P.O.D. People Building a Profitable Print on Demand Business

In this segment I introduce myself and give a bit of background on what I do and how I got started in the Print on Demand industry. We talk about what print on demand is as well as why it's important to have a side hustle or some type of side business. We also talk about how Print on Demand doesn't have to be all about print on demand. It can be a valuable tool for Youtubers or Influencers to monetize their audience. It can also be a way for a more traditional eCommerce store to add more apparel type items to their offerings.

It's my personal belief that Amazon Merch and really the entire POD space, but especially Merch is the best opportunity out there for aspiring Entrepreneurs or people looking to get started with online business. POD and specifically Amazon Merch require no money to get started, no web design skills, no dealing with payment processors. It's literally as simple as creating designs, uploading them to Merch or whatever POD platform your selling on, and they take care of the platform, the payments, they drive the traffic, they ship the items and they even take returns. After uploading your shirts the only thing you need to do is sit back and wait until the end of the month at which point they cut you a check based upon how many of your designs sold. Now there can be more to it, you can promote your shirts and run ads to shirts, but that is not necessary or required. For these reasons I think Amazon Merch and POD as a whole is the best opportunity around right now for wantreprenuers and aspiring Entrepreneurs.

In this segment I give a brief 10 minute overview of everything you need to know about Amazon Merch and the Print on Demand business to be successful. While the rest of the course dives into these topics in much more detail, this not only gives students an overview and some insight into what they will be learning, but as a student myself I know a large percentage of students will not make it through an entire course so I wanted to give them an overiew and the most important insights very early on.

As with pretty much any business or venture someone is thinking about starting, the most common question people often ask is what's the upside? What's my benefit? How much money can I make? This question is impossible to answer. There's so many factors at play, how hard are you going to work, what niches are you going to sell in, what platform are you going to sell on. I know people making $0 per month with print on demand businesses, I also know people who make over $20,000 per month during the peak holiday season. What I can tell you is I am not a trained graphic designer, quite frankly my design skills are subpar, but I'm currently making over $1,000 per month selling on Amazon Merch via a combination of my own designs and outsourcing design to graphic designers.

In the print on demand space we have platforms and we have fulfillment partners. Platforms are programs like Amazon Merch, Redbubble, Teespring, and other platforms that serve as shopping platoforms. They provide the site, they handle the payment processing, the customer service, everything basically. A fulfillment partner would be something like Printful, Printify or CustomCat. They only provide  the printing service, you need to sell the items either on a platform like eBay or Etsy or build your own Shopify or Wordpress/WooCommerce site. While I would recommend people new to POD starting on a platform, you'll eventually want to find a fulfillment partner and expand from platforms to sites like Etsy and eBay and possibly eventually to your own eCommerce website.

There are 3 types of Amazon Merch sellers. We have the business person, the designer, and the dabbler. The designer is a graphic designer or someone who views themselves as an artist. The business person is typically someone who is going to hire freelance designers and treat this more like a traditional eCommerce business and the dabbler is that person who's just gonna dip their toe in and try this out. The type of seller you are is going to determine how you tackle and go about doing this business. In this section we try to help you identify which type of Amazon Merch seller you are.

Early on it was quick and easy to get accepted into Merch By Amazon. As the popularity of this program grew it became harder to get in. At one point people were waiting well over a year to get on. Fortunately for you they have sped up the process, most people are getting on within a few days to maybe two weeks max. Unfortunately Amazon has also gotten pickier about who they let in. In this section were going to tell you how to fill out the application to maximize your chances of getting accepted the first time around.

One of the biggest challenges new Amazon Merch sellers face is getting out of the lower tiers. When you only have 10 shirts to list your chances of selling a shirt are very low. In this chapter we discuss how in the early tiers the goal is not to make money, the goal is to tier up in order to get more listings available to us as ultimately this is a numbers game. In this segment we are going to discuss strategies and tactics for getting out of the lower tiers.

One of the beautiful things about Amazon Merch is the platform is fairly simple. In this segment we give you a walkthrough of the Amazon Merch platform. We show you how to check your sales stats, as well as take you through the process of uploading your first tee shirt so once accepted you should be able to breeze right through the process of uploading your first shirt.

In this segment we show you a walkthrough of the Redbubble platform as well as how to upload a shirt to Redbubble just as we did in the previous segment regarding Amazon Merch. Redbubble is a bit different from merch in that there's many more products and the upload process differs a bit. There's dozens of other platforms such as Teespring, TeeChip, Society 6 and others. Most others are pretty similar to Redbubble and are very intuitive to use so we won't show every single platform, but this will give you an idea what most other platforms are like to use and to upload to.

In this segment we discuss Amazon Merch and POD best practices. We discuss how to avoid trademark infringement, what types of designs sell, and other Merch and POD best practices.

There numerous websites, softwares and platforms that will enable you to design tee shirts. If you already know Photoshop, Illustrator or GIMP great, however I realize many people new to print on demand have never done graphic design. In this video I show you how to use a program called Canva which is a very basic drag and drop editor which will easily allow you to make text and image based tee shirts and other apparel. Canva is free to use, however  in order to make clear background images you will need to subscribe to their paid service, or you will need to use another program to remove backgrounds. You will be able to make PopSockets without a subscription as they do not require a clear background. Canva is easy to use and anyone whether you have graphic design knowledge or experience will be able to use this program.

In this segment we show you how to design tee shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and Popsockets using the Merch Informer design program. Merch Informer is very similar to Canva, it's a very user friendly design tool. Merch Informer at one time was just an analytic tool but in the past year rolled out a basic designer. One bonus about using Merch Informer is the templates you design within are already formatted correctly for MBA products where as with Canva you will need to go through the additional step of resizing your designs for Merch by Amazon.

Okay so now you have the knowledge and skills to actually design and list shirts on Amazon Merch and other print on demand platforms but what should you sell? This is the point at which many people hit a stumbling block. In this section were going to talk about how to find topics and niches for profitable tee shirt sales. We're also going to talk about specifically which products are best to offer. One other thing we touch on in this segment is Print on Demand is no longer just novelty tee shirts. Most POD platforms have expanded their product offerings into athletic gear, tote bags, backpacks and even home decor items. There's a lot of different directions you can take your POD business and we'll be covering all that in this section.

In this segment were going to address promoting your shirts. One big advantage of selling on platforms like Amazon Merch, Redbubble and others is they bring you organic traffic and they already have shoppers on their platform. That said in recent years as the popularity of POD and the number of designs on platforms has grown it has become very beneficial to be able to promote or drive traffic to your products on your own in addition to being reliant on the platform itself bringing  you customers. My promotion strategy uses paid ads and paid traffic very sparingly. The margins on POD sales are too low to really pay for ads and because we don't control the checkout process we can't analytically confirm where sales came from. I do have success using AMS ads and Etsy PPC marketing, however outside of that I'm not a huge fan of using Facebook ads and share some other strategies for driving traffic and sales organically and through content.

At this point you have all the knowledge you need to launch your own Amazon Merch and Print on Demand business. You have the knowledge, actually developing the skill is going to take some time. Start working on your designs, start keeping an eye out for trending topics, hobbies and other niches from which you can come up with design ideas. Keep in mind this is a long term game, your not necessarily going to start seeing sales rolling in from day one. With Amazon Merch specifically its going to take some time to tier up until you really start seeing sales roll in so don't get frustrated, work hard and stick with it.