Print On Demand 3 Month Results (Beginner)

I've been trying pretty on demand for the last few months with some not so great results. since the last couple videos, I've been studying the print on demand, YouTube gurus and I think I know what I have to do. for this video, I'm giving myself a whopping 300 budget. so if you want to see how things work out, then make sure to watch till the end. make sure to hit that like button, because it does really help out the channel. let's start by toking about what's happened since the last two videos, because there's some not so good but pretty interesting news. if you haven't already, I would highly recommend you guys watch the first two videos in this series just to get an understanding for what's going on. maybe you can learn from my mistakes. but anyway, let's start toking about what's happened since then. so one good thing is that I've actually been getting some natural exposure onto my Etsy page. I've been getting a little bit of traffic here and there, but I don't have to pay for any of it. so it's really nice to see that somebody's still finding the store. but that's about as far as the good stuff goes. so here's all the bad stuff. I had a really bad experience with shipping to a customer. something actually happened internationally. maybe it got lost or whatever, but I had to figure that out and it was just a whole hassle to do that. after that, apparently printful had some kind of glitch in their system or whatever, but all Etsy stores were disconnected from printful. so that was a hassle. and finally, the biggest one- my Etsy store was closed. it was suspended. I don't know why or what happened. this one was by far the worst one to happen because just out of nowhere, my Etsy store is closed. one day I popped up to try to look at some analytiks and it said that the store was suspended. I hadn't received any emails about it. I didn't have any reason for why it happened. so I obviously sent out a support tiket to Etsy and said: what's going on? I don't even know. after around two weeks they finally got my store unsuspended and it was back there. everything was fine. but it was just really odd that I ran into that. obviously during that time my print on demand Journey had to take a pause. I didn't get anywhere. I didn't get many sales. there was just nothing really going on. after this big hiccup with Etsy I decided maybe I should try a different storefront, maybe I should go over to Shopify, and there were a lot of reasons why not just this one hiccup. since I was already planning on switching from Etsy, I decided this time I'm going to switch everything up. I decided I was gonna go into a different Niche, get different designs. I was going to make a Shopify store instead of Etsy, because there was just too much competition on Etsy. plus, I wanted to see what Shopify was all about. I was gonna try different advertising tikniques and I was going to switch to printify as my fulfillment company instead of printful, because I realized that if I use printify, the prices were lower, the shipping times were lower, the production times were lower and I could just have better profit margins. and the best part about this whole switch up, I'm going to give myself a 300 budget to see if throwing money at a problem can actually solve it in this whole pretty on demand business. the idea I had is simple: I'm gonna make a good looking Shopify store, advertise it well, and then I have a successful print on demand business. that's making me some money and I can just sit back and think about the next sports car that I want to buy- really I, since I plan on starting everything fresh. I needed a new Niche and this time I decided I was going to go with something a little bit more General to hit more people, have a wider audience, so that maybe I can get more sales. this time I decided to go for the pet Niche, but more specifically dogs. I was gonna have clothing with all these funny dog texts or just funny things for specific dog breeds and everything that you could possibly imagine. I was thinking in my head: if I have breathe specific clothing, then I could probably reach out to breed specific theme pages on Instagram and advertise it perfectly there. next was switching over to a Shopify store instead of etsy. now there was a huge learning curve for creating a Shopify store. I've actually never made a Shopify store before and your first time is actually kind of complicated. the main reason I wanted to switch over to Shopify stores because I'd have a lot more control over it. I could make it look any way I wanted, I could change the theme colors, I could put my clothing wherever, and there was just so much more customizability and control over a Shopify store than there was with Etsy. another reason is because I do think that I lost quite a few customers on Etsy. just to like the related searches, people could find other merch that was similar to mine and maybe they bought that instead. and lastly, it was the fees on Etsy that were really killing me. I was losing so much of my profit margins to these fees. it was six and a half percent transaction fee, another two point something percent for processing fee. it was just getting way too high for me to keep up with it. obviously there are still some drawbacks to Shopify. nothing is perfect in this world. as for Shopify, you do have monthly payments. the nice thing is you can have a two-week free trial and that's what I was kind of banking on along with switching to Shopify. I also switched from printful to printify and, as I said before, it's because I could just have better profit margins if I worked through printify. the product prices and the shipping were lower. you can actually choose where you want your fulfillment center to be located, and I actually ordered some samples and found that production time and shipping time were a lot faster than the samples that I got from printful. and the thing is these samples don't even look bad like. these are actually really nice quality samples. here's one of the shirts I made for my dog, Niche. if you want to buy something, let me know I can hook you up. and there's also this really really comfy, nice hoodie right here. it has just a nice simple design in the top left corner, but the quality of my products was actually really nice, so I felt pretty good selling this to other people. if you guys want to switch over to printify or if you want to start doing print on Demand with printify, then go ahead and check the description. there will be a link there where you guys can sign up and start with printify. now we're on to one of the biggest things for print on demand and that is advertisements. this time I had a budget of 300 and I know that might not sound like a lot, but for somebody like me who doesn't make a crazy amount of money all the time and knowing that my first Trials of print out a man didn't go as well, it can be a little bit worrying to just put this money somewhere and say, oh, it might just disappear like think about it. 300 is somewhere around 30 meals from Chipotle and if you're not on the Chipotle currency then I don't really know what you're on. the plan for advertising was to try three main form terms of paid advertising, along with the free social media exposure. the three forms of advertising would be Facebook ads, Instagram ads and theme page or influencer advertising. as for the free social media exposure, I would have to make a new account on Instagram and tik tok for this Niche, for my dog Niche, and try to be posting on there as often as I can. I think if you get a lucky break on tiktok and one of your videos goes viral for your print on demand business, that could actually be really, really amazing for the longevity of your business and for the sales in the current moment. now that you know the ins and outs of this plan that I have, you might as well know the timeline. I was planning to do this all within two weeks because the Shopify free trial ends after two weeks. so with everything planned out and ready, it was time to execute this process and create a successful print on a man business. well,

Print On Demand Shopify Store SEO

all right, guys, welcome to a new video. in today's video, we're going to be toking about the long-term approach to marketing and we're going to begin the whole marketing process. I guess you could think of this as a bridge between the actual marketing and getting traffic, and what this is is we're toking about the SEO portion. uh, for today, okay. so just to be clear, when everybody's watching this and everybody's going through building their stores, understand that SEO is one of those things that you don't actually see take place until you actually see the results, if that makes sense. and I remember when I first started doing SEO for my businesses, I really didn't know, uh, what the results were going to be. I was doing it right, but I was just didn't know what the results were going to be because the results weren't instantaneous. I mean, it's terrible to say that, but it's just the truth. they're not instantaneous. kind of like marketing is: I could go spend 500 in an ad and within two, three hours that whole ad budget could be spent and I know exactly if the ad is a working ad, if I'm making money, if I'm not making money. but SEO is drastikally different to where you're gonna have to do the work and then you're gonna have to wait for the results, and it's important for every business, at least in my opinion, to have a dichotomy between the two and an understanding between the two. more importantly, to Encompass the two types in their business, not just the, the advertising, social media, marketing side, but also the SEO portion. now, the reason why I say that is because every day is going to be a little bit different in your business. one day you're going to get sales through ads. one day you're gonna get sales through SEO. one day you're gonna get sales through- uh, you know, using Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter. every day is different, and when one thing doesn't work, you got four other five other things that do work, but one is again: SEO is one of those things that, if you do it properly, you can succeed. so I'll kind of tok about what SEO is. the first thing you want to do with your website is you want to look at every image that's uploaded and you want to add an ALT text if it's possible. so, once again, every Shopify theme is a little bit different. we're using the uh themepodshopcom. this is the Shopify theme that is literally created for print on demand. I mean, they we've toked about this before we've we've shown this before, we've tutorialed it. um, I mean, you guys know how it is. I've made videos on this so you guys can go ahead and check it out. I'll always leave the link in the description to that theme, and this is the theme that you're looking at right now. it's four print on Demand, right? so let's say, for example, this grid Builder, this is an image. yes, it's a banner, but it's an image. so I'll go over here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to add alt text to this image. now, Shopify has a nice little feature to where, and and most web Builders do have this feature, to be 100 honest, but you need to add alt text for what that image is. now alt text actually has a function. so, for those who don't know, originally alt text was never created for SEO purposes. it was created for the blind people. no offense, I mean not to be offensive, but it's for blind people on the internet. when you have something like Instagram or something like that, when you have the ability to add alt text, consumers who are blind are able to click on a specific image. well, I honestly have no idea how they can. I mean, once again, I'm not in that world, but once- but really, what it it's it's for is, it is descriptive text for what the image is. however, it's common practike now for individuals to use alt text to represent what the image is like- almost descriptive text- and when people do searches on Google, they'll find it, and you can actually go on Google and do research on what is alt text and essentially it's alt text that describes the image. but it was originally made for people who are blind, believe it or not, and so, uh, I mean, Instagram still uses it till this day for people who have visual uh impairments and things like that. but search engines use it to help you rank right, to help you, to help understand what the actual image is. so what we're going to do is we're going to add alt text from an SEO standpoint. now let's tok about what this SEO standpoint is. there's a lot of different tools out there. you have sem rush, you have ahrefs, you have uh, the SEO kit. you have so many different SEO based tools that show a comparison between search volume and uh, the actual uh keyword. so I'll just go ahead and pop into a software here and I'll just pause my screen and I'll show you exactly what I'm toking about so you can see here what tool I'm using. in front of me is called the Google Keyword Planner tool. now, this is once again a tool that you could use. if you're an Advertiser on Google. you get data for CPC value values, but seos can use this tool to understand search volume for specific keywords and all the different tools that are out there. the sem rushes, The Uber suggests all these kind of things. they pull data from this actual tool. so let's go ahead and go into our website now. remember, for every image, we're describing what that image actually is. so in my case, it could be very simple. I could type something like Irish hat or signature Irish flag hat or Irish flag hat. now you could do some research on those specific keywords and I could type in here Irish flag hat and I could perform a search. but something that you're going to want to understand is for competition. competition is subjective to the keyword search and I'll explain what I mean. you have a section here called competition. this competition actually has nothing to do with the competition of the search volume. the competition is referred to the competition in the ad spend section. so we could actually go ahead and read this together. it says competition shows how competitive placement is for a keyword specific to a location and a specific Network targeting option selected. the level of competition- low, medium or high- is determined by the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword. so biggest, biggest mistake: a lot of people who have no experience what they're doing, they think that competition refers to the competition in this circumstance and that's not the case. these average monthly searches have nothing to do that with the number of competition. the competition is referring to people's bidding strategies on the keyword and when we refer to bidding we're referring to advertising. so advertising is in the future, but for now what we want to look is that we want to look at the average monthly searches. now what I want you to do is I want you to understand that when you take a look at average monthly searches, the average monthly searches is genuinely generally less competitive when the search is less right. so, for example, if the keyword Irish- if I just search for the keyword Irish here- that's going to have a lot more search than the keyword Irish flag hat- is right. so you could go ahead and see here the keyword Irish has from 10 000 to a hundred thousand searches, okay, a month. Irish flag hat has a lot less. the reason why that exists or that isn't the case is because this is what's referred to as a long tail keyword. it's very, very important that if you're gonna walk into the world of SEO, you need to understand the difference of short tail and long tail keywords and their the implications of each, and really what that is is that a short tail keyword with less keywords in the phrase is generally less competitive than a keyword or, excuse me, is more competitive than a keyword that is long tail. now, that's not always the case, but 99 of the time that is the case. there are special cases where people, when they search with more specificity or they add more keywords, it could be a little bit more competitive for majority of the people in the print on demand space. you're not going to be experiencing that, okay, so that is not.

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How To Make Money With Print On Demand Shopify (For Beginners)

hey guys, nick vasil here, and in this video we are going to go over how to make money online with shopify print on demand, even if you're a complete beginner, and, more importantly, how you can make 100 to 700 per day, or that. after the intro, hey guys, mike fasil here, welcome to this video. before we actually remind you that several spots open up for this week's free workshop, which is literally the fastest and easiest way to make money online, sign up for it in the link below. okay, guys, so let's tok about how to make money with print on demand in shopify. let me just break down the rules, guys. so in the beginning, before we actually begin, all print on demand and shopify is is you create a shopify store. it literally takes like five seconds to go ahead and open up and what happens is you could literally upload designs on shopify. you could connect it with a service like printful, which is essentially print on demand, drop shipping. you never have to actually buy the products yourself until you actually go ahead and make a sale. don't worry if you don't know how to make a sale, if you don't know how to get customers, we'll show you exactly how in this full tutorial. but it's actually pretty simple, right? you create this e-commerce store, you link it with printful and then you can see exactly how the profit works. like to make a hundred dollars a day. all you need to do is sell something for i don't know, like 24 bucks. you sell less, maybe like seven a day. that's already a hundred and eleven dollars profit. if you sell 20 a day, which the methods that i'm going to show you, you can make 300 a day profit. if you sell 30- nine a day- a really interesting number- that's 623 profit per day. now that you understand how this exactly works, like i said, you put you link printful with shopify. the moment someone makes a sale, you take the 20 bucks, you literally go and it automatikally orders it from printful. they charge you eight dollars. remember you already got 24 or 20 from the sale. you could put it on a travel awards credit card, meaning you get free credit card points for free travel. like that's how i literally got millions of free travel rewards points. i lived in vegas for 30 days for free. i lived in hotels for free. i fled business costs for free. because of this method, you guys should be grateful actually that they're charging you because you could put it on a credit card the moment you understand that. now it's time to understand the business side of things. how are you actually going to make the sale number one? 99 of all of the entire print-on-demand businesses are based off of designs. so the first step is: how can you find a good design that is proven to make sales? the first thing that i like doing is going to aliexpress and i just like typing in animal t-shirt or whatever t-shirt that you want to sell, right, and the moment i'm there i would literally go and sort things by orders, because what it shows me are all the popular themes that work right now in the entire marketplace. you can see animals are very popular with like. i think this is a wave and a line. this is like a yin-yang style, so it's like with wolves, and this one's also a yin-yang style, but with cats. so just this idea. i'm already thinking, wow, this is a really good theme that i could go and create. i would go and screenshot this and keep it in a separate folder so that you could give it to a very cheap designer to go ahead and create a lot of designs for you like this, because this one design you can maybe create hundreds of different types of designs to put on your store. right? just think about this. if this works for cats, you could probably put cows on there, beagles on there, uh, bali dogs on there, bears on there, tigers on there. the fact that there's two different animals that have the same exact style and it's on the most orders just shows that this is a good concept to have. so just screenshot a bunch of those that already are working. i would even do the exact same thing. now that i see cats, i'm gonna type in cat t-shirt and do the exact same thing. what is actually gonna work? because, like i said, they're telling me all the things that work. look at this. there's two different stores that have this as the highest. there's even this that got sold the highest. so these are just all designs that i think i could at least model when it comes in time to actually selling on the store. oh, but, mike, i'm not good at designing. i'm not good at art skills. i don't know how to share my crayons. i'm gonna show you exactly how to do that, even if you don't have any of those skills at all. that's the first step: going to aliexpress and just seeing what products are already making sales. the next step that you can also go ahead and do is just go to redbubble and type in the exact same keyword, based off of the niche that you want to center your shopify, your ecommerce store, around. so if i scroll down, it's very interesting because you also see the very similar design katana thing right here that is also making some sales, but also are shown here on aliexpress with a bunch of sales- coincidence? i think not. you could see why a lot of the successful designs are the things that are modeled off of other places as well. what i like doing here also is when you have a certain design, you can model it on the most popular things and the most best-selling things, right? the thing about starting your own shopify store compared to you know putting your designs on print on redbubble, is: no one can find you on shopify unless you know your marketing and if they do, you want to make sure that you can convert them into a sale. how you know you can convert them on a sale is by seeing which ones are the best selling ones, like you could see the most relevant. oh, let's go back. you can see these are the best-selling style things. right, it's like this cat spaceship. so what if i put like a wolf in there? what if i put a bear in there? what if i put a dog in there? you know there's all these other like interesting sailor meow cats, so it's like mixing it with like anime parodies and then look at this kind of like halloween kitty shirt thingy and all these things. like i said, just screenshot a bunch of these. i'd also do this with cafe press type in cat t-shirt or whatever niche that you want to get into. right, like i said, all the designs already created. all you got to do is just find something that best, better serves you. and the thing is that you're selling on shopify. you're not having to compete against all these other people that are posting all their designs on here. so what i would do is scroll down and, if ever you like some certain type of theme, like this number one, ask yourself: can i duplicate this with like another niche or another type of theme? right, this is cats. you could do with dogs, horses, cows, pigs, dogs, doesn't matter. we did it for elephants and jesus and whatnot. um, same thing with here. cats make me happy, you, not so much. dogs make me happy, you not so much. women make me happy, you not so much. my mom makes me happy, you not so much. all these things play to a certain theme that you go ahead and sell on here. another thing that i would do is also do a lot of research- is go on to pinterest, type in all pins and just do the exact same thing. what are people actively bookmarking to buy later? look at this. you see certain things that are starting to be more consistent with all the other research that you did. right, i saw this multiple times. right, um, certified cat lover. pause, have claws. you had me at meow. start screenshotting the things that you think your audience, your customers, would rather resonate with. the moment you have all those designs, all you got to do is go to upwork and type in graphic designer, scroll down, go to hourly rate less than 10 or below. go over here, because this is going to be the best quality, i guarantee it- and you just type in philippines. the reason why is because a lot of them are english speaking. uh, like, literally all the philippines are just designed to serve, i guess, like the american race when it c.

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FREE SHOPIFY PRINT ON DEMAND COURSE | COMPLETE A-Z BLUEPRINT 2022

Hey guys, It's Kamil Sattar and it's The Ecom King. In this video, I'm going to be giving you a completely free print-on-demand course for 2022 to 2023.. In this free course, we're going to be teaching you everything from the very beginning, which is finding designs and then running paid advertisements on multiple different platforms. Now, the reason why me and the team create these free courses for you on YouTube that lasts for hours on hours is because we want to make sure that you don't have to pay for any paid courses to learn this information, and you can learn it from this YouTube channel for completely free, in your own time. The only thing that we ask for in return is to like the video and, if you're able to as well, leave a comment which will thank me and the team for making these free courses for you so you can get successful with your own e-commerce businesses. Now, this is going to be a step-by-step print-on-demand course using Shopify for 2022 to 2023, and there's going to be no BS involved. You're going to be learning absolutely everything you need to find success. Now, this free print-on-demand course for 2022 is going to teach you how to find winning designs, how to build a premium POD store, how to set up all the apps needed, how to make mockups and video ads, how to run Google ads, Pinterest ads, Facebook ads, TikTok ads and even influencer marketing. Now, if that sounds amazing to you guys, don't forget to smash the like button and also leave a comment to show your support. How does print-on-demand work? for those that don't understand, It starts off with your customer going to your Shopify store and placing an order for that item that you've designed. then the order will go to your POD supplier. Now, if you hear me saying POD in this video- and this course it means print-on-demand- Then what happens is your POD warehouse will then create that design for you. The supplier puts your artwork onto the product for you, then it prints the item that you then create. The supplier takes care of the packaging. Then it gets shipped directly to your customer. Now, what makes this business model so lucrative and amazing is that you don't need to buy any stok or any inventory, which means you're limiting the risk. The only thing you need to do is create the designs, put them on mockups and if people like the design, they'll order them, and then your POD supplier- dropshipping supplier- will then ship them directly to your customer. Let's tok about the pros and cons of POD in 2022.. The pros are instant branding, meaning that you can instantly brand your business, your e-commerce store, so people are going to be buying into your brand. You're not tiknically having to go and buy other products that are not yours. All of these will be your own unique designs. It's going to have fast shipping and local shipping, meaning that if you're selling from the US, you'll have a supplier from the US that can send it to the US, Building a sellable asset very fast. What this means is you're being able to basically create a business that you're building as an asset and overrun about one to two years. if you're able to grow it successfully, you can then sell the asset for hundreds, even millions, of dollars. It's less saturated than dropshipping. Now, lots of people that do print-on-demand have also done dropshipping. vice versa. The great thing about print-on-demand is it's less saturated than dropshipping normal AliExpress products or any products from China. Now, the cons of print-on-demand in 2022 is limited creativity left, meaning that the designs that you're going to create. there's less creativity left because a lot of people have done a lot of designs. It doesn't mean that there's none left. It just means it's going to be harder to find unique designs. It doesn't mean you need to have unique designs to make money. You can recreate other people's designs and you can make a little bit of a change to their designs and make them even better. Now it's harder to advertise. When it comes to advertising these products, you've got less platforms- for example, Facebook ads, Google ads- to advertise with to find success. You're limited to a few different platforms. The other negative point is it takes longer than dropshipping to actually set up and run. in terms of setting up from the ground up To actually run advertisements, it takes a little bit longer. If you haven't got as much time, then this might not be a better option for you. The last negative point is profit margins can be low. It doesn't mean that it's always low, It just can be low. That's why we're going to be teaching you in this free course how you can make sure you've got profit margins. The good thing about print-on-demand is normally you're going to get a higher average order value than dropshipping. You're going to get a longer customer lifetime value, meaning they're buying from you more than once because they're buying into your brand and into your designs. These are going to be the print-on-demand cost involved in 2022.. Now, these are not going to be a complete pinpoint pricing. This is just rough pricing that you're going to be expecting. The Shopify plan is going to be $29.99 a month, but if you use my free trial, then you'll get 14 days for free. I'll leave a link to that in the description and I'll be showing you that a little bit later on. The domain name is going to be around about $14.99 as a one-off fee. Your theme- meaning the actual theme used on your website- is going to be around about $100 to $200, and it's going to be a one-off fee. We'll be explaining which theme we recommend in this video a little bit later on. The logo can be made for free. The apps are going to be around about $20 to $50 per month. Your POD designs can either be done for free by yourself or you can pay for somebody to do them for you for around about $50 a month. To finish off, the marketing is going to be around about $1,000 to $5,000.. This is the most important part, because if you don't advertise your business, no one's going to buy your product. In terms of the marketing spend on a monthly basis, I always say you're going to be spending between $1,000 to $2,000 dollars a month and you want to be topping this up by $500 every single month. It doesn't mean you have to have $5,000 a month or $2,000 a month. You can start with $1000 a month and just keep topping it up by $250 a month, Whatever profits you make. if you do make profits, you can reinvest it into the market. Now this is extremely important. You must listen. This is a long-term business. This is not a get-rich-quick business. This business has changed thousands of lives, but on the long-term basis. It doesn't mean that you can't see success within the first year. I know people that have seen success within the first year, first six months, even a few months, but it doesn't guarantee that you are. I'd always say: "Look at this as a one to three year game plan". You guys can skip to the part of the video you need from this course or watch this course in full, which is recommended. Timestamps will be in the description and there will be a scroll bar on the video to skip to the part you need. If you already know about print-on-demand and you just want to learn how to do the advertising part, you can skip to it. If you're a complete beginner or you've never seen success with print-on-demand. I'd recommend you watch this video from here. How much cash flow do you need to start with in 2022? I'd recommend around about $1,500.. The more obviously, the better. You need to top this up by $300 to $800 on a monthly basis if you want to maintain momentum and success. I know a lot of you guys are going to have loads of questions for me and the team and you want to have some help. Now we have created a free Discord and it will be in the description: a.

The SAD Truth About Shopify Print On Demand (Beginners Beware)

hey, joe, it's folks here. this video is going to either depress you or it's going to make you very excited, and not excited like in a weird way- in a good way. and i say depressed because today i'm going to be showing you some real print-on-demand stores and highlighting some things that i advise not to do. and if you've done some of those things well, maybe you will end up being depressed, but don't be, because i actually got all the stores from my print-on-demand facebook group. every single tuesday i make this post right here where i ask people to share their store url so that way i can review it in videos like this. so if you're watching this video and you're not a member, check it out. there's a link down in the description. you can share your url and you can maybe get some help. and this video might also excite you, because i'm also going to be showing some awesome print-on-demand stores. so maybe, if your store is sort of like the ones that i'm showing, you're going to be excited about that, but again, not excited like in a weird way, or anything like that. some of you have probably wondered what makes certain people successful with print on demand and what makes people not successful with their print-on-demand store, and i think really, for this video to sink in, we first have to define what i mean by success. for me, success just means making consistent sales every single day, sales that actually make you money. toking about the big bucks? no, actually not the big bucks. what i'm toking about is just being able to make five to ten sales a day, profiting like a hundred bucks or so every single day on your store, and then doing that for an entire month or so and having thousands of dollars in profit. for me, that is what success really means, and if you agree with that, smash the like button. it sounds silly, but that's going to help this video get recommended to a wider audience and, honestly, too, it does help my small channel to grow. now some of you guys won't want to believe what i am actually saying. keep in mind there's a chance i could be completely wrong. i just want to share some of the experience i have running my own stores, reviewing hundreds of yours and also working directly with students on theirs. at this point, students of mine have achieved about five million dollars in sales. so basically, what i'm saying is today is all about my experience. if you disagree, that is perfectly fine. so the first thing you don't want to do with a print-on-demand store is something like this. this is shop bengal athletiks. essentially, the store owner discovered print on demand and wanted to create their own clothing line, so they came up with a name and a logo and they started putting it on a bunch of print on demand products, as you can see here on the page. in a few minutes i'll tok about why that is actually a bad idea. and the second thing you want to avoid is creating stores like this with really abstract designs placed on a bunch of different products. don't get me wrong. this is really cool, these designs look awesome, but honestly, at the end of the day, this is all just really abstract stuff that is just thrown on a bunch of different products. and i know what you're thinking. but why, joe? why should we avoid doing this with print on demand? and that brings us, honestly, to the sad truth about print on demand. the fact is is that print on demand is a business model that is best done with direct response marketing, meaning people that you see that are successful- and remember before we define successful as just consistent sales on a store- are using direct response marketing. they're on social media, whether it's organic, on a pinterest page or instagram or tiktok or facebook, or they are using some sort of paid advertisement. shopify stores that are successful are doing stuff like this. you can see all of these ads here really actually represent specific niches and in order to make these work, you have to realize that the sad truth about print on demand is that it is all about creating tacky niche designs, and when i say tacky, i don't mean it in a negative way. i mean doing stuff like this and creating simple and unique designs that represent specific niches. and this is what i call the sad truth, because a lot of people starting print on demand want to sell their art or they want to create some sort of a clothing line, and they see people online sharing big numbers from their store and they wonder why they are struggling. and that's because the people that are successful have realized that print on demand is about the niche and they've created tacky niche products for them. our niche is what's actually going to get people interested in our stuff. if someone was scrolling on social media and saw these designs here being ran as a facebook ad, for example, or an instagram post, they might think they're cool, they might click the like button, they might even visit the store, but when it comes to actually purchasing, they have no reason to do it. our niche is what gets people interested. our niche is the reason they buy our tacky niche design. now, a niche is just defined as a specialized subsection of the population. in other words, it is a group of people that share a common interest, a common passion or maybe a common identity that they have could be something that you choose as your niche. back to these ads here. they all represent a niche that someone is really interested in and when they see this stuff they say, whoa, that is super unique, i'm going to buy it. i love the fire pit, i love to camp. or, if we scroll down more, i love my dog. or, if we scroll down even further, i love to read books and i need this super unique item. essentially, print on demand is all about creating impulse purchases with people on social media to buy tacky niche designs like this. this store here has done a fantastik job at doing that. you can see all of their designs just really represent the beach. the store is called coastalpassioncom. all of their designs have imagery of the beach, sea turtles, stuff like that, where, when people who do love the beach see this stuff, they're going to be inclined to buy it because the niche actually gives them a reason. essentially what i'm saying: if you're jumping into print on demand, the sad truth is you have to realize that really, if your goal is to be successful in my definition of successful, which is making five to ten sales a day relatively on autopilot by using social media- you need to actually choose a niche. you can't do abstract art, you can't create a clothing line, and you actually need to create a niche, specific item. now, of course, if you wanted to sell your art, or if you did want to start a clothing line, you could certainly do that, but your strategy for success would be much different than what most of you are actually trying to do. what i mean by this is all the time, like inside of my print-on-demand facebook group, i will see someone make a post. they'll say something like: i've been running my store for six months, i'm running ads, i'm posting on social media, i'm getting people visiting the store, but not a single person has purchased. when they share the url, they end up having something like this that does not represent a specific niche. i've seen this time and time again where people make posts, they tok about trying social media marketing and then not making sales, and then they're doing stuff like this where they don't have a niche. they're creating abstract designs and then expecting people that have never seen their store before to want to buy it. if you are doing direct response marketing, which is showing your product to people that are not currently shopping, for example, social media- you need to give them a reason to buy, and that reason is the niche. that is what print on demand is all about. and if you're someone that is not excited- and again, not like excited in a weird way- at the beginning i said there would be two types of people watching this: those that are excited, not in a weird way, and also people that are now depressed because i

Which Platform is Best for Print on Demand: Shopify or Etsy?

hi guys, it's heather welcome to my channel or welcome back to my channel, so today i wanted to go over a topic that has been most asked, and i feel like there's a lot of people who really don't know where to start. as far as print on demand and etsy goes, or print on demand and shopify goes, a lot of people are kind of in uh analysis, paralysis phase in creating their stores, where they're like, okay, well, i can create a store in shopify, i can create a store on etsy, but which one is right for me and should i waste my time on one platform rather than the other? and sometimes it does feel like a waste of your time, but it might be the best option for you as far as your budget goes, as far as your knowledge goes and your stages in owning a business. a lot of people don't know all that goes into owning their first online business, especially with e-commerce. there's so many tax implications, there's so much legal things that go on with that as well. it's not all dandelions and butterflies out there, unfortunately, and that's why i wanted to make this video is: should you use shopify, starting out with a print-on-demand business, or should you use etsy starting out? i think a lot of my visitors and viewers on tiktok and youtube and instagram all are in relatively kind of the same area, where they're either beginner to intermediate and they're looking for help on, first of all, their budgets, second of all, how they should start their ecommerce journeys. and we're going to sit down in a moment here and i'm going to give you guys all the details on what the pros and cons are and hopefully by the end of this video, guys, you can figure out if you want to start with etsy or start with shopify, and i'm going to go over my experiences with shopify and etsy. i've been on both platforms with print on demand and there are perks to both platforms. i'm not gonna lie, i'm not pro one of them, but personally, what i do for my t-shirts in sweatshirt business is- i saw an etsy. some people have different options as far as that goes. some people absolutely will not use etsy, some people will absolutely not use shopify. so it really is ultimately dependent on you and where you want to take your business. but for me personally, i chose etsy and i'm gonna go over why i choose etsy and continually choose at sea as far as print-on-demand businesses go- and we're gonna get into that during this video today, so stik around for more [Music]. so, guys, one of the first things i want to tok about is shopify: why people use shopify, what are the pros, what are the cons, and then we will get into what is the pros and cons of etsy, and we're going to compare the two. people generally use shopify for drop shipping. they use it for merch and inventory that they sell on their websites. they use it for handmade businesses, and there's so many other business models you can create with shopify, such as a digital product shopify store and all that. there's so much again that goes along with shopify, and that's one of the reasons why a lot of people use it, especially if they're in the print on demand world. shopify just really works with doing print on demand as well, and i think it's a really great place to go. so one of the pros for shopify is there is a high amount of traffic control, so you are able to scale your store quite high with shopify and although there are methods of doing that with etsy, it really isn't worth your while to scale an etsy store through doing ads and campaigns, but you still can. as far as etsy goes, with shopify, you have a lot of control over all of your shopify store with a third-party platform such as etsy. etsy can basically suspend your account, shut it down, shadow ban it at any time that they would like. so with shopify, you don't have those issues. you're not scared, at the end of the day, as far as that goes, that shopify is going to shut you down because you own that website and, tiknically, they really can't shut you down unless there's some big legal issue with your store. that's when they would shut you down. so, as far as that goes, shopify is really great with kind of giving the seller more control over their business. there are a lot of cons to shopify, though, and usually those cons are related to being a new seller or a new business owner or entrepreneur in the e-commerce world. now, one of the main cons is it's very costly for new businesses to get started and your starting budget with shopify is usually much higher than it would be with etsy. so generally, for a new shopify store, you're looking at spending a few hundred dollars when you first start off. if you're really looking to get into doing ads, creating really great products, maybe getting mock-up photos for your store. the shopify subscription alone is 29 a month at the cheapest plan and most inexpensive plan. so those are things you kind of have to look into and account for if you're starting a shopify store. the main thing that is a huge difference between shopify and etsy- is that you don't have as much market validation when you start a shopify store. market validation- and the simplest of terms i can give- is that you validate your market that you're selling to, by the amount of demand of that specific market. maybe it's a niche or a product. you want to make sure that there's a demand for that product in the niche that you're selling in, and then, on top of that, you want to make sure people actually want to buy your product. so you may have the right niche and product type selected. however, the design might not work and you're not getting that market validation as far as that goes. so that's something that's really tough with shopify, because you will be spending a lot of money just to test out your market, test out what's your target audience, what's the best-selling niche, what's the best-selling product, and you may have all that correct, but your design might not be correct. these are things that you run across with shopify as a new business owner. so, just for the purpose of this video, if you're a beginner as far as owning an e-commerce store, if you're a beginner with shopify, drop shipping or print on demand, i think shopify is just more advanced for people who don't know exactly what type of product they're creating. they don't know what niche they're going into. on top of that, they might not have a lot of skill with design yet and maybe you could outsource people from fiber to kind of create some really good designs. but with shopify it's just really hard to validate your products. and i will give you guys an example of my shopify store when i first began- and that's going to be in a future video here, but look out for that one- because i'm really excited to share my experience with shopify and why i do suggest etsy over shopify, and i know that's not a popular opinion among the e-commerce world. a lot of people prefer shopify over etsy. for me personally, my best advice is to never keep all of your eggs in one basket. try to kind of establish maybe a online presence or a different stream of income, especially if you're doing this full time. you don't want to stik just to etsy. that's what i try to tell my viewers, my students, my clients, the people that i work with on their own etsy and print on demand stores- is you don't want to just quit your day job for at sea alone, because etsy does have a lot of control over their stores. there's things that you want to control in your business and etsy has that control over a lot of things in your business. so it's good to start with etsy, but it is also good to branch out later down the line. i also wanted to delve into etsy and etsy's pros and cons. so etsy has always been a market for handmade and unique items that they sell on their site and that's kind of their aesthetik, so to speak. in the past few years they have opened that unique part of etsy up to print on demand sellers and people who sell t-shirts, sweatshirts and items that are not necessarily mass produced, but they do fall into that category as unique and a lot of handmade businesses do not like print onto me.