How To Start Print On Demand Without a Following
What if I told you that you could start a Print on demand business today without having a following and you could be successful? Well, after being a Print on Demand seller for just about 10 years now, I can vouch for that and say that that is absolutely true.
So in today's article, I'm going to walk you through all these steps to start a Print on demand business from scratch with no following. Now, there is going to be a lot of information for us to cover today. So follow the article with us to the end.
How to start a Print On Demand Business with no Following
So if you want to start a print on demand business, you're either going to have a following or you're not going to have a following when you're getting started. If you have a following, Print on Demand is an extremely good business model to make money from that following.
So when you see creators online that sell their own merch, most of the times that is being done with Print on Demand. However, for those of you who do not have a following and you still want to get into a Print on demand business. Print on Demand can actually be done a totally different way than these big creators are doing, and it does not require a following at all. When someone who does not have a following wants to start Print on Demand, you can actually create designs and you can upload them to Print on Demand marketplaces.
So let's start on Amazon. This is a website that everyone knows, but what a lot of people don't know is that Amazon is actually the largest print on demand website out there. So if you just go to the search, you type in something like funny fishing shirt, give that a search. All of these shirts that you see here are going to be fulfilled with Print on Demand. So when someone's on Amazon, they're searching for a funny fishing shirt, they click on one of these shirts, they can actually buy this shirt, which has not been printed yet. They can choose what kind of shirt they want it printed on, men's, women's, youth, girls, what color shirt they want that printed, what size, and then they can add it to their cart and purchase it just like anything else on Amazon.
Now you may be wondering, how do I know that this is done with Print on Demand on Amazon? Because this looks just like any other listing on Amazon. Well, the giveaway is it says Amazon Merch on Demand. This is Amazon's Print on Demand department. So if you go to Amazon Merch on Demand demand on Google and you find this page, this is a very basic looking page, but this is where you actually become a seller. So you can sign up to be a Print on Demand seller on Amazon. If you find this little button here that says sign up, you just click that, you answer some information about yourself and you've essentially applied to be a seller. Once Amazon gets back to you, they will approve you or deny you to be a seller on their platform. And just like that, totally for free, you can sell Print on Demand on Amazon's platform.
Now just a quick note here. Amazon is the largest print on demand platform out there, but they are not the only Print on Demand platform out there. There are several other Print on Demand platforms that you don't have to even apply to. You can just sign up with your email and start uploading your designs today. As we get further in this article, I will share the best platforms with you, I've been selling on a ton of them over the years, so I'll give you just the top couple to focus on.
So now that you've seen what Print on Demand looks like on a Print on Demand marketplace website, that is how you start Print on Demand with no following. When you create these listings and you upload them to these marketplaces for free, they get listed on Amazon, for example. And then there are so many people coming to Amazon every single day searching for funny fishing shirts they just browse through and when they find yours, they can purchase them.
So you don't have to do any marketing, you don't have to have any following set up. And all of this traffic that's going to find your shirts and buy them is totally free. So with that being said, now let's get into the actual fun part of this article. Let's go through the tutorial, starting from the idea that you want to get into Print on Demand on these marketplaces, to actually getting your first sales. Everything here is going to be covered step by step, and I'm about to take you right along.
Okay, so the very first step we have to do here is we have to come up with ideas to create T shirt designs about. So the first tool that I use here is called ChatGPT. It is a totally free artificial intelligence tool. While it is still free to use, I highly recommend using it. I don't know if they're going to put this behind a paywall in the future, but if you log on to this and you can just start using it right away, this is a very powerful tool for coming up with ideas for print on demand. So what I recommend doing is just come in here and say 50 hobbies and literally just hit enter. This is going to start typing out with artificial intelligence 50 hobbies that we can use as ideas to create T shirt designs about.
Over the years that been selling print on demand, I have found that the top two categories that T shirt designs sell in are hobbies and occupations. Now, there are literally unlimited ideas that you can come up with between hobbies and occupations. And I'll show you how to get really good design ideas out of each one of these hobbies that we've come up with.
Okay, so this is our initial list here, we've got 50 ideas that we can go into I already see some good ones wine tasting, things like that. Now, just to give you another pointer here, we typed in 50 hobbies on its own, you can type in things like 50 women's hobbies or you can type in 50 men's hobbies or 50 indoor or 50 outdoor hobbies. You can get really creative with this and come up with more unique results. And then these are the results we'll use in the next step that I'm about to show you.
So now that we've got this really good brainstorm list of ideas, the next step is figuring out which ones of these ideas are not overly competitive. In the last couple of years of print on demand, more people have found out about the print on demand marketplaces and more people have uploaded designs.
So what that means for you is, as you're just getting started, some of these niches, like cooking or gardening or photography may be totally oversaturated and it's not even worth your time to create a design into. So that is the reason that it's so important to check into these before we spend time creating designs to see which ones have opportunity for us to actually get sales.
So for the sake of saving you the most time possible here, I'm just going to show you the tool that I have grown to use to do all of the research for me. So what that is is using a tool called Merch Informer. Now, if you've seen my other articles on Print on Demand, this is a tool that I use in several different parts of my Print on Demand process. I've been using them for years, I can definitely vouch for them myself.
Now, before I get logged in, I do want to be really transparent about this. This is a paid tool. All you really need is the newbie plan here, but it's about $10 per month, they do have a three day free trial, so you can use that. You can do it for this tutorial in the next couple of days, and then I also have a personal 20% off coupon code that I can share with you guys [Greg20]. That's for both the newbie or the professional plan, 20% off for as many months as you stay subscribed.
Okay, so once you're logged in, over on the left side are all of the tools that expand into different parts of the process that we'll use. What we want to start with here is the competition checker, so just click on that. And now we just go back to our list over on ChatGPT and we can start copying these and we can paste them into the competition checker in the keywords box. Hit search and it's going to tell us if we should go into that niche or not. This does all the heavy lifting for you, it makes this process a lot easier.
Now I'm looking over on the right side here, this is giving you a letter grade, so just like in school you had. An A all the way through an F if you did really poorly. Well, this is saying that the letter grade for this niche is an F. It means there are far too many people that have already created designs in this niche. If you're just coming in, you're going to have a really hard time getting sales. What we are looking for is an A grade and that means that is a really good niche that not many other people have found yet. That's one that we want to go into.
We're going to pick more of these out of here. We're going to search them. I like this one hiking. Let's copy that. We'll come back over here, let's paste it and we're going to hit search. Okay, so we've got our results here. Hiking has another F. It's just too saturated of a niche.
So this is actually going to bring us into another tool here on Merch Informer, that's going to blow your mind as to what it actually does. This is something that not many people know about in Print On Demand. This is a tool that I love and I'm happy to share it with you guys. So if we take hiking, which we know is an F here, it's just too saturated of a niche. You go over to Keyword Research, you go to Keyword Finder, and we type in that hiking again, and we search it. What this tool is going to do. Is take the overall niche of hiking and break it down into all of these sub niches within hiking, literally in the matter of seconds here.
So we are searching on Amazon. We have all of these results here you actually have 500 results. I'm just going to scroll back up top and I'm going to switch it from 10, show me 100 at a time. That way I can keep scrolling down. It's more efficient, and this is kind of the secret sauce to Print On Demand. The reason I'm so happy to share this is because there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of different sub niches you can go into. But now we have a list of all of these sub niches within hiking. That other people aren't going to brainstorm on their own.
So Adirondack hiking, the Adirondacks are a specific area in the United States. You could create hiking designs tailored to the Adirondacks. What we're looking at here is the keyword, which is the sub niche. How many people are searching for that on Amazon every single month? And then the little button all the way at the end is the details button. If you click on that, this is going to open up that competition checker again, just in the matter of seconds here and give you the letter grade.
So, as you can see, hiking had an F, but Adirondack Hiking has an A. So there's our first niche that we can go into. As you scroll through here, here's another one Alaska Hiking. They've got over 2,000 people a month searching for it. Let's see what the competition scores. There's another A grade. So, as you can see, we've gone from F,F to A,A. So this is how you find those really good niches to go into.
All right, so if you've gotten this far, you already know a lot about this process. There are a few more important steps. Once we found these low competition sub niches that have the A ratings, now we need to come up with the phrases that we're actually going to use on these shirts for these sub niches.
So let's take one of these examples. Let's go with Alaska Hiking. So I'm just going to copy that. Let's go back over to ChatGPT and I'm going to say write 10 shirt ideas about and then paste Alaska Hiking. Give that a search. And just like that, it's going to write you these ideas that you can use for your design. So as you can see, trailblazing through the last frontier. This is just so creative. That's why you use a tool like this, where every path leads to adventure, hike Alaska, Breathtaking views, unforgettable trails. These are all just custom to that specific sub niche that you just found.
So as you find these low competition sub niches, you can come through here and come up with design ideas. I generally try to create 20 to 40 different designs in each sub niche. And then move on to the next one. So for instance, we have Alaska Hiking 20 to 40 designs. Adirondack hiking 20 to 40 designs. And then anytime someone searches that on the Print on Demand marketplace, there's already low competition. But anything they buy is generally going to be one of your designs.
So now that we've got these actual design ideas, the next step, you would think would be to take these to a design software and start creating these designs. I will show you that. But there's a very important step in between. This is something that a lot of Beginners and Print on Demand skip over and it's something that can cost you a lot down the road.
So let me show you this important step now. So now that we've got these ideas. We need to check that nobody owns the rights to these ideas. There are laws in place to protect copyrights and trademarks. So this protects not only artwork, but it also protects phrases, things like this right here. So a person or a company could formally own the rights to this specific phrase on T shirts. That means that if we use this Phrase and we put it on a T shirt and we go to sell it and try to make money from it, that company can have our design taken down. They even have rights to the profits that we've made from those sales.
So that's why I say that this is a very important part of this process. It only takes a couple of seconds here. If we go back to Merch Informer. They have a tool for this built in. So you just go to trademarks, you go to trademark alerts, and now you can type in all of the phrases that you're thinking about using and you can check them all for trademarks all at once.
So we'll go back over to ChatGPT, I'm going to copy this and then come back over here, paste it, go to the next line, and let's just copy a few of these and we'll check them all for trademarks. All right, so I've just put the first four in this list. All you have to do now is just hit save. This is going to drop those down into this list down here. It says not checked yet. So you hit this big blue button. That says check trademarks and then it says, we're checking your data. Please allow a few minutes for results. If you just hit refresh on your Internet browser, the results are typically instantly. So you can scroll right down here and you can see that they were all just checked. So this is a good outcome. All of these are safe to use. You have a green check mark. That means that nobody owns the rights to these, so we're free to use them on our designs.
Now, I will say if you get a red X here on any of these, that means that someone does own the rights to that. And I do not recommend putting that on any design on any print on demand marketplace. You are just setting yourself up for some legal issues and some trouble.
Now it brings us into the next step of actually creating the designs. So I'm just going to take you into the design software that I personally use. This one is called placeit.net. the reason that I use Placeit and I've grown to use them over the years is that everything on their website is copyright free and commercially usable. As we were talking about with trademarks, that's for the phrase.
Well, the actual graphic or the fonts, the layouts that your designs use, those can be copyrighted, so they can be owned by other people. When you go to other graphic design tools out there, not everything is copyright free. So you may create an amazing design, you go upload that to sell it and it gets taken down. Well, you check the trademark on the Phrase, but the actual fonts or the Graphic could be owned by someone else. And they're trying to get your design taken down because of it.
This one is going to be a paid tool as well, but I have a coupon code from them as well. You can get from this link. So once you are logged in here, you have full access to everything on their website. So just to show you some of this, if you click on mockups, for instance, this is what placeit was originally known for. You can create kind of photos of models wearing your specific design, you can even do videos as well. This is super helpful if you're going to do any social media marketing or anything like that, and you don't want to actually hire models to take photos wearing your shirts. You can just upload the design that you create on this website onto a model, download that in full resolution and you have the rights to use that on your own social media.
However, what we are going to be using this for, if you hover over designs, go to apparel and go to T shirt designs, this is going to give you something like 50,000 different t shirt design templates that you can use, again with full usage rights. Now you can scroll through all of these there's like 900 different pages here. What I would recommend for you to do is just type in the niche that you are trying to create a design about.
So let's just type in hiking, the general overall niche that we're looking for templates on. And then this is going to give you all of their results about hiking. But it's going to mix in the model mockups as well. So let's just come over to the left side, show more filters and go down here and go to T shirt Designs only. This will give you just the T shirt design templates that you can use. It just makes it a lot easier and more efficient to see what you're looking for.
So yeah, these are all the templates that you can use to create your designs. You'll see a lot of these look like some of the best sellers on the platforms. Well, that's the template that you use to create them, it's actually really cool. And you can create unlimited here. So there is no maximum cap on how many you can download with Placeit. So if you have a subscription, you can create a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand different downloads every single month.
So that being said, just click on one of these that you like. I'll show you how to edit them real quick. It's just going to show you what that looks like a little bit bigger and this is going to bring you into their editor. So all of these elements you can click, you can drag, you can move them. If you want to go back, just hit the back button. If you got things like way out of whack and you want to go back to how you started, just hit the reset layout button. I find myself actually using that one a lot, so it's super useful.
Now all of this text down here is what we're going to be customizing. You don't actually click on it to edit it down here, you go to the corresponding box that's on the left side, whatever you change here will change in real time over on the right. So now let's go back to Merch Informer and let's see what we could actually use.
So which ones are safe to use? Let's get started with the first one here. So trailblazing through the last frontier. I'm just going to copy that. Let's come back over to PlaceIt and I'm going to paste it up top. It's not going to fit all of it. So I'm just going to do trailblazing through, put that first line in, paste it again, and I'm going to take it out the last frontier. And then as I mentioned before, this button up top is actually pretty useful hit reset layout. It's going to format it how it started, but with your new text. And then as you can see, the text is kind of done down here.
Now we can go to our graphic and see if we want to change anything here. The background of the mountains is pretty awesome, let's leave that. But as you can see the graphic of the people hiking, you can hit edit and you can change this to anything else. Again, all of these are going to be copyright free to use.
So as you click on these, it's going to change it in real time in that design. That's how easy this is to change. So you can click around, you can see what you like, and once you find one that you like, you just X out and now you have your design made.
All I can say is when I started Print On Demand, I didn't have tools like this. So I was doing this all by hand and I was spending a lot more time creating designs that were not as good as this. So this is extremely helpful no matter what level you're at in Print On Demand.
So now we've pretty much got our design here. There's only one more important step, we want to remove the background. So there's a little button right here, that says background color. Just switch that to this checkerboard down here that is going to remove the background. If you're using a graphic design tool to create Print On Demand designs and it doesn't have that background removal feature, you are going to have to do a lot of work to try to properly remove that background after the fact. Just being able to remove the background before you download the design is so helpful, it's going to save you a lot more time.
Now all you have to do is hit Download design, it's going to say, processing your design takes just a second. And then you can hit click here to download. You'll be able to put a name to this, so you should have it still copied to your clip board. You just paste this on here, and that's the title that we used. We'll save that, then we can open it on our computer. When you zoom in, you can see that this is high quality. So you're going to have no issue when you're printing it being blurry or pixelated. And this design, is ready to be uploaded to those Print on Demand Marketplace websites.
Now, as promised, we talked about Amazon being the largest print on demand marketplace out there, but there are a couple others that I really recommend uploading to. Now I'll show you these others, but something that's important to know is that you can upload this same design that we just created to all three of the websites I'm about to show you. They are non exclusive, so you own the rights to your design, you can sell them on all three of them at the same time.
So the first one obviously is Amazon Merch on Demand. As mentioned, this is how you find that and you have to actually apply to be a seller there, since you can't get started on the first day because you have to wait for them to accept your application.
The other two that I would recommend that you can get started on the first day first would be redbubble. You can literally just sign up with your email address and start uploading your designs right away. They are a full marketplace, all print on demand products, it's pretty awesome. And then the other one that I recommend is Teepublic. This is actually owned by redbubble as well.
So they're kind of both the same company, but it's the same concept. You can create an account here with your email, you can start uploading your designs right away and both of them are going to get millions of people coming to their website every single single month just looking for T shirts to buy.
Now the cool part about this is no matter which website you want to upload to, the process is pretty much the same. So if you want to start on Teepublic, just go to create an account and just fill out first name, last name, email address, country and set a password.
So once you've got this filled out, there is one more button here it says, I'd like to advertise my products in off site marketing. I recommend leaving this turned on, this is just additional free marketing that they're going to do for you. If you do want to turn this off, you can just uncheck that and later on in the future you could turn this back on in your account if you want to. I recommend just leaving it on just how it is and then click Create my account. This is just going to send you a quick verification link in your email, so just go check your inbox. And then once you verified it there, just go to account and go to log in.
Now just use that same email address and password that you just set and you can log into your account. Okay, so then you should get this green box that says sign in successful and that button that says create an account now changes to sell your art.
So now you just click on sell your art. This is going to ask you, do you have one file to upload or do you have a bunch of files ready to go right away? We just made the one on PlaceIt, so I'll just click single file upload.
Now, the first time around, you're going to run into this popup that says you're new here. Set your storefront name, this is going to be for your general storefront on your account. It's not niche specific, so you can set this as anything, I would just make sure that it's not vulgar or has profanity. Nothing that would deter anyone from making a purchase of one of your designs. So I'm just going to call this ggts, all right, take me to the uploader.
Okay, so once you get here, you're basically going to see the same type of upload a design icon on whatever website you are uploading to, but just click on that and it's going to allow you to select the artwork file, the one from placeit off of your computer. Once you've selected that, it's just going to upload it. So once we come down here, these are the couple boxes that we have to fill out. And this process is going to be the same for the other platforms that you upload to as well.
So first things first, the design title. So I'm just going to paste what we still have copied, this is the name of our design. Trailblazing through the last frontier. That is whatever is on your design, that's what I recommend putting in the title. And then the only thing we're going to put at the end is what that niche is in. So this is going to be Alaska Hiking.
Now, we're not actually going to type in T shirt here because something that's cool on these websites is they auto populate what that piece of apparel is. So I'll show you what this looks like later, but for now just know that you don't have to put in T shirt or shirt or anything like that in these listings.
Okay, so that is it for our title. Now you could leave your description just like this. You don't need to do anything fancy here. I would recommend just sprucing it up a little bit and just say this trailblazing through the last frontier T shirt is perfect for those who love. And then you just leave whatever you put at the end. So Alaska Hiking. I'm going to change that just to make a little bit more sense and say hiking in Alaska.
So just like that, you can take the keywords from the title, nice and easy and you can turn that into a simple description. Then up on the right side we have our main tag. This is going to be the overall niche. So this will be hiking.
Now, although this design is about Alaska hiking specifically, we don't want to miss out on all the traffic of hiking. So we can put hiking as the main tag. When you click in down here, you can see anything that would relate to it. So I would go ahead and just select the ones that also relate camping, nature, adventure, travel, mountain. And then I'm also going to put in Alaska. This gives their system a good idea as to what our design is about. So when people are searching through their marketplace, they know where to show us.
Then you've got one little option here that says yes or no. Does this design contain mature content? I would say no here. I don't recommend doing anything that's for mature content. No profanity, no nudity. Although you can sell that kind of stuff. I think there's a lot more money to be made in these regular just kind of funny shirts. I wouldn't go into that kind of category. And that kind of opens a can of worm of potential problems that you can run into down the road.
So over on the left we have albums these are kind of niche specific storefronts. You really don't need to use these. So I'm just going to move on from here. And this is going to bring us right into the section where we choose what this design is offered on. So since this is print on demand, we can offer it on a T shirt, on a hoodie, on a tank top, crew neck, all of these different items at no additional cost because none of these are actually printed yet.
These are all the items that they have available in their warehouse that could be be printed on. All of them will get their own prices set. We just get to choose which ones we want to offer it on. So I would say kind of the first step here is to look at the kids. Does your design relate to kids? Is it made for kids? Is it not for kids? And that will tell you if you should turn these on or leave them off.
Now, this could technically be a kid shirt as well, so we can just turn all of those on as well. If it's a design that's made for an adult, something like a nurse, an occupation that wouldn't be a kid, then you can turn those off. But once you've got that first step done, now we're going to go back up to the first here, the T shirt, and now you're going to choose the default color. So when you pull up a listing, let me give you an example of this. If you come over to Amazon, black is the default color here. Although you can choose all of these other colors, the default color is the very first one that people see.
So when we come back over to Teepublic, what's the first color that we want here? So I'm going to hit this dropdown and you can hover over these and see what looks really good to you. I'm going to put it on black, that's typically my go to. Just kind of a note here. Most of these T shirts that sell on print on demand marketplaces are on darker shirts, mostly black. I don't know why this is. I just have assumptions. But just so you know, I would recommend setting the default color as a darker color or black almost every time.
The only thing I would say to look out for is if you have black text on the design, you're not going to be able to see it on a black shirt, so keep that in mind. So with that being said, we've got black selected all through here. Baseball tee doesn't come in all black, so you have to select a different color here. I'm going to put a black base with white sleeves. And then everything else you can just kind of check to make sure it all looks good.
So if your design for some reason is not fitting right, you can mess with this scale. So you can make it bigger, you can make it smaller. If you go too big, it's going to cut it out of the print area. So generally it's going to do a really good job with that. But if for some reason it's not showing up right, just know that you can move it around, you can move it back to centered by using these guideline tools right here. And then just play with the scale to make sure it all fits perfect.
So just like that, we only have a couple steps left here. The next step is the colors that this will be available on. Just like we were talking about before. All of these are available at no additional cost. Those are the types of apparel, but you also have the different colors that could be printed in.
Now, the couple buttons here are all. You can click that, it'll select everything and turn it all on or light. It'll be just the light colored shirts. You could do the same for dark or you can do none. And you can pick them all one by one. What I recommend to do is just hit the all button and then scroll through here, make sure everything looks good and you can read everything on it.
So the only thing I'm seeing that could be a potential issue are any of the colors that are on this design most likely going to be the orange and the blue. So once you scroll over here and you get to something like the orange, make sure that you can still read it. So you see how that text gets a little bit hard to read. I'm just going to turn that off because I don't want anyone to order this and then realize that the print color is the same as a shirt and they can't read it and they want to return it.
Now a small note while we're talking about this, if anyone ever does receive a shirt, they want to return it, they got the wrong size, they need an exchange. That is all handled by the print on demand marketplace websites themselves, we never even get notified as the seller. This is a really nice benefit to using these print on demand marketplaces as opposed to setting up your own store, and selling print on demand that way.
So like I said, just go through here, make sure everything looks good. Nothing is hard to read. This one gets a little bit close on the bottom line, I'm going to turn that one off. So that is the step on the colors there just make sure you don't have white on white, black on black, other things that you can't read like orange onrange. And then we're down to the last step right here, and then we basically can publish this and it's live.
So this last step is what other products do you want this to be available on? So obviously we have the T shirts, the apparel right here. But they also do hats. So if you click on that, you can see what that would look like on a hat. You can pick all of the colors. You can do stickers, phone cases, coffee mugs, wall art, all the way down.
Now, this section is something that comes from trial and error. So over the years that I've been selling print on demand, the vast majority of the sales have come from just T shirts.
The only downsides to this is that one you may not get many sales from all of these, they're mostly all going to come from T shirts. And secondly, if you do leave all. Of these on, you have to click them one by one and make sure that the formatting is right on all of them. So if I zoom in here and show you, that is really close on the bottom. So you really have to be careful and zoom that out so nothing gets cut off. You're going to spend quite a bit of time going through each one of these and making sure that they all look perfect.
To me in my experience, all of these extra things don't represent many of the overall sales. And they do take a substantial amount of time to go through one by one and make sure everything is lined up perfect. The last thing you want is to sell a product that is cut off and then someone receives it and that's just instantly going to be a return. So you can go through these one by one, or you can just go in here and you can turn all of these off and just leave the apparel on. That's where the bulk of these sales, are going to come from.
Anyways, I just wanted to spend a second here to explain why you'll see these turned off on mine. So once you've done that section, just come down here and hit "I have". Read and agree to the terms and conditions and hit "publish". So if you've made it this far in this tutorial, you are officially a print on demand seller. And you can do all of this again with no following.
Teepublic is going to set all the pricing for you, they're going to run sales for you. You just get a split of all the profit that they make. And then, just like that, people can find your designs in the marketplace. They can choose the size, they can pick what type of hoodie, all of that, and they can add it to the cart and purchase it right there.
What I love about doing print on demand this way is that you don't have to do anything else after uploading these designs? No marketing, no order taking, no paying for the orders upfront, no customer service, everything is done for you. You can just spend time going back, finding more niches, creating more designs and uploading more listings.
Now one last thing that is pretty important to know about these print on demand marketplaces is a lot of them have tier systems. So when you are just starting out, they want to make sure that you are a real person uploading real designs. Some people have created bots to try to spam these websites and upload thousands of designs on brand new accounts.
So in order to combat that, websites like this Teepublic, Redbubble, Amazon Merch On Demand, they have these tier systems in place. So essentially what that means is when you just start a brand new account, you're going to get very limited exposure. As you start to upload legit designs and they see that you are not a bot, you're not spamming their platform, they will switch you over to getting the full exposure on their marketplace.
That is when what we talked about before, the off site marketing, when you signed up, all of that starts, it's free marketing that they're going to do for your designs. And just remember, every time you get a sale, they make money as well. So that is why they are willing to do all this additional marketing for you free of cost. Because when you make a sale, you make money as well.
In conclusion, So that is how to start print on demand, from scratch with no following. If you guys have any questions about this at all, just let me know down in the comments.
