Print on Demand Business Guide

Hey, everyone, welcome back to another video. In today's video, I'm going to give you a full print on demand tutorial for beginners. This video is going to walk you through everything from the idea that you want to start print on demand, all the way to getting your first sales and everything in between step by step. Now, in order to make this video as helpful as possible, I'm even going to put you on screen recording and walk you through everything really click by click and show you real examples so this all makes sense. Now, for those of you who know my video style, this video is going to be equivalent to a full paid course, but it's going to be here on YouTube entirely for free. So all I ask is if you do enjoy this video, please just give it a thumbs up and let me know down in the comments. Okay, so the first thing we need to cover is what is print on demand, and specifically what is a print on demand business? So in the vast majority of cases, when you hear someone online talking about a print on demand business, what they're talking about is a print on demand T-shirt business. Now, although you can do print on demand with many other products, the most sales are going to come from T-shirts specifically. It's just kind of how the market works. So this tutorial and what I recommend to you is all going to focus on a print on demand T-shirt business. So let's start on Amazon. So if you didn't know, Amazon is the largest print on demand platform out there. Most people didn't even know that you could do print on demand on Amazon. But to show you what this looks like, if you search for something like funny Father's Day shirts and you scroll down here, I can tell that all of these are done with print on demand. And I'll show you in a second here why I can tell that. But I'm looking for the designs that are on T-shirts, just a regular T-shirt, not a performance shirt or anything like this. And then it has a design that looks like somebody created it themselves. It's not a company logo or anything, it's just kind of a funny shirt. Generally that works the best for a print on demand business. So if you click in on one of these, the dad giveaway that it is in fact done with print on demand is this little label right here. It says Amazon Merch on Demand. That is Amazon's print on demand department. So anytime there's a listing done with print on demand on Amazon, it's going to have that little label right here. But essentially the way that a print on demand business works is that the seller, let's say you or me, just created this design right here and they uploaded it to Amazon, which created the virtual listing here. And the way that you can tell it's a virtual listing is because once you hover over any other color, the T-shirt, the actual mockup stays the same, and the design stays the same. It's just showing what it would look like if it was printed on these different color shirts. And then the person that comes in here and wants to buy this can pick what color shirt they want it printed on. If they want it on a men's or a woman's shirt, then they can scroll down here and they can pick what size they want that printed on, and then they can add it right to their cart and they can purchase it through Amazon. Now, what's going to happen behind the scenes and what brings this whole print on demand business to life is that once Amazon receives this order, they are going to go pick a men's shirt in navy blue color in a large size, and they're going to print this exact design on it and they're going to ship it out to the customer. And if there's any returns, exchanges, or customer service, Amazon handles all of that for us. We as the print on demand seller, just get a split of the overall profit added into our account. That is what a print on demand T-shirt business looks like. So the idea here as a print on demand seller is you want to up with as many good T-shirt design ideas as you can and upload them to big print on demand websites like Amazon, and then as people find them and purchase them, those websites do all the printing, the shipping, the customer service, and we just get our split of the profit. Now the last thing I'll say before moving on from here is that there are multiple other print on demand websites that you can use, and they're not exclusive too. So you can create one design like this one here, and you can upload it to Amazon, you can upload it to several other print on-demand marketplaces, all getting their own traffic and getting their own sales. Once we get later on in this video, I'll share the top websites that actually get the most sales out of all of the websites that I've used over the years. So if you're just going to focus on a couple different websites, those ones will get you the most sales. Okay, so hopefully now that we are on the same page as to what print on demand is and what it looks like in real life, now let's actually get into this tutorial. So the very first step here is we need to come up with different ideas to create designs about. This is a huge part of the business and knowing how to come up with good ideas that are actually going to sell is worth its weight in gold. So what most people do is they just go on Amazon and they just come up with different ideas, they search them, and they see if other people have designs, and then they either copy them or they create similar designs. And a huge piece of advice that I can give you is don't approach coming up with your T-shirt design ideas this way. This is really just coming up with random ideas and hoping that they sell. Now that more people know about print on demand, you have to be strategic in how you're coming up with your print on demand design ideas. So with that being said, I'll show you my personal strategy on how I come up with design ideas and how I know that they're actually going to get sales. So let's switch over to that now, and I'll walk you through it. So if you go over to a website called ChatGPT, and by the way, I'll put links to this website and all the other websites throughout this tutorial down in the description just so you can easily find them. You don't have to go find them on Google. But what ChatGPT is, is a free artificial intelligence tool. So really down at the bottom it says Message ChatGPT. You can type in anything, and basically treat it as a virtual assistant. It's essentially going to go over to Google and the other search engines, gather all of the information that you are looking for and give you a clean concise answer. So for as long as ChatGPT is free to use, which it currently is, I highly recommend using it. There are several different stages. We're going to use this throughout this tutorial. If for some reason ChatGPT is not free anymore to use, you can technically do all of this on Google. It's just not going to be as quick or as efficient. So with that in mind, this first stage here is we want to ask ChatGPT for a list of different hobbies or occupations. In my experience of years of doing print on demand, the most sales are going to come from hobby related shirts or occupation related shirts. So let's start off with a list of 20 hobbies. That's all you have to type in. And then just hit Enter. And this is literally just going to write you out a list of 20 hobbies. Now to give you an example here, once this finishes here, we have 20 of these hobbies we could use. If you did 20 occupations, it's going to do these same thing as hobbies, and it's just going to give you different ideas for occupations. So a really big tip I can give you is that most of these shirts are going to be purchased as gifts. Now keep that in mind, as you are looking at these different ideas. So would be purchased for someone who likes gardening. It's most likely not actually going to be purchased by someone who's doing gardening themselves, but they know someone who does gardening and they really like it and they want to get them a gift. So that kind of changes your mindset a little bit and just keep that in mind as we're going through this whole tutorial. So something else that's really going to help you is that, if you type in 20 hobbies and I type in 20 hobbies, we may get the same list here. It's just how ChatGPT works. So a really good pointer for you is to start to get creative with your searches. So instead of just 20 hobbies, type in 20 men's hobbies or 20 women's hobbies or 20 kids' hobbies. The more creative you can get here, the better. So you can do outdoor hobbies, indoor hobbies, introverted hobbies, extroverted hobbies. This is where your own creativity is just going to give you better and better results. Okay, so now we've got this list right here, and this is a good starting point for ideas. So what most new print on demand sellers would do at this stage and what's going to set you apart from them is most new sellers would just come in here and they would pick one of these hobbies and start creating designs about them. This single tip is going to help you a ton as you start your business. This is something I learned from years of doing this, is that these big general overall hobbies are what you should just consider already full. These should be considered oversaturated, over competitive, and very hard for you as a new seller to actually compete in. Instead of just going into one of these overall niches, take, let's say motorcycle riding, and we're going to break that down into sub-niches within motorcycle riding. This one little tip here is worth so much because it's going to change all of your searches to give you the actual niches and ideas that you can compete in because not many other people are creating designs in. So to show you what this looks like, let's take motorcycle riding, for example. I'm going to now search 20 types of motorcycles. Now this will break down this overall niche into different sub-niches that we can create designs about. So when you look at these, you have a chopper motorcycle, a bobber motorcycle, a cafe racer motorcycle, sportbike. All of these are different sub-niches within the overall niche of motorcycles that you can create designs in. And you are far more likely to be landing on the first page of the marketplace because they're not overly saturated. Okay, so we're moving right along here. This tutorial's about to start to get even cooler here. I have some really cool things to show you that I'm excited about, but just know that what you've done already is putting you ahead of most print on demand sellers because you're breaking it down into these really good niches. So although these are overall going to be way better niches than creating on these more general niches, there is a way that you can actually cross reference the marketplaces and see just how profitable those niches are, especially for a new print on demand seller. So this brings us into the next tool here. This one is called Merch Informer. If you've seen my other videos on this channel, I have been using Merch Informer for years now. They are a staple in my print on demand process. So right off the bat, I do wanna say that Merch Informer is a paid tool. If you look at their pricing, they are about $9.99 per month. You only really need the newbie plan, but they do have a professional plan. And two important things that are worth knowing here is that I have a 20% off coupon. So it brings us down to about $8 per month. I will put that link down in the description below. And secondly, they offer a three-day free trial. So for the purposes of this tutorial, you can do everything that we are going to talk about and we are going to do on a free trial, so you don't even have to pay to use it. So I'll get logged into my account and I'll show you this next step here. Okay, so once you are logged into Merch Informer, they have all these tools down the left side. They basically all open up and they give you more tools that you can use. What we are going to be using for this stage in the process is the competition checker. So if you just click in on this, you can literally type in what the niche is or the sub-niche is and hit Search, and it's going to give you an analysis of that niche and tell you how likely you are to get sales if you create designs in it. So let's go back to our list over here, and we have all of these different sub-niches. So what I would be doing is coming in here in each one of these, I'm just going to copy. And then we'll come over here. We're going to paste it and then we're going to search. So just like that, you have instant results telling you everything you need to know about this niche. So basically over on the right side, it's going to give you a letter grade. So it works just like in school, you get an A through an F. So an F means that it is just wildly oversaturated and A means that it is a really good opportunity. So when I am doing this, I am copying, pasting, copying, pasting, and I'm searching all these just looking at the letter. If I get an A, B, or even a C, that is a niche that I am going to go into. If I get an F, I know that that niche is just going to be too saturated. So right off the bat, we have one sub-niche that gets an A score. This is a sub-niche that is wide open to go into. When we come back to our list, you can just keep copying pasting these. A good little tip here to know is that, if we copy something like cruiser and we go over here and we go to search it, cruiser is just going to give you a very general term. It's not going to know that we're talking about cruiser motorcycles. So just add on a motorcycle to the end of this and then search it. But as you can see, just like that, two out of two are both A scores. Just to show you why these sub-niches are so valuable. If you were to type in something like motorcycle, the general overall niche, you are going to see exactly what I've been explaining here. This gets an F score because there are just so many different designs out there for motorcycles. That big overall niche is just very oversaturated. There's so many people creating designs in it. Now, keep in mind here that this applies to all of these niches as well. So if you were to type in something like fishing, you're probably going to get these same F. But if you go over here and you break down 20 types of fishing and you start to type in those sub-niches, you're probably going to start getting all A's. So now that you know how to find these sub-niches and go over to Merch Informer and make sure that they are good niches to go into, now it's time to actually come up with the phrases that are going to go on those designs. So when it comes to print on demand, the designs are pretty much broken up into two categories. You have text only designs. These are like the ones that we saw in the beginning, just like these. And then you have text and graphic designs. So if we go over to that fishing niche, you've got text and graphics. These are pretty much the two categories that I would focus on for print on demand. A lot of people ask me, "Can you create just graphics or can you upload photos for print on demand?" And yes, technically you can, but I would say the vast majority of sales are going to come from these two categories. But now I'll walk you through how to actually come up with these phrases. So now that we know that sportbike got an A rating, cruiser got an A rating on Merch Informer, I'm going to start with these two right here. So there's two strategies to do this. First, I'm going to show you just staying on ChatGPT. This is a totally free way to do this, and you can come up with some really good design ideas. So I'm going to say 20 T-shirt ideas about sportbikes. And just let ChatGPT write these out for you. Now, not all of these are going to work. Some of them aren't going to make much sense, but you can absolutely pull some really good ideas out of this list. So you've got "Eat, Sleep, Ride, Repeat: Sportbike Lifestyle." "Born to Race, Forced to Work." "Keep Calm and Twist the Throttle." "Fuelled by Coffee and Sportbike Dreams." So you can modify that to just "Fuelled by Coffee and Sportbikes." You can see that there are really good ideas here, and it only takes a second to get a list of 20. So that is the first way you can absolutely use ChatGPT to just come up with ideas for you. I'll show you what to do with these in the next step. But I did wanna talk about the second way of coming up with design ideas. This is going to be a plug for something that I actually offer myself. I've put together pretty much for the first time ever, a list of the best selling phrases that you can use for just about any niche. These are universal templates that you can apply whatever the sub-niche is. So you could use it for all of these different types of motorcycles. You could use it for all different types of fishing. Once you find those sub-niches, it's more or less just plug and play into these templates. So for those of you who want to go that route and just have proven universal templates, you already know how to find these sub-niches, that is going to be linked down in the description. Okay, so with that being said, let's move right onto the next step. This step is going to be the only really important step for print on demand that you have to pay attention to because it is about copyrights and trademarks. So for those of you who are not familiar with copyrights and trademarks, it basically means that someone, whether that's a person or a company, can only writes to a specific phrase or a specific image on T-shirts. So if you use that phrase and you try to sell it on let's say Amazon for print on demand, they have the rights to tell Amazon to take down your design because they own the rights to sell it. No one else can make money from it. So I'll show you how to quickly check these phrases to make sure that they are not owned by other people and that you are free and clear to use them to sell on your print on demand shirts. So just go back over to Merch Informer, whether you have a free trial or however you're using this, you will still have full access to this feature as well. So if you go over to trademarks and you go to trademark alerts, you can copy and paste all of the phrases that you wanna check at once. You can hit save and check trademarks, and it will check all of them instantly and you will know right away if you can use them or if someone else owns them. So I'll show you exactly how to do this. So let's just copy some of these phrases that we want to use. I'm just going to copy, we'll go back over here, paste it, hit Enter. I'm gonna copy this one, and we'll get a couple more. Okay, so in this list right here, I've pasted six different phrases that I pulled from that list that I want to use. Let's just click Save, and then scroll down here a little bit and click Check trademarks. Now a little popup will come up and say, "We're checking your data. Please allow a few minutes for results." So if you scroll down here, it's still going to say, Not checked yet. All you have to do is refresh your page, and you're going to either green check marks, meaning yes, you are totally okay to use that, nobody else owns it, or you're going to get Red Xs. If you get a red X next to any one of these phrases, do not use that for print on demand because once you upload that and sell it on the marketplace, you are setting yourself up to get a copyright or trademark infringement strike and your design's going to get taken down. Now, a quick note to say that some of the print on demand marketplaces really pay attention to this. So if you get too many of those copyright strikes and get your design taken down, they will just close your entire account. So just make sure that you are paying attention to this step. I know we're not spending too much time in this tutorial on it, but I really do wanna stress that this step is super important. Okay, so just like that, we have six phrases that we can use related to sportbikes. All of them are free and clear to use. Nobody owns the trademark to them. So now we can take these phrases and we can start creating the actual T-shirt designs with them. So when I started out and print on demand, I was creating all of my designs by hand, and back then, I really had no graphic design experience, so the designs were not very good. What I have learned over the years is that there are websites that have T-shirt design templates. So they're templates made by professional graphic designers that you can come in and you can change everything and customize them with these specific phrases that you want to put into that template. So coming into this next step of actually creating these designs, this is the specific T-shirt design tool that I personally use. It's called placeit.net. And although I've used just about every other design tool out there, this is the one that I keep coming back to. Placeit has the largest library of designs, and secondly, probably even more important, everything on their website is 100% copyright-free. So as we were just talking about where you have to check the phrases to make sure that nobody owns the rights to it, well, the same thing for the graphics or the fonts that are actually going into the designs. So most of the other tools out there that have customizable T-shirt templates are not 100% copyright-free. So you may create a really good design, but once you upload it to a print on demand website, it may get taken down later and you get a strike on your account because somebody owns the graphic that you used in that design, or somebody owns even the font of the text that was in that design. This again is going to be a paid tool. It's about $10 per month, and they have unlimited downloads. So you can create as many designs as you want, all included for that one price per month. Now two things that are super important on their pricing. This $9.99 per month is actually for their annual plan. This is how much it would break down to on a monthly basis. They do offer a month to month plan, so you can just have one month at a time. I believe it's about $15 per month. And I have a personal coupon code from them that I'll put down in the description. It gives you 15% off either one of those plans. Now I just wanted to make sure I was taking a second to clarify that, 'cause I wanna make sure I'm being super transparent in all of these tools, how much they cost, and why I use them. Because I know when you're starting a business, you're trying to make money and not spend money. So I just wanted to properly justify why I use these tools and why I see so much value in them. So let me go ahead and get logged into my account and then I'll show you how to create these designs. Okay, so now that you are logged in, come back over to Merch Informer. These are all of the designs that we're going to create right now. So these are all about sportbikes and motorcycles. So I'm going to come back over to Placeit, and I'm just going to type in motorcycles and hit Enter. And then this is going to give you everything that they have on motorcycles. You're going to have both mockups, which is pretty cool. So once you do create a design, you can have that kind of photoshopped onto a real person, so if you wanna post on social media or anything, but what we are focused on is these actual T-shirt design templates. So the quickest way to sort this over here is go over to the left side and go to T-shirt designs. And these are all going to be customizable T-shirt designs that you can use that are specifically related to motorcycles already. So let's go back over to Merch Informer and let's pick the one that we want to start with. I love this one right here, Born to Race, Forced to Work. So I'm just going to copy this. We'll go back over to Placeit, and let's see which template we wanna use to put this into. So all of these are really going to work here. I like this one right here. Let's just click on this. And this is going to bring us into their editor. So all of our changes are going to come on the left side over here. And then on the right side is more or less just suggestions of similar other templates, things that you could just quickly click on and create a second design. So over on this left side, these three text boxes right here are going to correspond to text that's on the screen. So this text right here, you can move it around, you can make it bigger and smaller. You can click undo if you want to undo something as many times as you want to, or if you want to just bring everything back to how it started, if you got things way out of whack, you can hit Reset Layout right here. Now, the way to actually change this text. If you double click in here, it's not going to do anything. So you come over to the left side, each one of these text boxes is going to correspond to the text that's on the design. So I'm just going to paste in our phrase over here, and I think it actually looks better when it's fully capitalized. And then I'm going to split this onto two different lines. So I'm going to put Born to Race, and then Forced to Work underneath of it. Born to Race, and then down here, Forced to Work. So here is our text right here. I'm just going to slide it to the middle. Once you hit the center, you're going to get that pink line. That means it is snapped directly to center. Just make sure that both of these are snapped to the center. And then if you can remember back a couple steps, the sub-niche that all these were about is sportbikes. So that's what this design needs to be geared towards. So Born to Race, Forced to Work doesn't actually mention sportbikes. So that's where the graphic is going to come in. So this graphic right here, again, if you click on it, it's not going to do anything. Come over to the left side. Right here is a little edit button. If you click on that, it's going to open up their entire graphics library. As I had mentioned, all of their graphics, all of their fonts, they're all copyright-free. So you can freely just click on these and it will sub it into your design. And you know that you have the rights to use this graphic. Nobody else owns it. So this is technically a sportbike. This is another sportbike right here. That looks like a better one to me, so I'm just going to drag that down and put that to the center. And then pretty much, we've just created a design right here, but I'll show you how to spruce it up a little bit. So if you go to edit, you can change the colors of this graphic. So if you didn't want a blue, but instead you wanted a green, you can just click that. It's going to change the colors right there. Again, you can just hit back if you want to go back. And then the other customization comes from the font here. So if you want to change the color or the type of font, you just click over here and this is going to be that first box, Born to Race. Just click on the font and you're going to go to suggested. All of these are going to be fonts that you can use where you have the rights to use them. If you just click on any of these, it will switch it instantly for you and you can just make sure that that is put to the center. If you don't like it, just hit back. Then if you want to change the color, just hit the little color box right here. You can change the color of your font to anything. So with that being said, our design is pretty much ready to go here. We use that first phrase, we got our graphic, all this we have rights to use. A couple more steps here that are important. Let's drag this to the top, which if you can imagine is kind of the chest area of the shirt. And then we'll take our text, and we'll go up to the top as well. Now, there's only one more step we need to do before we actually download this. And as you can see, this has a yellow background. If you were to download this as is and upload it to a print on demand website, it would print on the shirt with the yellow background. So just come over to background color, go to the little checkerboard down here. This is going to give you a transparent background. Not all graphic design tools are going to have a feature where you can just easily take out the background. Placeit makes it super easy for us. So from here, all we have to do is click Download. Just give this a second to load. It's going to say Processing your design. And then once it's ready, it'll say, Click here to download, and you'll get a pop-up here that says, what do you want to name this download? And where do you want it to save to? So right now it's going to save to my downloads folder, and I want to name this what the shirt is called, which I have saved to my clipboard still. So this is going to be Born to Race Forced to Work. I'm just going to take the comma out of that. And this is how I'm going to know in my files what this design is without even opening it. Just go ahead and click Save. And just like that, we have our first design made. So as you can see, it has no background, has a transparent background. When you zoom in here, you can see that the quality of this design, the pixels is perfect for print on demand. It's not going to be blurry when it's printed on the shirt. Now the idea from here is to go back to Placeit, go back over to Merch Informer, and now we're going to do the same thing for the next phrases. So we'll copy this, we'll go back over to Placeit. I'm going to type motorcycles again. We'll go to T-shirt designs. And now I'm just going to pick a different template that I wanna use for this next one. Now real quick, I wanna show you something super cool. So if I click in on this template right here, yes, we've got all of these phrases that we know are safe to use right here, but you can't really scale these. Each one of these you have to do one by one. So the list of the universal bestselling phrases I was talking about that you can buy down in the description, an example of one of those that I'll give to you for free in this video is "Easily Distracted By". And then you type in what that sub-niche is. So if you go back to our list up here, you don't even have to come up with different ideas about sportbikes. You can use all of these right here. It saves you that whole extra layer of research. So if you just say sportbikes, cruisers, touring bikes, and then you go over to Placeit and you say sportbikes, and then you just go to their library, find a photo of a sportbike, which would be this one right here. Let's just take out this bottom text right here. We'll just click hide, format this properly, "Easily Distracted By Sportbikes". Boom, that's how easy it is to use this universal phrase. So then to create more of these, you would then do dirt bikes or whatever type of bike was next. Put that to the center, come over here, find a dirt bike, and you click on that one. Now you've just made two designs. So it's just a different way to do it. This is the way that I prefer to do it because you can really scale this, you can create the designs much faster and you can use the same template just by swapping out the graphic and what that sub-niche is. Now, something else that I'll say while we're on this topic just before we move on is that you can search for anything in their library. So if you typed in horses, for example, all of these are going to be different types of horses. So you have seahorses, you have graphics of different types of horses, people playing polo on horses. So no matter what type of overall niche you're going into, you can use this same concept of just swapping out the graphic, swapping out the name of the sub-niche, back and forth, back and forth. I just thought that was worth noting for a second here, just so you knew the difference between the universal phrases and coming up with your own ones on ChatGPT. Okay, so first off, we're almost to the end here. You've made it so far in this tutorial. We are just at the logistical stage here of actually uploading the designs that you've created up to the print on demand website so they can actually be sold. The first thing that I wanna say before we go through actually uploading these designs is which websites to upload these designs to. Now there are quite a few big print on demand websites that you could upload to. Not all of them should really be treated equally because not all of them get as many sales as each other. In my experience, there are three specific print on demand websites that I would focus on that are going to get the vast majority of sales. The first of these websites is Amazon themselves. As we talked about Amazon Merch On Demand is the actual print on demand department. So if you go over to Google and you search Amazon Merch on Demand, this is their actual signup page right here. So you just click the signup button. A quick note on Amazon Merch on Demand. They are the only one that actually has an application where you have to apply and wait to see if they approve you as a print on demand seller. I will put a link to a full video on this channel that walks you through the whole application and gives you my pointers along the way, to give you the best odds of getting accepted. However, the other two websites that I recommend uploading to that you can start on right away, first is Redbubble. Redbubble is going to be the same kind of marketplace. So if you type in fishing shirts, these are all going to be print on demand shirts and this is kind of their marketplace. So it looks just like Amazon, and each one of these designs is just uploaded by someone. And then once the order goes through, Redbubble does all the printing, the shipping, the customer service, just like we talked about on Amazon. So Redbubble is the second one. You can sign up and start there right away today. The third one is called TeePublic. TeePublic is actually owned by Redbubble. They were purchased a couple years ago. So it's the same exact concept here. You type in fishing shirts, this is what their marketplace looks like. So when you look at any of these, it's going to be the same concept. They do the printing, the shipping, all of that for us. Now the super important thing to know about this is that all of these websites are non-exclusive. So as I briefly mentioned before, you can create one design and you can upload it to all three of these websites. All three of them are entirely free to use. You're never going to get a bill from them. You are just going to have your profits from every sale added to your account. The other thing that is extremely important to know before I show you how to actually upload and create your listing here is that on these three websites, when someone places an order, you are not going to be charged for that order. On some other print on demand websites out there, whenever customer places an order, you have to pay for that order upfront, the cost of the goods for that to be printed and shipped to them. And then afterwards, you get your full amount of money with the profit. On these three websites, the customer pays for the order in full upfront. So we are only getting our split of the profit afterwards. We don't have to actually front the money every time we get a sale. All right, so without further ado, let me show you how to actually upload a design here. I'll walk you through it step by step. It only takes a couple minutes, and you have a listing live on these websites. So let's go back to the homepage of TeePublic. TeePublic I think is just the easiest to get started on. Their upload interface is super easy. So if you're just getting started as a beginner, this is the one that I would kind of get the feel for it on. And these same principles apply for the other websites as well. So just come up to the top right corner and say, create an account. Just type in your first name, last name, email address, country, and set a password. And then you have this little toggle switch here that says, "Yes, I'd like to advertise my products and offsite marketing." By default, it is going to be on. I would recommend leaving this on. What their offsite marketing is, is they do email marketing, they do display advertising. They're going to take your listing and show it to other people on the internet totally for free for you. The reason they're able to do this for free is because they get a split of the profit as well. So if your design is really selling well, they're going to wanna show it to as many people as possible and get as many sales because it's making them money as well. This is something that these print on demand websites do for us that is so much easier than trying to run ads yourself. So in short, I would just leave this on by default. If you ever do wanna turn this off later, you can turn it off. I just want you to be aware of that. So once you filled that out, just go ahead and hit Create My Account. And then it's going to send you a verification email to just make sure that that is a legitimate email address. So just check your email real quick and click verify. And then once you verify that, go back to create an account and just go to log in this time. Now sign in with your email and your password. And now just like that, that button switches from Create an Account to Sell Your Art. So go ahead and just click that button, Sell Your Art up here. And it's just going to ask you do you have a single file to upload or do you have multiple files to upload? If we had gone through and we created a bunch of designs and downloaded them from Placeit, we could do multi-file upload. It just makes it a lot faster. But for this instance, let's just do single file upload 'cause we just have one that we've created so far. And the first time around, it's going to ask you, what do you want to name your store? Now something that's important to know about the store is you can name it anything that you want. It can be super general. It doesn't have to be specific about any niches. Back in the day, these stores were really important and it was best practice to have niche specific storefronts. However, now that the models of print on demand have kind of changed over the years, your designs will be listed individually on the marketplaces in those niches or sub-niches that they are created about. So the actual store doesn't get found by people very often. So you can name it something that is more general or something about you. It really is not all that important. The only couple tips here are to make sure that the name is not the name of another company to avoid any trademark issues. And secondly, make sure that it's not vulgar or gruesome or something that would turn someone away from purchasing from you because of the name of your store. So I'm just going to come up with a general name here, GGTees2. So it says this store name is available. Perfect. Take me to the uploader. So now just click on this little icon right here and allow you to pick the file off your computer that we downloaded from Placeit. So just give this a second to upload here. And here is our file. You can see Born to Race, Forced to Work, it has a transparent background, that's why you can see the checkerboard. Everything is perfect here. As you scroll down here, a couple things to note. You're going to get this little message right here that says, "Your image isn't large enough to support our wall art options." This is talking about big canvas wall arts. We are only printing this design on T-shirts, so it's only going to print about that big, not a massive wall art. So we can disregard this message and just keep scrolling down here. And once you come down here, this is where we're going to do pretty much our editing here. It only really takes a couple minutes to go through here, but once you know the formats for each one of these boxes, you'll be able to do this on every design that you're uploading and you'll start to get a really fast pace at doing this. So the first things first is your designs title. So what I recommend doing for your title is to take whatever is on that shirt, Born to Race, Forced to Work, and start with that. So Born to Race, Forced to Work, and then put in what that sub-niche is. So this is for sportbikes. Now a little caveat that comes from experience here is on TeePublic, they're going to add in whatever that article of clothing is at the end. So we don't need to type in the T-shirt because they are going to add that for us. So we'll leave that blank, and we'll just finish it as sportbike. I know that's a little bit confusing, but I'll show you in a second here what I mean by that so it all makes sense. So then coming down in the description, just go ahead and copy this. This is the most efficient way that I found to do this. And then paste it down here and put in the front. "This Born to Race, Forced to Work T-shirt is perfect for those who love sportbikes." Now, depending on what your phrase is and what your sub-niche is, you may have to get a little bit creative and swap out a couple words. But generally what we've just done is all you need to do for your description and just make sure that it makes sense. Again, keep in mind on the description here, most of the print on demand T-shirts are going to be purchased as gifts for other people. So when you're saying this shirt is perfect for those who love whatever the sub-niche is, it's going to make sense to the person who's making that purchase. Okay, then coming over to the right side, we have our main tag. This, instead of using the sub-niche, which is sportbikes, you wanna use the overall niche, which is motorcycles. Now what this is going to do is get you in front of all of the people that are searching for motorcycles, which is a much larger overall niche. And then down here in supporting tags, this is where we can put in sportbikes. Now, if you have any other supporting tags that are related to that niche or that sub-niche, you can type them all in here. Just be sure to put comma in between them, and that will save that as a supporting tag. Okay, moving right along here. Does this design contain any mature content? Just hit no here. Yes, technically you can create mature content and sell that on print on demand websites. I don't personally recommend it. I think it just opens you up to a bunch of issues. So I would just create designs like the ones that we've created here. Now the thing that we've kind of skipped over here is the albums. This is kind of creating your own storefronts. I haven't personally seen that this is necessary to do. I find that the designs just get listed on the marketplaces individually. You can play around with this feature and kind of create niche specific storefronts. I just think that this is kind of old news that used to work really well back in the day. I don't think you need to do it anymore. But as you scroll down here, this is where you're going to have the different options for what types of items are going to be available for someone to purchase. Now remember, anything that you turn on here will be available to purchase, but it doesn't cost you anything extra because none of these items are actually printed yet. So just go through here and make sure that all of these different items make sense for what your design is. So if your design is something about a dad, you wouldn't necessarily wanna offer that on a women's shirt or if it's something that would not apply to kids, you wanna make sure that for kids, it's not going to be turned on. Now this brings us into the next step, which is actually choosing the default color. So when someone comes to that listing, as we saw over here and you click on one of these, what is the first color that's going to show? Is that black, is it blue, is it gray? That is what we are setting right here. So for these default colors, you can really pick any color you want. Just make sure that you're not picking a color that hides the text. So as you can see this asphalt color with the dark gray text, you can't read it. So I wouldn't be picking that color. But scroll through here and see if you can find a color that you really like. If you can't find something that looks exceptionally good to you, you can just go with white. Or if the font is white, then you can go with a black. But just go through here and select the default color for all of these. And then once all of those are set, keep scrolling down here. And this is going to bring us into a rather important part here. So as I was just talking about, you don't want dark text on a dark shirt because you can't read it. Well, this is overall not just the default color that's going to show first, but the other colors that someone who's coming in could actually purchase that design on. So just scroll through these and kinda hover over them. Make sure that you can read everything that's on these. So if it gets too close where it's too hard to read that, you can uncheck that, and I'll show you an example of that once we get to it. Like that one might be a little bit too close to read, so I'm just going to uncheck it. Now, this is good practice to do so that none of the customers that order this receive it and they realize that they can't read it and they want to return it. Although us as these sellers are not going to have to deal with that return or the exchange because the company handles it for us, it just makes it easier for everyone by spending the extra second to just remove anything that could potentially be an issue. So now that you've done this, now let's keep scrolling down. This is going to be what other products would you potentially like to offer as well. So this brings us all the way back to in the beginning of the video when I said in most cases, print on-demand businesses are focused on T-shirts specifically. That is because although you can have magnets and pins and tapestries, all of that available for sale, in the vast majority of cases, people are just coming in to buy a T-shirt. Now, in addition to that, if you were to click on any of these, you can see that the design doesn't always fit just right. So you have to come in, you have to play with this and make sure that it fits just right. It's in the right place. And in my opinion, if you have to spend so much time to try to format this and make sure that it's perfect for the person who's buying it, and ultimately these items aren't going to make up many of the sales anyways, I don't spend the time formatting any of these. What I end up doing is just turn all of these off and I focus just on the T-shirts. That way, when I'm coming through here, I don't have to spend any time editing all of these different ones. Making sure that in the perfect spot. So that's what I recommend doing. It makes it super efficient. And then you just scroll down and you just have to click, "I have read and agree to the terms." Then you just click Publish. Now if you've made it this far in this tutorial, you are officially a print on demand seller. This is a live listing that someone can come in, they can pick the color of the shirt, they can pick male, female, what type of shirt they want it printed on, the size, and they can add it right to their cart. And now you would take the same listing with the same title description and upload that to Redbubble and then Amazon Merch On Demand. Then you've got one design in three different places. You'll get sales from all three of those marketplaces. Now, as you can see, what I was talking about in the last step, they added T-shirt to the end of this. We ended it at sportbike, but they put T-shirt at the end because a T-shirt is selected. This makes it for them so that if someone comes down here and they say, I want it printed on a hoodie or a tank top, they can just automatically switch that to hoodie or tank top, and our original title stays the same. Now our description is right down here. Our main tag is just above it, telling people what it's about, and then our little store name is over to the right, right here. As I was saying, it's not all that important because not many people are going to see this. This is the only place that people will see our actual storefront name. So if they click on that, they can see all of the designs that we've created. So a couple really important rapid fire things to know here is that TeePublic, you don't actually set the price yourself. They are pretty unique where they set their own pricing for you because they run their sales. So like right now, this shirt is 27% off. They're doing all of their own sales, they're managing it all for us just to encourage people to make purchases. On the other websites, you do get to set the price yourself, so you get to see as you're creating that listing, what the profit margin would be. Now, generally speaking, when you sell a T-shirt, the profit margin is somewhere between 2 and $5. Now, on some of these other items like a hoodie, they sell for $32, they're much more expensive, so your profit margin goes up with that. So it can be anywhere from 10 to $20 when you sell a hoodie. Now, I should also mention too, that that is the actual amount that you get to keep. That is the net profit that gets added into your account. Now, a question that I get all the time is, how do I do marketing on this design? And something that I will say that I've learned from literally years of doing this is that you do not need to do any marketing. Although you could make a social media account, you could run paid advertising and try to send that traffic to these listings. I've done all of that over the years, and although it does work, in my experience, it's not worth all that effort to do that. I would instead suggest spending that same time and effort to create more designs and upload them to these marketplaces. The real secret sauce in all of this is finding those sub-niches that are not oversaturated already. Now, the last thing I'll leave you with in this video is the next steps going forward. So if you've watched this whole tutorial and you followed along, you know every step to run a successful print on demand business. Now all you have to do is just reads and repeat the last few steps of finding those niches, creating the designs, and uploading them. That's it, from there, to grow this business, you don't have to worry about shipping, customer service, marketing, none of that. The more designs that you can get uploaded to these big print on demand websites, essentially the larger your business is going to grow. So guys, again, if you enjoyed this video, please just give it a thumbs up. All of the discount codes, all of the links to the resources we use throughout this video are all going to be down in the description. As always, if you have any questions at all, just let me know down in the comments, and I would be happy to help you out. Otherwise, I'll be seeing you guys in the next video.

Hey, everyone, welcome
back to another video. In today's video, I'm going to give you a full print on demand
tutorial for beginners. This video is going to walk you through everything from the idea that you want to start print on demand, all the way to getting your first sales and everything in between step by step. Now, in order to make this
video as helpful as possible, I'm even going to put
you on screen recording and walk you through everything
really click by click and show you real examples
so this all makes sense. Now, for those of you
who know my video style, this video is going to be
equivalent to a full paid course, but it's going to be here on
YouTube entirely for free. So all I ask is if you
do enjoy this video, please just give it a thumbs up and let me know down in the comments. Okay, so the first thing we need to cover is what is print on demand, and specifically what is a
print on demand business? So in the vast majority of cases, when you hear someone online talking about a print on demand business, what they're talking about is a print on demand T-shirt business. Now, although you can do print on demand with many other products, the most sales are going to
come from T-shirts specifically. It's just kind of how the market works. So this tutorial and
what I recommend to you is all going to focus on a print
on demand T-shirt business. So let's start on Amazon. So if you didn't know, Amazon is the largest print
on demand platform out there. Most people didn't even know that you could do print
on demand on Amazon. But to show you what this looks like, if you search for something
like funny Father's Day shirts and you scroll down here, I can tell that all of these
are done with print on demand. And I'll show you in a second
here why I can tell that. But I'm looking for the
designs that are on T-shirts, just a regular T-shirt,
not a performance shirt or anything like this. And then it has a design that looks like somebody
created it themselves. It's not a company logo or anything, it's just kind of a funny shirt. Generally that works the best for a print on demand business. So if you click in on one of these, the dad giveaway that it is in fact done with print on demand is this
little label right here. It says Amazon Merch on Demand. That is Amazon's print
on demand department. So anytime there's a listing done with print on demand on Amazon, it's going to have that
little label right here. But essentially the way that a print on demand business
works is that the seller, let's say you or me, just
created this design right here and they uploaded it to Amazon, which created the virtual listing here. And the way that you can
tell it's a virtual listing is because once you hover
over any other color, the T-shirt, the actual
mockup stays the same, and the design stays the same. It's just showing what it would look like if it was printed on these
different color shirts. And then the person that comes in here and wants to buy this can pick what color shirt they want it printed on. If they want it on a
men's or a woman's shirt, then they can scroll down here and they can pick what size
they want that printed on, and then they can add
it right to their cart and they can purchase it through Amazon. Now, what's going to
happen behind the scenes and what brings this whole
print on demand business to life is that once Amazon receives this order, they are going to go pick a men's shirt in navy blue color in a large size, and they're going to print
this exact design on it and they're going to ship
it out to the customer. And if there's any returns, exchanges, or customer service, Amazon
handles all of that for us. We as the print on demand seller, just get a split of the overall profit added into our account. That is what a print on demand
T-shirt business looks like. So the idea here as a
print on demand seller is you want to up with as
many good T-shirt design ideas as you can and upload them to
big print on demand websites like Amazon, and then as people find them and purchase them, those
websites do all the printing, the shipping, the customer service, and we just get our split of the profit. Now the last thing I'll say
before moving on from here is that there are multiple
other print on demand websites that you can use, and
they're not exclusive too. So you can create one
design like this one here, and you can upload it to Amazon, you can upload it to several other print on-demand marketplaces, all getting their own traffic
and getting their own sales. Once we get later on in this video, I'll share the top websites
that actually get the most sales out of all of the websites
that I've used over the years. So if you're just going to focus on a couple different websites, those ones will get you the most sales. Okay, so hopefully now that
we are on the same page as to what print on demand is and what it looks like in real life, now let's actually get into this tutorial. So the very first step
here is we need to come up with different ideas to
create designs about. This is a huge part of the business and knowing how to come up with good ideas that are actually going to sell
is worth its weight in gold. So what most people do
is they just go on Amazon and they just come up
with different ideas, they search them, and they see
if other people have designs, and then they either copy them or they create similar designs. And a huge piece of
advice that I can give you is don't approach coming up with your T-shirt design ideas this way. This is really just coming
up with random ideas and hoping that they sell. Now that more people know
about print on demand, you have to be strategic
in how you're coming up with your print on demand design ideas. So with that being said, I'll
show you my personal strategy on how I come up with design ideas and how I know that they're
actually going to get sales. So let's switch over to that now, and I'll walk you through it. So if you go over to a
website called ChatGPT, and by the way, I'll put
links to this website and all the other websites
throughout this tutorial down in the description just
so you can easily find them. You don't have to go find them on Google. But what ChatGPT is, is a free
artificial intelligence tool. So really down at the bottom
it says Message ChatGPT. You can type in anything, and basically treat it
as a virtual assistant. It's essentially going
to go over to Google and the other search engines, gather all of the information
that you are looking for and give you a clean concise answer. So for as long as ChatGPT is free to use, which it currently is, I
highly recommend using it. There are several different stages. We're going to use this
throughout this tutorial. If for some reason ChatGPT
is not free anymore to use, you can technically do
all of this on Google. It's just not going to be
as quick or as efficient. So with that in mind, this first stage here is we
want to ask ChatGPT for a list of different hobbies or occupations. In my experience of years
of doing print on demand, the most sales are going to
come from hobby related shirts or occupation related shirts. So let's start off with
a list of 20 hobbies. That's all you have to type in. And then just hit Enter. And this is literally just
going to write you out a list of 20 hobbies. Now to give you an example here, once this finishes here, we have 20 of these hobbies we could use. If you did 20 occupations, it's going to do these
same thing as hobbies, and it's just going to give you different ideas for occupations. So a really big tip I can give you is that most of these shirts are going to be purchased as gifts. Now keep that in mind, as you are looking at
these different ideas. So would be purchased for
someone who likes gardening. It's most likely not actually
going to be purchased by someone who's doing
gardening themselves, but they know someone who does gardening and they really like it and
they want to get them a gift. So that kind of changes
your mindset a little bit and just keep that in mind as we're going through
this whole tutorial. So something else that's really
going to help you is that, if you type in 20 hobbies
and I type in 20 hobbies, we may get the same list here. It's just how ChatGPT works. So a really good pointer for you is to start to get creative
with your searches. So instead of just 20 hobbies,
type in 20 men's hobbies or 20 women's hobbies or 20 kids' hobbies. The more creative you
can get here, the better. So you can do outdoor
hobbies, indoor hobbies, introverted hobbies, extroverted hobbies. This is where your own creativity is just going to give you
better and better results. Okay, so now we've got
this list right here, and this is a good
starting point for ideas. So what most new print on
demand sellers would do at this stage and what's going
to set you apart from them is most new sellers
would just come in here and they would pick one of these hobbies and start creating designs about them. This single tip is going to help you a ton as you start your business. This is something I learned
from years of doing this, is that these big general overall hobbies are what you should just
consider already full. These should be considered
oversaturated, over competitive, and very hard for you as a new seller to actually compete in. Instead of just going into
one of these overall niches, take, let's say motorcycle riding, and we're going to break
that down into sub-niches within motorcycle riding. This one little tip here is worth so much because it's going to
change all of your searches to give you the actual niches and ideas that you can compete in because not many other people
are creating designs in. So to show you what this looks like, let's take motorcycle riding, for example. I'm going to now search
20 types of motorcycles. Now this will break
down this overall niche into different sub-niches that
we can create designs about. So when you look at these,
you have a chopper motorcycle, a bobber motorcycle, a cafe
racer motorcycle, sportbike. All of these are different sub-niches within the overall niche of motorcycles that you can create designs in. And you are far more likely to
be landing on the first page of the marketplace because
they're not overly saturated. Okay, so we're moving right along here. This tutorial's about to
start to get even cooler here. I have some really cool things to show you that I'm excited about, but just know that what
you've done already is putting you ahead of
most print on demand sellers because you're breaking it down into these really good niches. So although these are overall
going to be way better niches than creating on these
more general niches, there is a way that you can
actually cross reference the marketplaces and
see just how profitable those niches are, especially for a new
print on demand seller. So this brings us into the next tool here. This one is called Merch Informer. If you've seen my other
videos on this channel, I have been using Merch
Informer for years now. They are a staple in my
print on demand process. So right off the bat, I do wanna say that Merch
Informer is a paid tool. If you look at their pricing, they are about $9.99 per month. You only really need the newbie plan, but they do have a professional plan. And two important things
that are worth knowing here is that I have a 20% off coupon. So it brings us down
to about $8 per month. I will put that link down
in the description below. And secondly, they offer
a three-day free trial. So for the purposes of this tutorial, you can do everything that
we are going to talk about and we are going to do on a free trial, so you don't even have to pay to use it. So I'll get logged into my account and I'll show you this next step here. Okay, so once you are
logged into Merch Informer, they have all these
tools down the left side. They basically all open up and they give you more
tools that you can use. What we are going to be using
for this stage in the process is the competition checker. So if you just click in on this, you can literally type
in what the niche is or the sub-niche is and hit Search, and it's going to give you
an analysis of that niche and tell you how likely
you are to get sales if you create designs in it. So let's go back to our list over here, and we have all of these
different sub-niches. So what I would be doing is coming in here in each one of these,
I'm just going to copy. And then we'll come over here. We're going to paste it and
then we're going to search. So just like that, you have
instant results telling you everything you need to
know about this niche. So basically over on the right side, it's going to give you a letter grade. So it works just like in school,
you get an A through an F. So an F means that it is
just wildly oversaturated and A means that it is a
really good opportunity. So when I am doing this, I am copying, pasting, copying, pasting, and I'm searching all these
just looking at the letter. If I get an A, B, or even a C, that is a niche that
I am going to go into. If I get an F, I know that that niche is just
going to be too saturated. So right off the bat, we have one sub-niche
that gets an A score. This is a sub-niche that
is wide open to go into. When we come back to our list, you can just keep copying pasting these. A good little tip here to know is that, if we copy something like cruiser and we go over here
and we go to search it, cruiser is just going to
give you a very general term. It's not going to know that we're talking about
cruiser motorcycles. So just add on a motorcycle
to the end of this and then search it. But as you can see, just like that, two out of two are both A scores. Just to show you why these
sub-niches are so valuable. If you were to type in
something like motorcycle, the general overall niche, you are going to see exactly
what I've been explaining here. This gets an F score because there are just
so many different designs out there for motorcycles. That big overall niche is
just very oversaturated. There's so many people
creating designs in it. Now, keep in mind here that this applies to all of these niches as well. So if you were to type in
something like fishing, you're probably going to get these same F. But if you go over here
and you break down 20 types of fishing and you start to
type in those sub-niches, you're probably going to
start getting all A's. So now that you know how
to find these sub-niches and go over to Merch Informer and make sure that they
are good niches to go into, now it's time to actually
come up with the phrases that are going to go on those designs. So when it comes to print on demand, the designs are pretty much
broken up into two categories. You have text only designs. These are like the ones that
we saw in the beginning, just like these. And then you have text
and graphic designs. So if we go over to that fishing niche, you've got text and graphics. These are pretty much the two categories that I would focus on for print on demand. A lot of people ask me, "Can
you create just graphics or can you upload photos
for print on demand?" And yes, technically you can, but I would say the vast majority of sales are going to come from
these two categories. But now I'll walk you through how to actually come
up with these phrases. So now that we know that
sportbike got an A rating, cruiser got an A rating on Merch Informer, I'm going to start with
these two right here. So there's two strategies to do this. First, I'm going to show
you just staying on ChatGPT. This is a totally free way to do this, and you can come up with some
really good design ideas. So I'm going to say 20 T-shirt
ideas about sportbikes. And just let ChatGPT
write these out for you. Now, not all of these are going to work. Some of them aren't
going to make much sense, but you can absolutely
pull some really good ideas out of this list. So you've got "Eat, Sleep, Ride, Repeat: Sportbike Lifestyle." "Born to Race, Forced to Work." "Keep Calm and Twist the Throttle." "Fuelled by Coffee and Sportbike Dreams." So you can modify that to just "Fuelled by Coffee and Sportbikes." You can see that there are
really good ideas here, and it only takes a second
to get a list of 20. So that is the first way you
can absolutely use ChatGPT to just come up with ideas for you. I'll show you what to do
with these in the next step. But I did wanna talk about the second way of coming up with design ideas. This is going to be a plug for something that I actually offer myself. I've put together pretty
much for the first time ever, a list of the best selling phrases that you can use for just about any niche. These are universal templates that you can apply
whatever the sub-niche is. So you could use it for all of these different
types of motorcycles. You could use it for all
different types of fishing. Once you find those sub-niches, it's more or less just plug
and play into these templates. So for those of you who
want to go that route and just have proven universal templates, you already know how to
find these sub-niches, that is going to be linked
down in the description. Okay, so with that being said, let's move right onto the next step. This step is going to be the
only really important step for print on demand that
you have to pay attention to because it is about
copyrights and trademarks. So for those of you who are not familiar with copyrights and trademarks, it basically means that someone, whether that's a person or a company, can only writes to a specific phrase or a specific image on T-shirts. So if you use that phrase and you try to sell it on let's say Amazon for print on demand, they have the rights to tell
Amazon to take down your design because they own the rights to sell it. No one else can make money from it. So I'll show you how to
quickly check these phrases to make sure that they are
not owned by other people and that you are free
and clear to use them to sell on your print on demand shirts. So just go back over to Merch Informer, whether you have a free trial
or however you're using this, you will still have full
access to this feature as well. So if you go over to trademarks and you go to trademark alerts, you can copy and paste all of the phrases that you wanna check at once. You can hit save and check trademarks, and it will check all of them instantly and you will know right
away if you can use them or if someone else owns them. So I'll show you exactly how to do this. So let's just copy some of these phrases that we want to use. I'm just going to copy, we'll go back over here,
paste it, hit Enter. I'm gonna copy this one,
and we'll get a couple more. Okay, so in this list right here, I've pasted six different phrases that I pulled from that
list that I want to use. Let's just click Save, and then scroll down here a little bit and click Check trademarks. Now a little popup will come up and say, "We're checking your data. Please allow a few minutes for results." So if you scroll down here, it's still going to say, Not checked yet. All you have to do is refresh your page, and you're going to
either green check marks, meaning yes, you are
totally okay to use that, nobody else owns it, or
you're going to get Red Xs. If you get a red X next to
any one of these phrases, do not use that for print on demand because once you upload that and sell it on the marketplace,
you are setting yourself up to get a copyright or
trademark infringement strike and your design's going to get taken down. Now, a quick note to say that some of the print
on demand marketplaces really pay attention to this. So if you get too many of
those copyright strikes and get your design taken down, they will just close your entire account. So just make sure that you are paying
attention to this step. I know we're not spending too much time in this tutorial on it, but I really do wanna stress that this step is super important. Okay, so just like that, we have six phrases that we
can use related to sportbikes. All of them are free and clear to use. Nobody owns the trademark to them. So now we can take these phrases and we can start creating the actual T-shirt designs with them. So when I started out and print on demand, I was creating all of my designs by hand, and back then, I really had
no graphic design experience, so the designs were not very good. What I have learned over the years is that there are websites that have T-shirt design templates. So they're templates made by
professional graphic designers that you can come in and
you can change everything and customize them with
these specific phrases that you want to put into that template. So coming into this next step of actually creating these designs, this is the specific T-shirt design tool that I personally use. It's called placeit.net. And although I've used just about every other
design tool out there, this is the one that
I keep coming back to. Placeit has the largest
library of designs, and secondly, probably
even more important, everything on their website
is 100% copyright-free. So as we were just talking about where you have to check the phrases to make sure that nobody
owns the rights to it, well, the same thing for
the graphics or the fonts that are actually going into the designs. So most of the other tools out there that have customizable T-shirt templates are not 100% copyright-free. So you may create a really good design, but once you upload it to
a print on demand website, it may get taken down later and you get a strike on your account because somebody owns the graphic that you used in that design, or somebody owns even the font of the text that was in that design. This again is going to be a paid tool. It's about $10 per month, and
they have unlimited downloads. So you can create as
many designs as you want, all included for that one price per month. Now two things that are super
important on their pricing. This $9.99 per month is
actually for their annual plan. This is how much it would break
down to on a monthly basis. They do offer a month to month plan, so you can just have one month at a time. I believe it's about $15 per month. And I have a personal
coupon code from them that I'll put down in the description. It gives you 15% off
either one of those plans. Now I just wanted to make
sure I was taking a second to clarify that, 'cause I wanna make sure
I'm being super transparent in all of these tools, how much they cost, and why I use them. Because I know when you're
starting a business, you're trying to make
money and not spend money. So I just wanted to properly
justify why I use these tools and why I see so much value in them. So let me go ahead and
get logged into my account and then I'll show you how
to create these designs. Okay, so now that you are logged in, come back over to Merch Informer. These are all of the designs that we're going to create right now. So these are all about
sportbikes and motorcycles. So I'm going to come back over to Placeit, and I'm just going to type
in motorcycles and hit Enter. And then this is going
to give you everything that they have on motorcycles. You're going to have both
mockups, which is pretty cool. So once you do create a design, you can have that kind of
photoshopped onto a real person, so if you wanna post on
social media or anything, but what we are focused on is these actual T-shirt design templates. So the quickest way to sort this over here is go over to the left side
and go to T-shirt designs. And these are all going to be
customizable T-shirt designs that you can use that
are specifically related to motorcycles already. So let's go back over to Merch Informer and let's pick the one
that we want to start with. I love this one right here,
Born to Race, Forced to Work. So I'm just going to copy this. We'll go back over to Placeit, and let's see which template
we wanna use to put this into. So all of these are
really going to work here. I like this one right here. Let's just click on this. And this is going to bring
us into their editor. So all of our changes are going to come on the left side over here. And then on the right side is more or less just suggestions
of similar other templates, things that you could
just quickly click on and create a second design. So over on this left side, these three text boxes right
here are going to correspond to text that's on the screen. So this text right here,
you can move it around, you can make it bigger and smaller. You can click undo if you
want to undo something as many times as you want to, or if you want to just
bring everything back to how it started, if you
got things way out of whack, you can hit Reset Layout right here. Now, the way to actually change this text. If you double click in here,
it's not going to do anything. So you come over to the left side, each one of these text
boxes is going to correspond to the text that's on the design. So I'm just going to paste
in our phrase over here, and I think it actually looks better when it's fully capitalized. And then I'm going to split
this onto two different lines. So I'm going to put Born to Race, and then Forced to Work underneath of it. Born to Race, and then
down here, Forced to Work. So here is our text right here. I'm just going to slide it to the middle. Once you hit the center, you're
going to get that pink line. That means it is snapped
directly to center. Just make sure that both of
these are snapped to the center. And then if you can remember
back a couple steps, the sub-niche that all these
were about is sportbikes. So that's what this design
needs to be geared towards. So Born to Race, Forced to Work doesn't actually mention sportbikes. So that's where the graphic
is going to come in. So this graphic right here,
again, if you click on it, it's not going to do anything. Come over to the left side. Right here is a little edit button. If you click on that, it's going to open up their
entire graphics library. As I had mentioned, all of their graphics, all of their fonts,
they're all copyright-free. So you can freely just click on these and it will sub it into your design. And you know that you have the
rights to use this graphic. Nobody else owns it. So this is technically a sportbike. This is another sportbike right here. That looks like a better one to me, so I'm just going to drag that down and put that to the center. And then pretty much, we've just created a design right here, but I'll show you how to
spruce it up a little bit. So if you go to edit, you can change the colors of this graphic. So if you didn't want a blue, but instead you wanted a
green, you can just click that. It's going to change
the colors right there. Again, you can just hit
back if you want to go back. And then the other customization
comes from the font here. So if you want to change the
color or the type of font, you just click over here and this is going to be that
first box, Born to Race. Just click on the font and
you're going to go to suggested. All of these are going to
be fonts that you can use where you have the rights to use them. If you just click on any of these, it will switch it instantly for you and you can just make sure
that that is put to the center. If you don't like it, just hit back. Then if you want to change the color, just hit the little color box right here. You can change the color
of your font to anything. So with that being said, our design is pretty
much ready to go here. We use that first phrase,
we got our graphic, all this we have rights to use. A couple more steps
here that are important. Let's drag this to the top, which if you can imagine
is kind of the chest area of the shirt. And then we'll take our text, and we'll go up to the top as well. Now, there's only one
more step we need to do before we actually download this. And as you can see, this
has a yellow background. If you were to download this as is and upload it to a
print on demand website, it would print on the shirt
with the yellow background. So just come over to background color, go to the little checkerboard down here. This is going to give you
a transparent background. Not all graphic design tools
are going to have a feature where you can just easily
take out the background. Placeit makes it super easy for us. So from here, all we have
to do is click Download. Just give this a second to load. It's going to say Processing your design. And then once it's ready, it'll
say, Click here to download, and you'll get a pop-up here that says, what do you want to name this download? And where do you want it to save to? So right now it's going to
save to my downloads folder, and I want to name this
what the shirt is called, which I have saved to my clipboard still. So this is going to be Born
to Race Forced to Work. I'm just going to take
the comma out of that. And this is how I'm
going to know in my files what this design is
without even opening it. Just go ahead and click Save. And just like that, we
have our first design made. So as you can see, it has no background, has a transparent background. When you zoom in here, you can see that the
quality of this design, the pixels is perfect for print on demand. It's not going to be blurry
when it's printed on the shirt. Now the idea from here
is to go back to Placeit, go back over to Merch Informer, and now we're going to do the same thing for the next phrases. So we'll copy this, we'll
go back over to Placeit. I'm going to type motorcycles again. We'll go to T-shirt designs. And now I'm just going to
pick a different template that I wanna use for this next one. Now real quick, I wanna show
you something super cool. So if I click in on this
template right here, yes, we've got all of these
phrases that we know are safe to use right here, but you
can't really scale these. Each one of these you
have to do one by one. So the list of the universal
bestselling phrases I was talking about that you can buy down in the description, an example of one of those
that I'll give to you for free in this video is "Easily Distracted By". And then you type in
what that sub-niche is. So if you go back to our list up here, you don't even have to come up with different ideas about sportbikes. You can use all of these right here. It saves you that whole
extra layer of research. So if you just say sportbikes,
cruisers, touring bikes, and then you go over to
Placeit and you say sportbikes, and then you just go to their library, find a photo of a sportbike, which would be this one right here. Let's just take out this
bottom text right here. We'll just click hide, format this properly, "Easily
Distracted By Sportbikes". Boom, that's how easy it is
to use this universal phrase. So then to create more of these, you would then do dirt bikes or whatever type of bike was next. Put that to the center, come over here, find a dirt bike, and
you click on that one. Now you've just made two designs. So it's just a different way to do it. This is the way that I prefer to do it because you can really scale this, you can create the designs much faster and you can use the same template just by swapping out the graphic
and what that sub-niche is. Now, something else that I'll
say while we're on this topic just before we move on is that you can search for
anything in their library. So if you typed in horses, for example, all of these are going to be
different types of horses. So you have seahorses, you have graphics of
different types of horses, people playing polo on horses. So no matter what type of
overall niche you're going into, you can use this same concept of just swapping out the graphic, swapping out the name of the sub-niche, back and forth, back and forth. I just thought that was worth
noting for a second here, just so you knew the difference between the universal phrases and coming up with your
own ones on ChatGPT. Okay, so first off, we're
almost to the end here. You've made it so far in this tutorial. We are just at the logistical stage here of actually uploading the
designs that you've created up to the print on demand website so they can actually be sold. The first thing that I wanna
say before we go through actually uploading these designs is which websites to
upload these designs to. Now there are quite a few
big print on demand websites that you could upload to. Not all of them should
really be treated equally because not all of them get
as many sales as each other. In my experience, there are three specific
print on demand websites that I would focus on that are going to get the
vast majority of sales. The first of these websites
is Amazon themselves. As we talked about Amazon Merch On Demand is the actual print on demand department. So if you go over to Google and you search Amazon Merch on Demand, this is their actual
signup page right here. So you just click the signup button. A quick note on Amazon Merch on Demand. They are the only one that
actually has an application where you have to apply and
wait to see if they approve you as a print on demand seller. I will put a link to a
full video on this channel that walks you through
the whole application and gives you my pointers along the way, to give you the best
odds of getting accepted. However, the other two websites that I recommend uploading to that you can start on right away, first is Redbubble. Redbubble is going to be the
same kind of marketplace. So if you type in fishing shirts, these are all going to
be print on demand shirts and this is kind of their marketplace. So it looks just like Amazon, and each one of these designs
is just uploaded by someone. And then once the order goes through, Redbubble does all the
printing, the shipping, the customer service, just
like we talked about on Amazon. So Redbubble is the second one. You can sign up and start
there right away today. The third one is called TeePublic. TeePublic is actually owned by Redbubble. They were purchased a couple years ago. So it's the same exact concept here. You type in fishing shirts, this is what their marketplace looks like. So when you look at any of these, it's going to be the same concept. They do the printing, the
shipping, all of that for us. Now the super important
thing to know about this is that all of these
websites are non-exclusive. So as I briefly mentioned
before, you can create one design and you can upload it to
all three of these websites. All three of them are
entirely free to use. You're never going to
get a bill from them. You are just going to have
your profits from every sale added to your account. The other thing that is
extremely important to know before I show you how to actually upload and create your listing here is that on these three websites, when someone places an order, you are not going to be
charged for that order. On some other print on
demand websites out there, whenever customer places an order, you have to pay for that order upfront, the cost of the goods for that to be printed
and shipped to them. And then afterwards, you get
your full amount of money with the profit. On these three websites, the customer pays for the
order in full upfront. So we are only getting our
split of the profit afterwards. We don't have to actually front the money every time we get a sale. All right, so without further ado, let me show you how to
actually upload a design here. I'll walk you through it step by step. It only takes a couple minutes, and you have a listing
live on these websites. So let's go back to the
homepage of TeePublic. TeePublic I think is just the
easiest to get started on. Their upload interface is super easy. So if you're just getting
started as a beginner, this is the one that I would
kind of get the feel for it on. And these same principles apply for the other websites as well. So just come up to the top right corner and say, create an account. Just type in your first name,
last name, email address, country, and set a password. And then you have this little
toggle switch here that says, "Yes, I'd like to advertise my products and offsite marketing." By default, it is going to be on. I would recommend leaving this on. What their offsite marketing is, is they do email marketing,
they do display advertising. They're going to take your listing and show it to other
people on the internet totally for free for you. The reason they're able
to do this for free is because they get a split
of the profit as well. So if your design is really selling well, they're going to wanna show it
to as many people as possible and get as many sales because it's making them money as well. This is something that these
print on demand websites do for us that is so much easier than trying to run ads yourself. So in short, I would just
leave this on by default. If you ever do wanna turn this off later, you can turn it off. I just want you to be aware of that. So once you filled that out, just go ahead and hit Create My Account. And then it's going to send
you a verification email to just make sure that that
is a legitimate email address. So just check your email
real quick and click verify. And then once you verify that, go back to create an account and just go to log in this time. Now sign in with your
email and your password. And now just like that, that button switches
from Create an Account to Sell Your Art. So go ahead and just click that button, Sell Your Art up here. And it's just going to ask
you do you have a single file to upload or do you have
multiple files to upload? If we had gone through and
we created a bunch of designs and downloaded them from Placeit, we could do multi-file upload. It just makes it a lot faster. But for this instance, let's
just do single file upload 'cause we just have one
that we've created so far. And the first time around, it's going to ask you, what do
you want to name your store? Now something that's important
to know about the store is you can name it anything that you want. It can be super general. It doesn't have to be
specific about any niches. Back in the day, these
stores were really important and it was best practice to
have niche specific storefronts. However, now that the
models of print on demand have kind of changed over the years, your designs will be listed
individually on the marketplaces in those niches or sub-niches
that they are created about. So the actual store doesn't
get found by people very often. So you can name it something
that is more general or something about you. It really is not all that important. The only couple tips here are
to make sure that the name is not the name of another company to avoid any trademark issues. And secondly, make sure that
it's not vulgar or gruesome or something that would turn someone away from purchasing from you because
of the name of your store. So I'm just going to come up with a general name here, GGTees2. So it says this store name is available. Perfect. Take me to the uploader. So now just click on this
little icon right here and allow you to pick the
file off your computer that we downloaded from Placeit. So just give this a second to upload here. And here is our file. You can see Born to Race, Forced to Work, it has a transparent background, that's why you can see the checkerboard. Everything is perfect here. As you scroll down here,
a couple things to note. You're going to get this
little message right here that says, "Your image isn't large enough to support our wall art options." This is talking about
big canvas wall arts. We are only printing
this design on T-shirts, so it's only going to
print about that big, not a massive wall art. So we can disregard this message and just keep scrolling down here. And once you come down here,
this is where we're going to do pretty much our editing here. It only really takes a couple
minutes to go through here, but once you know the formats
for each one of these boxes, you'll be able to do this on every design that you're uploading and you'll start to get a
really fast pace at doing this. So the first things first
is your designs title. So what I recommend doing for your title is to take whatever is on that shirt, Born to Race, Forced to
Work, and start with that. So Born to Race, Forced to Work, and then put in what that sub-niche is. So this is for sportbikes. Now a little caveat that comes from experience
here is on TeePublic, they're going to add in whatever that article of
clothing is at the end. So we don't need to type in the T-shirt because they are going to add that for us. So we'll leave that blank, and we'll just finish it as sportbike. I know that's a little bit confusing, but I'll show you in a second
here what I mean by that so it all makes sense. So then coming down in the description, just go ahead and copy this. This is the most efficient
way that I found to do this. And then paste it down
here and put in the front. "This Born to Race, Forced
to Work T-shirt is perfect for those who love sportbikes." Now, depending on what your phrase is and what your sub-niche is, you may have to get a little bit creative and swap out a couple words. But generally what we've just done is all you need to do for your description and just make sure that it makes sense. Again, keep in mind on
the description here, most of the print on demand T-shirts are going to be purchased
as gifts for other people. So when you're saying
this shirt is perfect for those who love
whatever the sub-niche is, it's going to make sense to the person who's making that purchase. Okay, then coming over to the right side, we have our main tag. This, instead of using the
sub-niche, which is sportbikes, you wanna use the overall
niche, which is motorcycles. Now what this is going to do is get you in front of all of the people that are searching for motorcycles, which is a much larger overall niche. And then down here in supporting tags, this is where we can put in sportbikes. Now, if you have any other supporting tags that are related to that
niche or that sub-niche, you can type them all in here. Just be sure to put comma in between them, and that will save that
as a supporting tag. Okay, moving right along here. Does this design contain
any mature content? Just hit no here. Yes, technically you can
create mature content and sell that on print on demand websites. I don't personally recommend it. I think it just opens you
up to a bunch of issues. So I would just create designs like the ones that we've created here. Now the thing that we've
kind of skipped over here is the albums. This is kind of creating
your own storefronts. I haven't personally seen
that this is necessary to do. I find that the designs just get listed on the marketplaces individually. You can play around with this feature and kind of create niche
specific storefronts. I just think that this is kind of old news that used to work really
well back in the day. I don't think you need to do it anymore. But as you scroll down here, this is where you're going
to have the different options for what types of items
are going to be available for someone to purchase. Now remember, anything
that you turn on here will be available to purchase, but it doesn't cost you anything extra because none of these items
are actually printed yet. So just go through here and make sure that all
of these different items make sense for what your design is. So if your design is
something about a dad, you wouldn't necessarily wanna
offer that on a women's shirt or if it's something that
would not apply to kids, you wanna make sure that for kids, it's not going to be turned on. Now this brings us into the next step, which is actually choosing
the default color. So when someone comes to that listing, as we saw over here and
you click on one of these, what is the first color
that's going to show? Is that black, is it blue, is it gray? That is what we are setting right here. So for these default colors, you can really pick any color you want. Just make sure that
you're not picking a color that hides the text. So as you can see this asphalt color with the dark gray
text, you can't read it. So I wouldn't be picking that color. But scroll through here
and see if you can find a color that you really like. If you can't find something that looks exceptionally good to you, you can just go with white. Or if the font is white,
then you can go with a black. But just go through here
and select the default color for all of these. And then once all of those are set, keep scrolling down here. And this is going to bring us into a rather important part here. So as I was just talking about, you don't want dark text on a dark shirt because you can't read it. Well, this is overall not
just the default color that's going to show first, but the other colors that
someone who's coming in could actually purchase that design on. So just scroll through these
and kinda hover over them. Make sure that you can read
everything that's on these. So if it gets too close where
it's too hard to read that, you can uncheck that, and I'll show you an example
of that once we get to it. Like that one might be a
little bit too close to read, so I'm just going to uncheck it. Now, this is good practice to do so that none of the customers
that order this receive it and they realize that they can't read it and they want to return it. Although us as these sellers
are not going to have to deal with that return or the exchange because the company handles it for us, it just makes it easier for everyone by spending the extra second
to just remove anything that could potentially be an issue. So now that you've done this,
now let's keep scrolling down. This is going to be what other products would you potentially
like to offer as well. So this brings us all the way back to in the beginning of the video
when I said in most cases, print on-demand businesses are focused on T-shirts specifically. That is because although you
can have magnets and pins and tapestries, all of
that available for sale, in the vast majority of cases, people are just coming
in to buy a T-shirt. Now, in addition to that, if you were to click on any of these, you can see that the design
doesn't always fit just right. So you have to come in,
you have to play with this and make sure that it fits just right. It's in the right place. And in my opinion, if you have to spend so much
time to try to format this and make sure that it's perfect for the person who's buying it, and ultimately these items
aren't going to make up many of the sales anyways, I don't spend the time
formatting any of these. What I end up doing is
just turn all of these off and I focus just on the T-shirts. That way, when I'm coming through here, I don't have to spend any time editing all of these different ones. Making sure that in the perfect spot. So that's what I recommend doing. It makes it super efficient. And then you just scroll down
and you just have to click, "I have read and agree to the terms." Then you just click Publish. Now if you've made it
this far in this tutorial, you are officially a
print on demand seller. This is a live listing
that someone can come in, they can pick the color of the shirt, they can pick male, female, what type of shirt they want
it printed on, the size, and they can add it right to their cart. And now you would take the same listing with the same title description
and upload that to Redbubble and then Amazon Merch On Demand. Then you've got one design
in three different places. You'll get sales from all
three of those marketplaces. Now, as you can see, what I was talking about in the last step, they added T-shirt to the end of this. We ended it at sportbike, but
they put T-shirt at the end because a T-shirt is selected. This makes it for them so that
if someone comes down here and they say, I want it printed
on a hoodie or a tank top, they can just automatically
switch that to hoodie or tank top, and our original
title stays the same. Now our description is right down here. Our main tag is just above it, telling people what it's about, and then our little store name is over to the right, right here. As I was saying, it's
not all that important because not many people
are going to see this. This is the only place that people will see our
actual storefront name. So if they click on that, they can see all of the
designs that we've created. So a couple really important
rapid fire things to know here is that TeePublic, you don't actually set the price yourself. They are pretty unique where they set their own pricing for you because they run their sales. So like right now, this shirt is 27% off. They're doing all of their own sales, they're managing it all for us just to encourage people
to make purchases. On the other websites, you do
get to set the price yourself, so you get to see as you're
creating that listing, what the profit margin would be. Now, generally speaking,
when you sell a T-shirt, the profit margin is
somewhere between 2 and $5. Now, on some of these
other items like a hoodie, they sell for $32, they're
much more expensive, so your profit margin goes up with that. So it can be anywhere from 10
to $20 when you sell a hoodie. Now, I should also mention too, that that is the actual
amount that you get to keep. That is the net profit that
gets added into your account. Now, a question that
I get all the time is, how do I do marketing on this design? And something that I will
say that I've learned from literally years of doing this is that you do not need
to do any marketing. Although you could make
a social media account, you could run paid advertising and try to send that
traffic to these listings. I've done all of that over the years, and although it does work, in my experience, it's not worth
all that effort to do that. I would instead suggest
spending that same time and effort to create more designs and upload them to these marketplaces. The real secret sauce in all of this is finding those sub-niches that are not oversaturated already. Now, the last thing I'll
leave you with in this video is the next steps going forward. So if you've watched this whole tutorial and you followed along,
you know every step to run a successful
print on demand business. Now all you have to do is just reads and repeat the last few steps
of finding those niches, creating the designs, and uploading them. That's it, from there,
to grow this business, you don't have to worry about
shipping, customer service, marketing, none of that. The more designs that you can get uploaded to these big print on demand websites, essentially the larger your
business is going to grow. So guys, again, if you enjoyed this video, please just give it a thumbs up. All of the discount codes, all of the links to the resources we use throughout this video are all going to be
down in the description. As always, if you have
any questions at all, just let me know down in the comments, and I would be happy to help you out. Otherwise, I'll be seeing
you guys in the next video.

Transcript for:Print on Demand Business Guide

Transcript for:
Print on Demand Business Guide