About 5 years ago, I decided to get serious with my print-on-demand business and focus on growing it. I won’t lie, it wasn’t an easy decision.
In the last 10 years, I have done more jobs than I can count. So, deciding to pick one to focus on was kind of hard at first.
But a few years down the lane and it is unarguably the best business decision I ever made. I have channeled all of my experiences and knowledge from other jobs to boost my POD business to a skyrocketing level.
Starting as a POD business owner is quite easy. Keeping up with it is where the real problem is.
I often tell people that POD is a great business to do.
For one, you can start your own print-on-demand store without having a real inventory anywhere. You don’t need to store up items and products in your garage or incur an extra cost from storing them in a warehouse.
All of that stress and cost is taken off your shoulders thanks to the dropshipping system.
Also, with the POD business, you don’t need to pack and ship products all on your own. The supplier executes the entire process of product creation, product packaging, as well as order fulfillment.
This is why you must work hand-in-hand with a trusted supplier. For this, I always recommend GearBubble anytime, any day!
You can literally start your POD business with next to nothing! You only require a meager cost to get started.
However, it’s not all rosy, neither is it a “get rich quick” scheme.
To be a successful print-on-demand seller, you must first understand that it takes time to work.
It isn’t easy to make a lot of sales when you are just starting. There is a lot of competition out there. You cannot afford to be slack.
First, you need to have many products in your store. And I mean hundreds of thousands of products. This requires consistency!
You cannot be up today and down tomorrow. If you want to make it big in the POD business, you need to remain on top of your game.
I have been in this POD and internet marketing game for almost a decade now. And I have built wealth and experience over the years.
Are you struggling to make money from your POD business? Or you feel you are not making as much as you’d like to?
You’re in the right place! Let’s get you to your first $1,000.
In this article, I have listed 10 easy tips to help you make your first $1,000 fast.
Read till the end!
1. Keep adding new products
Don’t let anyone trick you with any short-cut strategy to POD success. You cannot be a successful POD business owner if you don’t upload new products frequently.
Before you ask me, “Bank, how frequent is ‘frequent’?
If you can upload new products every single day, it is great for you! Trust me.
However, the uploading process can be very stressful and cumbersome, especially when you’re listing tons of products simultaneously.
The process of uploading products on your POD marketplace manually can be very time-consuming and mentally sapping. Honestly!
First, you have to create a product on a supplier’s website.
The product creation process includes market research, niche selection, and quote research. Once you have all of these figured out, you can then move to your supplier’s website.
There, you would create a mockup image of your product. Export the mockup image to your device for later use.
From there, you would commence the product listing procedure on any desired POD marketplace; either Amazon or Etsy.
You can now create a product on the marketplace using the product mockup image derived from the step above.
Once you are done, you can move on to another product. Then the next. And the next one thousand product.
Finally, you can now start working on repeating the same process on another marketplace!
This is a very stressful process!
Naturally, I would suggest that you hire someone to get it done for you. But I did that, and hmm… it didn’t work out well for me!
Apart from the fact that I spent a lot hiring someone, I also almost had my Etsy account suspended for a human error committed by the person I hired.
But no to worry, I present you with a better way of doing things: PODTurbo, an automatic product uploading system.
PODTurbo is built to help you create and publish print-on-demand products to multiple marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Bonanza, Storenvy, Shopify, and WooCommerce fast and easy!
The PODTurbo has helped much many print on demand sellers to become better and make more money. We have a goal of becoming the number 1 choice for POD business system automation in the world.
The system will do all the work for you, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! This means that you are not prone to human error or limited by human fatigue. The system is programmed to do exactly what you tell it to do.
With this system, you will be able to save thousands a month and work more efficiently. You would also be able to build a more sustainable and consistent print-on-demand business.
2. Keep finding new niche ideas
Top POD marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy get millions of visitors daily. All of these buyers are coming to the platform in search of different products.
The best thing you can do as a POD seller is to spread your products across different niches. This way, you would be able to make more sales all year long.
The first kind of niches that you have to create products for is holiday niches.
Trust me, if you play your cards right, you can make about 6-figure sales from a single holiday. People buy a lot during the holidays.
Some of the best holidays you can create products for are New Year Day, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Halloween, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Free Shipping Day, Christmas, and Boxing Day.
You can make so much money by selling during these periods alone. However, as you can see, many of these holidays are in the Q4 (fourth quarter) of the year.
We only a few holidays in other months of the year. Does that mean that we have to wait till Q4 to make sales?
Definitely not!
This is why you should also learn to create products in what we call ‘Evergreen Niches’.
These are niches that you can make money from all year long.
If you want to make it big in the print-on-demand business, you need to have tons of products listed across several evergreen niches.
There are a number of them that you can choose from.
Having products scattered across various evergreen niches is a sure-fire way to secure steady income from your business every day, every week, all year long!
Some of the main evergreen niches that you can list your products in are professions, animal lovers, hobbies, birthdays, anniversaries, and many more. The list is endless.
Every niche is an opportunity for you to make more money. The more products you add to store in these niches, the more your chances of making more sales from time to time.
3. Simplify the designs
Simple designs sell BEST!
Take it from me.
I see many people who make the mistake of thinking that a good design is meant to be all shiny and flashy. No! It actually doesn’t work that way.
For a POD product, your design doesn’t have to be complex. A simple text-based design can sell well! In fact, they sell the best!
All of my winning coffee mugs have basically black text on a transparent background. That’s it!
This is one of the major things you must understand about the POD business. The majority of the designs that sell well are mostly simple text-based designs.
All you need is to ensure that the design is clean, with beautiful typography. It would help if you also kept the arrangement beautiful and easy to read.
The thing is that more people buy print-on-demand products because of the message than the design.
So, try to keep your designs simple and easy to read.
4. Use a design to create many products
Some products can attract so much sale. It might either be that a lot of buyers love the quote, or they love the design. However it is, you have just found yourself a winning product.
Once you can spot this kind of product, try replicating the same design on various other products.
This way, you can also make similar sales success on these other products. Do not restrict yourself to many products. Don’t stick to only a few products. The more, the merrier!
Replicate your design on coffee mugs, shot glasses, travel mugs, tumblers, wine glasses, camper mugs, pillowcases, face masks, etc.
5. Upload products to many marketplaces
You are more likely to make more sales with your products in numerous POD marketplaces than in just one store.
And luckily, there are so many marketplaces, too many to number, where we can sell print-on-demand products.
However, the leading marketplaces where you can make a massive profit from selling POD products are Amazon and Etsy.
I’ve had a much easier experience selling on Amazon and Etsy than elsewhere. This is because these platforms already have huge traffic and ready buyers.
These platforms have free organic traffic already, and you need to divert their attention towards you and your products. You can’t get this many ready buyers anywhere else, trust me!
I should also add that you might be required to pay some fees on these platforms. For instance, Amazon has monthly fees of $39.99. There is also a $0.20 fee that you have to pay every four months to list a product on Etsy.
But it is definitely worth it! You can begin to add some products to your store and make some sales in no time.
There are hundreds of online stores out there where you can sell print-on-demand products.
But none of them has the kind of traffic or ease of sale that you would enjoy when you set up your store in any of those two.
If you have spare time at hand, you can add your products to some marketplaces like Bonanza and Storenvy. Many of them are good for making some side cash.
It is better to focus on those three above if you want to make that $1,000 fast.
6. Optimize SEO for your product titles
As a POD seller, you should know that there are two major ways that many buyers search for products.
They can either use the keyword or the quotes.
It would help if you had both of these in your product title when uploading your products.
Not only do they help your product to get found easily, but they also boost your SEO optimization for ranking higher in search results.
When writing your product title, it is important that it contains the keywords of the product. Without this, your chances of showing up on search results are slim.
This can affect your sales big time and slow you down on your race to a thousand bucks.
Having your keywords in your product title is also good for your SEO. When people search for products, they are likely to use the keyword to find the right product for them.
If your product doesn’t have the keyword in your title, you’re most likely not going to rank at all.
You should also note that when people want to buy products, they are likely to search using quotes.
This is because people who search with quotes often know what they want and are ready to buy.
So, when listing your products, you must have your products’ quotes on the product title.
And I’d tell you why this is important. Marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy will use your product title for ranking your product in search results.
If you don’t have a good product title, people won’t find your product!
7. Write an attractive and optimized Product Description
Unlike a physical store, you are not present to convince the visitor to buy your product. This is where a great product description comes in.
Not only will you be able to convert visitors to buyers, but you would also be able to build trust in the heart of buyers for your shop.
When you’re writing your product description, do not write like a robot.
Write from a reader’s point of view.
Just stop and think for a sec, what exactly does a buyer need to see before he gets convinced of the quality of a product? Its benefits? Its features? Its uses and application? Or all of these?
It would help if you highlighted all of these properly before you can boost your sales. A robot cannot connect to the needs of the buyer the way you can.
You should be able to tell your buyers what the product can do for them. Your description should also define who should buy this product and why it is best for them.
A great description is also great for helping your rank better on search result pages.
When writing your product description, ensure that you skillfully add relevant keywords to boost your chances of ranking higher when such keywords are searched.
8. Keep Track of your Sales Stats
If you want to make more sales, you must be able to use market analysis and product performance data to boost your sales.
Marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy grant you access to detailed sales stats on the backend of your seller’s page.
These stats offer you all the necessary insight you need to have about your product performance.
This way, you can know which products are making more sales and then add more products related to niches.
This is also a great way to figure out your winning quotes too. If you find a product that sells well, you can try to adapt it and use the quote for another niche.
For instance, if the selling product has the quote “Keep calm, I’m a nurse” on a mug, you can also use that winning quote to create products in other niches like Doctor, Lawyer, or Mom.
More money for you!
9. Scale-up using Facebook Ads
If you want to scale your print-on-demand business to the next level, you might want to use paid traffic.
You can make tons of sales using Facebook Ads in a short time, but this business model is hard to implement.
The first thing you have to do is to locate your winning products. If you want to scale, you have to go with your unicorn products. Put your best foot forward!
You can figure out which products are doing pretty well in your store by checking your sales stats.
Once you can figure them out, pick those that sell well on Amazon or Etsy and promote them using Facebook ads.
I did exactly this for Mother’s and Father’s Day and made over $350K within a few weeks. It’s like a shortcut. You don’t have to spend lots of money to find winning products.
But not all hot-selling products on the marketplaces can be scaled using paid traffic. It would help if you still found the right audience to show your product to.
If the audience and the product don’t match, your product won’t sell. You have to spend money to find the right audience for your product.
You might lose money when you start, but after you match the right audience and the right product, you can scale it to 5-6 figures.
If you want to know more about making more money and scaling up using Facebook Ads, I have an entire course dedicated to this alone.
You can learn all that you need to know about scaling with Facebook Ads.
10. Re-read my blog!
Not to brag, but my blog might be the only place where you can find deeply insightful and practicable resources on POD on the internet.
Not only do I take my time to post long-form articles journaling my experiences every week, but I also spend much time mapping out all that you would need to start your business and stay profitable.
You would always get tons of free and actionable knowledge from my blog!
You should bookmark it already!
Conclusion
If you follow all of these tips religiously, you’re on a fast track to making your first $1,000.
These are not just strategies that I haven’t tested. They have worked for me over the years, and I have made a fortune out of them.
You’re welcome!
You should also follow my blog for more free practical tips for running a POD business.
—Bank K.
