for free. So, did my video help you? If it did, please hit subscribe and click that little notification bell so that you don't miss
out any of my videos. And if you'd like to learn
more about my t-shirt business, you should be sure to watch my video, "5 Income Sources that
I've built in my 20s that makes me over $1,000 a day." So go ahead, watch my next video, and I'll see you over there.
