Selling t-shirts can be an incredibly powerful way to make money online, and it requires very little to no upfront investment, making it a great option for people who don’t have much money to start a business.
T-shirts have been incredibly popular for decades. They’re comfortable, durable, and come in a dizzying array of colors and styles. You can find a t-shirt for just about any kind of interest you can imagine. People love to purchase t-shirts that speak of the things they are passionate about. Whether it’s their family, their hobby, their profession, their pet, or something else, people enjoy wearing t-shirts that let the world know what they’re into.
That’s why creating t-shirts can be incredibly lucrative. If you can find a topic that speaks to a large group of people, create an attractive design that really works for that group, and then put that design in front of the right people, it is almost certain to make money. Of course, finding the right topics and designing well to fit that niche is the tricky part. It takes a significant amount of time and research to find topics and designs that will succeed.
Let’s get started.
Brainstorming And Market Research
Contents
When it comes to thinking of names for your t-shirt business
it’s important to not “over think” it. The goal here is not to create a cool sounding hip t-shirt brand. The goal is to sell t-shirts. That being said let’s pick a very specific niche to work within and name our brand within the vocabulary of that specific niche. Later we will discuss how we are going to leverage the power of certain print on demand sites to launch our brand which will also be providing the eCommerce storefront for our brand but for now just remember four letters. KISS which stands for keep it simple stupid! We are not looking to create the worlds best branded t-shirt company we are looking to sell t-shirts fast, and go from idea to implementation in as little time as possible.
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First step: Identify A T-Shirt Niche
When you are identifying a t-shirt niche for your t-shirt company you can use tools such as Google keyword planner to determine if a certain t-shirt keyword is going to have enough volume to give you a good amount of sales. Simply sign up for a Google AdWords account and take advantage of using the Google keyword planner to research keywords around your niche. One of the best tools that you are going to need is TeeSpy, it is a piece of software that helps you find the hottest selling t-shirt designs by spying on other online t-shirt sellers. The software scans active campaigns on all the big t-shirt selling sites. It then pulls all that data and organizes it for you in one easy to see the layout. This software can also be used to scan what’s trending or popular on major social networking sites.
Pros
Finds thousands of best-selling Tshirt design campaigns! (Teespring campaigns, Teechip Campaigns, Viralstyle and more!) in minutes
Can filter results based on FB Likes, sales and cost
Includes a market finder tool that is fantastic
Easy to use
Cons
Requires monthly subscription
Second Step: Decide on a Name
Once you choose your t-shirt niche, you can choose to create a logo or not in the next segment. Personally, I recommend doing the bare minimum. In this method, we are going to use a print on demand site called Skreened. Skreened is a print on demand t-shirt provider that will host your t-shirt e-commerce site, print your t-shirt designs, and ship them to your customers at no hard cost to you. You simply define the mark up of each t-shirt design and skreened.com will take care of the rest. You can also use Teespring, but Teespring requires you to sell a certain number of shirts before any shirts will be printed, so if you don’t meet that minimum requirement, your efforts will all be in vain. This can make it tricky for beginners, since you never know for sure if a design will meet the minimum to be printed, that’s why we recommend Skreened.
So once you have created your skreened.com account, navigate to https://skreened.com/account/stores#create once you are here enter in the chosen shop name, shop URL, and shop description of your choice. When choosing your shop URL make sure to choose a URL that ranked high volume in your initial keyword research. So for example, if the URL skreened.com obamashirts is available, you will want to scoop it up. By choosing a shop URL that is an exact match within your niche, you already have a leg up on the competition as skreened. com’s SEO is very good and you are likely to rank top ten on Google in as early as 2 days. Now navigate to your skreened. com’s settings and enter in your Paypal information. Skreened will pay you a commission via Paypal for each t-shirt you sell. You can define this default commission per each skreened.com shop you open.
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Branding, and positioning your t-shirt brand
As mentioned above I prefer to build my t-shirts shops as fast as possible. If you are not interested in creating a unique brand and position for your t-shirt business then this segment is 100% optional. However, if you are looking to build something unique and personable you can potentially win more customers with a well-branded product.
Branding and positioning your t-shirt business should start with a core set of values or attributes you wish to associate your business with. Typically I like to start with a one-paragraph brief modus operandi of what my business stands for. From there you can narrow it down to a one-sentence mission. Furthermore to a three-word phrase, and then ultimately a one-word term to sum up the brands attitude.
Use the 1 word keyword you end up with to search for stock vector imagery at iStockPhoto.com. Find a simple icon that can be used as your t-shirts brand graphic symbol. Feel free to explore other sources for graphic imagery as well such as pond5, and graphic-river.net. Now you can use a free graphics editor such as GIMP to attach your new logo symbol to the name of your company. Choose a simple font such as ITC Avante Guarde, or Helvetica so it’s easy for others to read. Once your logo is complete upload it to your skreened.com shop under shop settings. If you like you can go one step further and create free business cards and postcards with your skreened.com URL using vista print but may be unnecessary as this method is geared towards automating the lead generation process using Google, Wanelo, Twitter and Pinterest but before we talk about that, let’s go into the next segment where we will discuss how to create thousands of t-shirt designs.
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Promote and profit
Congratulations, the brunt of the work is complete and you NOW have generated one or more t-shirt shops with a few hundred t-shirt designs that you are ready to promote. Now let’s get started on promoting your t-shirts on Twitter, Pinterest, and wanelo. Most of you know what Twitter and Pinterest are by now (I assume) but many of you may have not heard of wanelo.com. Wanelo is a site similar to Pinterest but features “Approved” stores in product feeds. Skreened.com just so happens to be an approved store for wanelo so we’re in luck. By having a shop on skreened.com you are immediately tapped into the 200k+ audience on wanelo. When you post one of your skreened.com t-shirt designs it will be featured to all 200k followers of the skreened.com wanelo account. This gives your t-shirts instant exposure, instant shares, and instant traffic to your t-shirt storefront. Wanelo is the singlehanded most powerful promotional tool as it serves as an instant traffic and SEO boost to your skreened.com titles. Now the designer automatically sends the designs to the promoter for promotion so once you have run the designer you can instantly start to run the promoter. All you must do is enter in your Pinterest, wanelo and twitter account information into the settings tab.
FINAL WORDS
As you rank higher, create more niche t-shirt shops and scale your t-shirt empire you will see your profits grow 20-100% every month depending on how much work you decide to put in and how many quality t-shirts you can create. The bottom line is, you now have a tool to create an unlimited number of niche t-shirt shops. The “Shotgun Spray” method in full force so go out, use the TeeSpy research tool that provides you with and create as many niche t-shirt shops as possible.
Join Teespy from the official website!