Okay, let’s talk about what to do and how to do it.
This business model is not that difficult, but it does require consistency.
I’ll show you all the steps you have to do to crush the print-on-demand sales on Mother’s and Father’s Day.
After reading this page, you’ll be able to start building your print-on-demand empire and start earning passive income.
Let’s see just how easy it is.
Step 1: Find the Untapped Niches for Mother’s Day
Well, we all know that the niche must be about the mother and father.
But that’s what most people think. The competition will be very high if you sell a coffee mug with a general Mother’s Day phrase.
There are over thousands mugs that have the phrase like “World’s Best Mom”, “Best Mom Ever”, “World’s Okayest Mom”, “I Love Mom”, etc.
That’s why most Mother’s Day mugs are difficult to sell. Many people are doing it and it’s difficult to make your new coffee mug visible.
Don’t add another mug to this arena. It’s too competitive.
What we will do instead is find some specific phrases for the mother.
I usually use Etsy to do the niche research to find out what kinds of Mother’s Day gifts can be sold well.
So, go to Etsy and search for some keywords like “mother’s day mug”.
Here are the search results from the keyword “mother’s day mug”.
The number of search results is 49,094.
It’s quite difficult to make your product visible if you target for this keyword.
Anyway, let’s check some products from these search results and find out how we can narrow this niche down.
Some of these mugs caught my eye.
If you notice these mugs, you will see that they’re not just a general Mother’s Day mug.
There are other niches combined with the Mother’s Day niche, which is long distance, Donald Trump, and Unicorn.
These products are in the top results for the common keyword “mother’s day mug”. It means that they should have gotten many sales.
To confirm the assumption, I checked the stats for each mug and found that they have gotten many customer reviews, and the overall sale stats for these shops are pretty good.
I use MerchantWords to check the keywords and search volume for products I’m interested in, which are the Unicorn and Donald Trump mugs.
This is what I got.
The keyword “unicorn mother” has a 1,400 Amazon search volume.
The keyword “trump mother”, “donald trump mothers day”, “donald trump mothers day mug” and “trump coffee mugs mother” have a 1,900, 700, 500, and 400 Amazon search volume, respectively.
Let’s go back to Etsy and try to search it with these specific keywords.
I tried searching Etsy with the keyword “unicorn mother” and the search results were reduced from 49,094 to just 5,009 search results.
And the “Mamacorn Mug” is still at the top of the search results.
Next, let’s search for “donald trump mothers day”.
The search results for this keyword was reduced from 49,094 to just 1,404 products, and the same “Trump Grandma Mug” was at the top of the search results.
Okay, this is how to narrow the mother’s niche and increase the chances of making your product visible to people.
If you do more research, you’ll probably find other narrow niches that have much lower competition.
I spent just a few minutes to discover the example of these three narrow niches above, which are the Trump grandma, Unicorn mother, and long-distance mom.
If you dig further into the Etsy’s search results, you’ll find that there are so many narrower niches that have very low competition.
Like these:
These are some other Mother’s Day mugs that the seller combined with other niches, such as architect, pilot, marine engineer, civil engineer, and domestic engineer.
If you look at the number of customer reviews, you’ll see that these shops have got many reviews from their customers, which means that they’ve got many sales.
I checked their shops and found that they have been making 1,000-3,000 sales from this kind of mug and other print-on-demand products, such as t-shirts, shot glasses, travel mugs, etc.
These are the examples of the products they sell. I think you’ve now got some ideas to work with 🙂
Step 2: Find Interesting Phrases That Children Want to Tell Their Parents.
Okay, when you’ve got some ideas about how to narrow the niche to find a low-competitive market, the next thing to do is to find the interesting phrases.
For most people who purchase a print-on-demand product, the first thing they will consider is the product type, which is a coffee mug, shot glass, tumbler, etc.
The second thing that will make them decide to buy the product or not is the message on the product.
Is the message on it what they’re looking for?
In the case of a Mother’s Day gift, most people will find the product with the message that they want to tell their mothers.
Is it funny enough to make her laugh or heart touching enough to make her cry?
Apart from that, I usually look for the phrases that I can use for many different niches as well. This will save tons of time in creating multiple products.
Phrases like these:
“[NICHE] and Mom. Nothing scares me.”
or
“The Best Kind of Mom Raises a [NICHE].”
These phrases can be used with any profession.
From the example above, this seller uses the first phrase for the theatre director, prosthodontist, vice principal, postmaster, and band director.
I tried searching Etsy with the keyword “Theatre Director Mom” and found that this mug is at the top of the search results.
This seller also purchases Etsy ads too, so I think he or she is doing well with this business model. Otherwise, he or she wouldn’t have spent their money on ads.
Also, if you notice the number of search results, you’ll see that there are only 16 results for this keyword.
This means that if someone who has a mother working as a Theatre Director and they are looking for a gift for their mom based on the profession, this product has a very high chance of being sold.
Okay, you might think that the traffic volume for this keyword must be very low.
What you think is true, BUT what if we have products like this for another thousand professions?
We could get tons of *highly targeted* traffic with very, very *low competition*.
This example shows only the products when we combine the mom niche with the profession niche. We can also combine the profession niche with other family members, like dad, grandpa, grandma, son, daughter, etc.
It’s VERY easy to get highly targeted traffic and get tons of sales from selling this kind of product.
Step 3: Create Simple Text Designs
Now that we have the niches and phrases, the next thing to do is create the designs.
Not good at Photoshop? No worries. We don’t have to create a beautiful and professional design.
Most of the top-selling print-on-demand products have just a simple text-based design.
Don’t believe me? Check out the top-selling novelty coffee mugs on Amazon below.
You see? Most of them are just simple, black text messages on a transparent background.
Ninety percent of my top-selling products also contain only the simple text design.
This means that if you do good research for the niches and phrases, you’ll have a very high chance of making the products that can be sold well.
NOTE: If you are a student of the 1-Hour System, check out “Three EASY Techniques You Can use to Create Unique Designs that Sell Better.”
The techniques inside this unit can be used to create the designs for Mother’s Day too.
Not in the 1-Hour System yet? I have a special way to get access to it. Keep reading till the end 😉
Step 4: Find the Common Keywords for Mother’s Day
Okay, now that we have the niches, phrases, and designs, we can use them to create some products and list them on marketplaces.
BUT, before doing that, we have to do one other important thing, which is keyword research.
Without some good keywords in the product title, product tags, and product description, it’s quite difficult to get a sale.
You have to add some keywords that people will search for when they want to buy something.
Well, to list the print on demand product in the low-hanging style, we will first focus on the quantity.
It’s like the spaghetti method: “Throw it against the wall and see what sticks.”
We will list many products to marketplaces and see what can be sold. So the first set of keywords will be the general keywords for one product type plus ONE main niche keyword.
For example, if you’re listing coffee mugs in the profession niche, the list of keywords will look like this:
[NICHE], [NICHE] coffee mug, [NICHE] mug, [NICHE] gift, mug for [NICHE], …
Replace [NICHE] with the profession, such as engineer, teacher, nurse, etc.
Got the idea?
Okay, now how can we find the list of the general keywords for Mother’s Day?
Do we have to buy a keyword tool or something like that?
Well, you don’t have too…
I actually have a keyword tool which is MerchantWords, but, honestly, I just use it 3-4 times a month when I want to do deep product research.
When I find the general keywords, I don’t use the tool. I go to Amazon or Etsy and see what common keywords are in most of the top-selling products.
For example, if I want to find the general keywords for the Mother’s Day mug, I’ll go to Etsy and search for the keyword “mother’s day mug”.
From the picture above, you can see that there are some common keywords that most products have, which are: mother’s day gift, mothers mug, mother’s day mug, mom mug, mama mug, mommy [Shark] mug, funny mother’s day mug.
This might be specific to Mother’s Day, so let me search for the keyword “mother mug”.
The common keywords are not much different. Most of the keywords contain the word “mother”, “mother’s day”, “mom”, “mama”, mommy”, “coffee mug”, “gift”, “gift idea”, etc.
What I have to do is just list all these keywords and combine them with the specific niches for my products.
Like this: [NICHE] mother mug, [NICHE] mother’s day, [NICHE] mother’s day mug, [NICHE] coffee mug, [NICHE] mother gift, [NICHE] mom, [NICHE] mom gift, [NICHE] mama, [NICHE] mama mug, etc.
Note: Etsy only allows 20 characters for one product tag, so some keywords might not fit in it. You have to shorten some of them by removing some unnecessary words.
Okay, this is the way I do the keyword research when I list many products fast.
If you’ve just got started, this is the easiest and effective way to do the keyword research.
We don’t have to do the deep keyword research yet, because we don’t know which niches can be sold yet. We will do it when we’ve got some sales.
For now, this keyword research method is enough and can help you get the results real quick.
Step 5: List Products to Marketplaces
We are now in the LAST step, which is listing products to the marketplace.
I’ll divide this step into two parts, which are (1) creating a product on a supplier’s website and (2) listing that product on marketplaces.
Let’s start with the first part.
We have to find the print-on-demand company to create a product with them and use the product mockup to list the product on the marketplace.
There are many print-on-demand companies in the market you can use, but Gearbubble is what I recommend.
I’ve been working with Gearbubble for many years and they have been making over 20,000 products for me and my customers.
I rarely get a complaint from my customers about the products. I think the last time I had an issue was several months ago.
The wrong mug was sent to my customer, but Gearbubble sent the replacement to this customer immediately when I told them about this problem.
So if you’re looking for a reliable print-on-demand supplier with a cheap production cost, I highly recommend Gearbubble.
Okay, when you decide which supplier you want to let make a product for you, then you have to use the design you make to create a product on the supplier’s website.
The product creation steps for different suppliers are not much different. Here you have to:
- Select the product you want to create, such as a coffee mug, shot glass, tumbler mug, or anything you want.
- Set up the product information, such as the product title, description, tags, and then upload the design.
- Wait for the website to render the mockup of your product.
- Publish the product on the supplier website.
Now, you will have the product mockup image to use when adding it to the marketplaces, which is the second part.
There are several marketplaces you can sell print-on-demand products with the low-hanging style.
The marketplaces I recommend are Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Bonanza, and Storenvy.
These are the top marketplaces that have many millions of visitors a month and you can easily make some sales from the free traffic.
What you have to do is just create accounts with these marketplaces.
I recommend you add your products to all these marketplaces because the more sale channels you have, the more stable passive income you’ll get.
To list a product on these marketplaces, you have to use the product mockup image you got when you created the product on the supplier website.
We don’t have to order the real product and take a photo of it by ourselves. The mockup image is enough to create a new listing on the marketplaces.
Then, you have to carefully insert the product title, product description, and product tags.
Insert this information with the keywords you researched in the previous step. This will help your product become visible to visitors.
When you insert all of the product information, then click publish. Do this for all marketplaces. The steps are not much different.
When you get the order, you have to use the customer info on the marketplace you got a sale to create the order manually on the supplier website.
When the order is shipped, you have to submit the tracking info on the marketplace.
You don’t have to stock the product or spend money on ads with this business model.
Okay, these are all the steps you can follow to crush it with print-on-demand sales this Mother’s Day.
You can see that the process is really easy and there are no ads or inventory needed. We will get sales from the free traffic from various marketplaces passively.
When there is an order, the supplier will handle the production for us and ship the item to our customers automatically.
Remember, the most important key is to keep creating new products and add them to all marketplaces. The more products you have, the more stable passive income you will get.
Anyway, if you remember what I wrote earlier in this guide, the reason I like this business model is that I don’t have to be involved in it.
I actually set up the team to handle all the processes for me. As you can see, it’s very easy to create products and upload them to marketplaces.
But the problem is that it’s time-consuming. It’s better to hire some people to do it for you.
For the past two years, I have hired two people; a graphic designer and a person who uploads the products.
They published almost 100,000 products in my Amazon account. It took almost $30,000 to hire them to list this huge amount of products.
BUT it’s totally worth the investment because I made a lot in the past holidays for the past two years.
Even if I stop uploading new products, these published products are still making a good income for me. This is the beauty of selling print-on-demand products on the marketplaces.
Anyway, the good news is: if you want to start building your print-on-demand business as I do, you don’t have to pay lots of money to hire people to do that for you anymore.
You don’t have to list the products by yourself as well.
I have something special for you to help you do it easier, quicker, and save tons on hiring costs.
Let me introduce you the automated print-on-demand system called PODTurbo…