Best place to make money selling t- shirt

N ot too long ago, I knew nothing about running a Facebook ad to sell a product. Okay, maybe I just tried it. I ran an ad for an iPhone app I had get more users. I was probably doing it all wrong. Still… I tried. One day in March, I came across someone selling a course about how to make money selling your own t-shirts online. This seller was your typical internet marketer. He said how easy it .

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People love t-shirts. They can make your entire outfit pop, help you make a statement, or be a conversation starter. While you might be the first one in your circle to design and sell t-shirts online, in the wide world of ecommerce, there are a bunch of other merchants chasing the same dream. So before you get to designing and setting up your store, you need to answer one question: who is going to buy your t-shirts? That said, you need to narrow down your audience even more to find a product niche. So in order to be successful, you need to find a niche that you understand and can market to. Knowing the desires and pain-points of these people is your biggest advantage — you can now generate product ideas that this particular niche will love. Find out who are your competitors, what are their strengths and weaknesses to get a better picture of how you could position yourself in the same market. Scout the web to learn what are local or global trends among online shoppers to find a gap in the market for your niche product. A couple of tools that can help you on this journey are Google Trends , Alexa , and Ahrefs. Will your t-shirt provide psychological support, help someone express their beliefs to the world, or make them feel part of a community? BigCommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms out there that lets you launch a store in a matter of a few minutes. That includes going over:. BigCommerce offers a number of integrations you can use to source products for your online store, so explore your options. This also gives more freedom to introduce new products, or discontinue those that are not selling. While your research has suggested what design will drive sales, your predictions might not match the actual needs of your target audience at this point in time. Sign up for our weekly newsletter. T-shirts are one of the most popular apparel items out there that are worn by both men and women. As a rule of thumb, the more popular the product is, the bigger the competition it has in the market. Start by jotting down the key themes, beliefs, and styles you want your brand to be known for. Then, take some time polishing these ideas to come up with more concrete design concepts. But if starting an online store is your way of testing the waters of ecommerce, make seasonal themes and trending topics the epicenter of your designs. This might be your chance of monetizing the moment. You can use typography, line drawings, shapes, illustrations, or photographs as your design base. But if you think that using one type of element is too restricting, mix and match different elements to create a one-of-a-kind t-shirt design.

How to Create a T-shirt Design

As a newbie designer who wanted to sell T-Shirts online, I felt overwhelmed with the number of websites out there selling Tees. These sites allow you to setup an account and upload your designs, while they handle the selling and the production of the T-Shirts — and pay you a royalty per Shirt sold. Customer lands on Redbubble. Yes, in general these sites are free and easy to join. You could have your first design up and ready to buy within minutes. Usually pop culture, funny, trending, fan art and mash-up type stuff does well on Print-On-Demand sites. Designers who are just starting out and want to test the waters. You can use these sites to see if your target market exists and if your designs will sell consistently. Those with large portfolios of designs will also likely do well with such sites, as the more designs you have up, the more money you are likely to make.

1. Design the Shirt

Boost My Budget. Selling T shirts online is an awesome way to make money from home. Depending on the effort you want to put in, it can bring you a little bit of extra cash each month, or you can even build it into a full time home business. By the way, this post contains affiliate links. That means that if you make a purchase or sign up for something through one of my links, I may make a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my site! The easiest way to sell T-shirts online to make money is through a print-on-demand platform POD.

Basically, print-on-demand is when you design T shirts and other products to sell. But the designs are only printed onto the products once a customer has bought one. The site creates a mock-up of what your design would look like printed on a T shirt.

You set your price, write a description, and list your T shirt for sale, using the mock-up as a product image. When somebody buys it, the POD company prints out your design onto an actual shirt and ships it off to the customer for you. Literally all you need is time, internet access, and some basic design program or app which you can get for free — more on that later.

Step 1 is to choose your POD platform. My top recommendation is Merch by Amazon! The main advantage of selling on Merch by Amazon is that your products will be sold on Amazon obviously and you get to benefit from their huge customer base and traffic. However, Merch does have a short application form and wait list. Check the instructions of the site you signed up to for specifications such as design size and file size. You can create your design in any design program you like.

Obviously, if you already have software like Photoshop then use. I make a lot of my T shirt designs in Gimp. This is a free open source image editing software. Merch even have templates to use in Gimp. I found Gimp a bit tricky to use at the beginning, but there are loads of free tutorials on YouTube. Another option is Canva. This free design site is a lot more user-friendly for beginners. However, you will have to pay a monthly fee if you want to download your designs with a transparent background.

The transparent background is a requirement to sell T shirts on Merch, but not other products such as PopSockets. There are also lots of free or very cheap mobile apps you can use. Usually these are kind of limited, but a useful way to knock out some designs on the go. So you have to put a lot of different designs out there before you find out which ones will be your best sellers. Create a large number of simpler designs targeting a number of different topics or niches. So as I mentioned in the introduction, I have NO design skills.

Not an artistic bone in my body! Do you have any hobbies? Are there any catchphrases or jokes that only fans of your hobby would get? Things like this make great T shirt slogans! A good starting place for research is to look at memes or inspirational quotes in your niche on Pinterest.

I have a series of T shirts that are just funny or slang words in a foreign language that I speak. The T shirts are aimed at people studying the language, or who are interested in the culture associated with the language. You can still make a plain text design attractive by choosing an interesting font.

Most design programs come with plenty of fonts, or you can download them for free from sites like Fonts just make sure it has a commercial licence. If you do want to create slightly more advanced designs, you can purchase basic design elements from websites such as Creative Market. You can buy things such as patterns, textures, fonts and clipart which you can mix and match into your own designs.

I love Creative Market because they have 6 free design goods every weekand many of these are suitable for print-on-demand designs! But again, do check the licence before you use.

This has worked really well for me selling PopSockets on Merch. Print-on-demand has been growing like crazy over the last couple of years, so there is a huge range of sites to sell your designs on! I recommend focusing on just one site to begin. Most sites have a range of products in addition to T shirts. So if you know that you really want to sell tote bags, for example, that will help you narrow down your choice.

I would definitely recommend Merch as the first site you sign up. Plus, all Merch products are available under Amazon Prime, which influences the buying decision for many people. PopSockets started selling quite well for me over the Christmas period. You might not have all the different products and marketplaces available when you first sign up, but they are rolling them out to all users.

There is an application process to get into Merch. They have several different types of basic T shirts, hoodies, tank tops. In addition, there are all kinds of other products such as leggings, dresses, baby clothes, phone cases, tote bags, caps and mugs. They also have several items with an all-over print option with Merch, your designs are confined to a small space.

There are loads of different POD sites out. If you are wondering how to get paid by Amazon without a US bank account, I use a website called Payoneer. But even lots of people who would never knowingly use a copyrighted design get caught out, simply because so many common words and phrases have been trademarked by various businesses! Also, check the content policy of your chosen POD site carefully to see if they have any rules against certain types of content like violence, drug use or obscenity.

Be aware of any specific rules you need to follow. If you submit a shirt that breaks these rules, the shirt will be rejected, and too many rejections mean you could lose your account. But here are some methods that work for other people:. This is great for very niche shirts. I would recommend doing your research or maybe even taking a course in Facebook ads before diving in.

This is a free way to promote your shirts, but it will take some work to build up your account! It can help to get on some group boards. Check my free guide for more advice on that! This is a more time consuming method of promotion but it can work very well if you have a lot of shirts in a particular niche perhaps based around a hobby you take part in.

If you can build up a thriving Facebook group or other online community around this niche, by sharing memes, videos, discussion topics etc, you can build up an audience ready to buy your shirts. To save time on building up your own Instagram or Facebook account, you can contact established influencers and ask them to advertise your shirts for you. Depending on the size of their account, some will post a picture and shout-out in exchange for a free shirt, and others will charge you. You might be thinking all this sounds good so far, but can you really make money selling t shirts online?

The answer is yes — definitely! And as with most side hustles, the more time you put in, the more you can expect to get. When you first join Merch, you are only allowed to upload 10 designs. Then you tier up tothenthenand so on. I only had 10 designs for sale over Christmasbut sold enough over the holiday period that I managed to tier up to straight away! Inspired by this, in January I got stuck in and uploaded another 50 or so shirts. To be honest, I was kind of burned.

Amazon paid a direct deposit into my bank account every single month, without me doing any more work. Pretty cool, right? In November I realised I was missing out on some serious earning potential, and decided it was time to take Merch seriously again! I also had a lot more free time since I quit my job to blog full time.

Also, my account had also been enabled for UK sales, German sales and PopSockets since I last checked in, so I took advantage of these new opportunities. Obviously my success that month was mostly due to the Q4 shopping frenzy, but it definitely helped having more products live. Or, you could be tactical about it, and research what kind of shirt is already selling well, in order to create your own version.

There are lots of videos about how to do this research for free online. I have recently signed up to Merch Informerwhich is a site that has lots of software to help you research bestselling products, as well as create your own! Amazon is a kind of search engine, just like Google. Niche shirts can be much easier to sell than generic shirts if you can market to the right audience. Once you have a shirt that takes off for you, create more products in the same niche!

One way to create a lot of designs quickly is to look at ways to adapt and scale your existing designs. The shirt is selling well, so you want to make more along the same lines.

There are two ways you could do. Also, it could just be that people really, really want pug shirts.

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Three years ago, Glen Zubia was stuck under a mountain of student loan debt, living with his parents and struggling to scrape together car payments. Now, the year-old has his own four-bedroom house in El Paso, Texas. He even co-hosts a weekly podcast where he tells listeners all about how he turned his finances. Zubia is a master of passive income through print on demanda system in which designers link up with sites like Amazon, Teespring and Redbubble to sell shirts and other items. Companies handle the production and customer service while paying out royalties, meaning people like Zubia can earn big without much investment or best place to make money selling t- shirt. Zubia is no stranger to making money off of the internet. While he was in college, he sold custom action figures on eBay; while whirt to pay off credit cards, he tried writing books through Kindle Direct Publishing. But in his fourth month, he got a check. He used Adobe Illustrator on his iMac to crank out a catalogue of 2, designs — a process that involved seemingly endless mak, researching, designing and saving. No way would it happen if I were messing. When the cash started coming in, he put it aside. Plus, he gets to set his own hours. Glen Zubia. By Julia Glum November 12, You May Like.