7 Tips You Need BEFORE Starting Print on Demand
I started Print on Demand back when I was completely broke as a teenager, and over the past few years I've been able to grow my shops to the point where they've brought in millions of dollars. This journey has not been easy, but there's things that I've learned along the way that could help you if you're looking to start your own online business.
Today, I'm going to give you the seven tips that helped me go from literal zero to a multi seven figure business. If you implement these tips early on, I promise that you'll have a better shot at getting what you want and actually succeeding with this business.
Tips to Start a Print-on-demand Business Successfully
Tip 1: Milestone Method
Before I had any success with business model, I would spend hours every day reading articles just like this one, feeling like I was doing something. But in reality, every hour that I spent reading a article could have been spent actually growing my business. The problem wasn't that I didn't have time or money, it was that my goal was too overwhelming to actually move towards.
When you're trying to make $10,000 a month, but you haven't even made your first 10 sales yet, bridging that gap feels almost impossible. The milestone method is about breaking down that gap into smaller, more manageable milestones that are actually really simple and easy to achieve. From making your first logo, to coming up with the name for your shop and posting your first product for sale, these are all little milestones that you have to hit along your journey to $10,000 a month and beyond.
Now sometimes these types of goals will feel insignificant, but just remember that big milestones like $10,000 a month is just a result of lots of smaller wins compounded over time. This is so important that I made a small wins checklist to walk you through each step of the process that you'll face as a beginner so that you can just tack tackle everything one step at a time. The steps are even linked to other resources, so hopefully you won't get too stuck. When you finish this article, I'll tell you how you can get this guide.
But as silly as it might sound, the easiest way to get to 3, 4, $10,000 a month and beyond is starting with the first milestone. It's setting up your account. It takes you less than one hour, you only ever have to do it once, and this is the step that most people never get past.
The point is just don't spend hours a day like I did waiting around. Just take the first step and get signed up for your free accounts. Your first milestones might seem small, but if you take enough of these easy, small steps towards your goal, they will compound and build up enough over time that you eventually will make money.
Tip 2: One Listing Away
Now, tip number two is sort of a mantra that you can remember to keep you going and keep you focused on what you need to do to make money. When I was starting out and I made some of my first ever sales, I noticed that as soon as one product in my shop started selling, all the other products that I had posted for sale in that shop would start selling as well. The more products that I would post, the more overall sales I would get, because as soon as one product started selling, all the others would get a little bit of a boost as well. It didn't matter if some were super good and some were super bad because it would just average out over time.
This taught me that you're always just one listing away. You just need one product listing to pop off so that your Etsy algorithm can start pushing out all your other products, your first product, your first 10 or maybe even a hundred products they might not sell. But if you keep posting and keep pushing forward, eventually you will post that listing that changes your entire business. You're just one listing away from changing your entire life.
Now there's more benefits that we'll talk about to having lots of listings, but the main takeaway is that posting more product listings is the path to success with this business. The most successful shops all have the most listings. Making more listings makes you better over time, and having more listings in your shop gives Etsy more opportunity to push out your products to new customers for free without having to pay for ads.
Tip 3: A Little Money Goes A Long Way
Now this listing momentum based approach will get you where you want to go, but if you want to get there quickly, a little bit of money goes a long way. When I got started back in 2019, I only had a few hundred dollars to my name since I had spent almost all of my money trying to stick it out in the real estate business, which is quite expensive by the way. But I took the last few hundred dollars that I had to my name and I invested it all into learning how to do this Etsy dropshipping business. I thought that if I was able to get to the point where I'm making even just $1000 a month, never mind $1000 a week or $1000 a day. But even if I could just make $1000 a month, then investing a few hundred dollars upfront would pay off many times over.
Basically, the downside was at Most, I lost my five or six hundred dollars if I never made anything back. But the upside was totally disproportionate. This allowed me to post products like crazy and get the software that I needed to and buy good mockups. And I wasn't obsessed over losing these few hundred dollars, since I knew that I could make it back hundreds or even thousands of times over.
Look, you can start this business almost entirely for free without investing hardly anything upfront, maybe as low as $50. But when you do go that route, you end up investing a lot more time. If you only spend $50 to start your business, you can still make it, but it might take you three or four times longer to reach even just $1,000 a month. But if you invest a few hundred extra dollars upfront, it might speed up your timeline by like five months, which means you'll start hitting your goals a lot sooner and you'll actually want to follow through with the business.
Again, you can basically do this entire thing for free. I just think that if I hadn't invested to see results within the first week or even the first month, that I probably wouldn't have stuck around long enough to see my first million.
Tip 4: Mockups Matter
Plus without any money at all, it's much harder to get great mockups. Now even though I try and hammer this home in every article that I talk about Print on demand. For some reason, some of you guys still don't understand just how important the mockups are. If your design is is an absolute 10 out of 10, but you put it on a 3 out of 10 mockup, you won't get any sales. But if your design is a 3 out of 10 and you put it on a 10 out of 10 mockup, you could get some sales on that listing.
I found after selling tens of thousands of products across multiple product types, that the mockup is usually as important, if not sometimes more important, than the design itself. The mockup is what brings your design to life and puts the image of owning that product in the customer's mind, which makes them even more likely to buy. Etsy has a vibe in the customers that spend spend money on Etsy are looking for products usually with that same premium high quality vibe in mind.
So if your product listings look like they belong on ebay, then you need to make them look like they belong on Etsy. The way that you do that is by having high converting mockups. Now how do you find these? You look at shops that have done very well selling the product that you're trying to sell, and you look to see if you can find the same mockups that they're using.
So if a shop has tens of thousands of sales, chances are that their product mockups convert pretty well. So you want to see if you can buy that exact mockup, or at least a very similar one. It's not by looking on PlaceIt, because their mockups generally don't work. You can verify that yourself by trying to find a top tier shop that's using PlaceIt mockups. You do it by looking at what's working, adding your own twist, and not by reinventing the wheel.
Tip 5: Getting Early Wins
I believe that early success is just one of the reasons why I was able to keep going and eventually make millions of dollars with this business. Getting an early Win Making a sale shortly after you decide to start this business might give you the confidence and the motivation that you can actually do this too.
Look, I'll be honest, when I opened up my first shop and made a sale within a week, I got lucky because I had chosen to post my products in a profitable niche. Now, unless you want to waste your time to get sales early on, you have to have the best product design and niche combination to make it all work.
Here's what I do every time I start a new shop: I pick a supplier who offers best selling products. Then I pick some high velocity niches to make designs for and then I make designs for those niches.
Picking Your Supplier
Now, from the profit that you take home to your customer satisfaction, picking the best print provider for the product you're selling will make or break your business in print on demand you work with a supplier like Printify who provides you with white label products. You simply pick one and then upload some kind of design to it, whether it's just text, an image or an AI design and then you list it for sale in your storefront with a nice mockup. I only sell products that are already best sellers. That basically means things like apparel or candles or mugs or phone cases or any best selling product. The higher the average price, the better.
Now on Printify, when you choose the product you're selling, you're actually presented with multiple print provider options. This is because Printify doesn't actually print and ship the items themselves. They just connect you with a print facility that can. So each print provider for that product can offer different prices, colors and sizes, and they operate completely different from one another. If you pick the most obscure product on Printify, chances are that the market is much smaller for it. Again, don't reinvent the wheel, just build off what's working.
High Velocity Niches
Now look, these bestseller products are going to be competitive and hard to sell unless you have designs on them that target high velocity niches. Now finding this kind of niche starts by deciding if you're going to run a single niche store or a single product store.
The single niche store is built around a single niche. Think about a shop that's made entirely for selling pet designs. Those designs can go on any product. The single product shop only sells one type of product. But their products can target a bunch of different types of niches. Think of a shop that only sells mugs, but those designs can target a bunch of different interests. This type of shop is how I made my first million. When you're only focused on selling one product, you can make designs that target all kinds of interest groups.
My strategy is to build out a shop around one best selling product that might be apparel, mugs, phone cases, candles, basically anything that sells all day, every day. Then the designs on that product are for targeting customers.
For example, if I'm selling candles, I can make designs that a fisherman could enjoy, or a basketball player, or a gardener, or a yoga instructor. The point is to target all kinds of niches with your product, no matter what product you're selling, so that anyone could have a reason to buy. You can make designs for absolutely every niche or idea that you can think of, and that's exactly what I did when I got started. But you can be even more effective by using high velocity niche keywords. We can use a tool like Listing View to analyze our niche idea. So for example, we could use a tool like the Keyword Finder to look for something like fishermen.
Now this brings up details like the average listing age, so you can see how long listings have been active for on average using this keyword. We can also see things like views, competition and the recommendation score. But if I was to look for something like a funny fisherman candle, you can see that the listings here are much younger, which is better for our shop and we have a higher recommendation score on this keyword. And we can use this to find other recommended keywords to use in our listings so that we have super optimized SEO. And honestly, it gives us keyword recommendations that I probably never would have thought of to use in the listing.
Now this might not directly affect the design you're making since it's still a fisherman design, but the way that you tell the algorithm what the product is and who it's for makes a huge difference in how well it performs. The perfect niche to sell in is something that's working right now, that isn't too competitive, that still unlocks the most amount of buyers.
Making Designs
Now with the niche in mind, then we have to make designs for that product and there's only two types of designs that you can make. First is a custom design which is sort of a template that the customer can personalize to whatever they want, usually just a name or something simple. Second is you have pre made designs which come as is and the customer can't change anything.
Both type of designs can be simple text designs, a graphic or AI design, or a mixture of it all. But a custom product could also be just a photo from the customer printed on the product. The thing is, there's no one best design, It just depends on the niche and the product that you're selling. I would recommend learning how to make all three types of designs. When you make custom designs, there's a little bit more work on the back end after you make sales since you'll have to customize each order as they come in. But they're also a little bit easier to get sales early on since there's a higher perceived value and less competition.
Pre made designs make scaling up your business super easy, but they're also a little bit harder to get sales on since the design has to already be what the customer wants to buy. If I was restarting my business, I'd do a mixture of both pre made and custom designs. This way, if one of your custom listings starts selling like crazy, Etsy can start to push out some of your pre made products to customers as well so that you get a nice balance of both and you're also able to scale your shop quickly.
Tip 6: How To Get Traffic
Now probably the top question on everyone's mind as soon as they start is how do I get traffic to my listings? There are two ways of getting paying customers to see your products. Either organically through search or paying for Etsy ads. With ads, you can give Etsy a budget to spend each day to promote your products. This causes Etsy to push your products to the top of search results. So when a customer searches for your type of item, your products will show up.
The cool thing is that you're only ever charged after a potential customer has clicked through to your listing. The problem with that is Etsy shoppers tend to look at several items before deciding which one to buy. Which means if they click on Your product, they might not buy it, so you'll lose money on the ad and you still won't get the sale.
I ran ads with a $20 budget for a month and I still wasn't able to even break even selling T shirts with Etsy ads. I did this to show you that you need a larger profit margin product to still have profit after all the ad costs.
Now I've got another test coming which I'll make a article about soon where the ads are performing quite well. But in the meantime, in the way that I grew my first six and seven figure shops is by only using organic traffic. Basically, instead of paying to have my product appear at the top of search results, I try to get them there organically by positioning them in the Etsy search algorithm. Now this takes time to do and it doesn't happen overnight, but if you continue posting listings, it works. As they gain traction, Etsy will keep showing them to more and more people and eventually you'll get a steady flow of sales. This works especially well when you're using high velocity niche keywords like the ones that we found earlier.
Tip 7: Master Automation
Now ladies and gentlemen, one thing is for so certain and that's that I would have never hit $10,000 a month or made millions of dollars if it wasn't for automation. The reality is that this is a numbers game and the more high quality designs that you make and post for sale, the better you'll do over time. This is why you have to automate the parts of your business that don't directly make you money. You should only focus on making the best designs and best products possible and then automating the rest. This is why I built out the bulk product uploader which is now available inside of Prelist.
So if you sign up for Prelist, you connect your Printify shop and bulk upload products. For example, I have this blank T shirt set up as sort of a template with all of my pricing details. All I have to do is select that I want to copy it right inside a pre list and then drag all of the design files that I want to upload and then I can just hit publish. Now it might take a minute depending on how many designs that you're uploading, but this is still in real time and as soon as it finishes uploading all of them, you can see that if we just refresh it creates them all right inside of Printify.
Let's say you're making AI phone cases with MidJourney and you have 20 designs that you want to upload all at once. Well, instead of having to come and create a new product and then upload the design to the product and wait for it to upload and then make sure it's positioned properly and then adding a keyword packed name and then saving it and then repeating for all 20 designs, it would take hours. You could take as many phone case designs as you want, select your phone case template and drag all of your designs right into pre list and then just watch the magic happen. Then maybe you want to go back in and add size charts or images to all of your listings. You can do that right inside of pre list by selecting the listings that you want to edit, clicking edit and then we can come add photos in. We could add tags into all of the listings, or we can even import tags from an existing high performing listing as well. This kind of speed and automation is how you list lots of products, but it's also how you beat the competition.
Now I have a little bonus section for you here because I know you're wondering how long it takes to get paid? How long from the point when you start until you start making money with this? When I was working in a restaurant, I got paid every two weeks or whatever. So at the front of my mind, all I could think about was how long until I got the cash from all of my effort.
One of the hardest lessons that I had to learn was to measure my success in actions and not time. Look, you're not doing this business because you're a good person you're doing it because you want to make money. And the moment that you start worrying about how long it's taking is the moment that you start losing. The reason that I tell you that you're only one listing away is because making and posting products for sale is the entire business. It's the only action that you need to take to make money.
Look, it wasn't like I woke up every day and wanted to make designs for T shirts or mugs, but I wanted the result that those actions brought. I was able to see that the thing that drove sales for me was having products for people to buy. The more listings that I made and posted in my shop, the more sales I made. And then looking at top seven and eight figure shops, they all had thousands of listings posted as well.
The moment I decided to start looking at my timeline in terms of work that I was putting in instead of the amount of time that the work was taking, that's when I became way less emotional about the business, and when I really grew it quickly, it all came down to just posting products and getting the work done. Instead of measuring your success in terms of time or dollars, try measuring it in products made and posted for sale. Measure your success in listings and you'll hit your goal.
