How to get free traffic, find the best ideas, and create the best designs for your print-on-demand shirts.
In this article, I am going to tell you the best print-on-demand ideas and also the niche you can pursue and the tools you’re going to use. How to get free traffic for this print-on-demand business and how to create the designs for your print-on-demand business. All this for you without going to get any print-on-demand books or courses, you will get to know it all here, Print on demand websites, Print on demand clothing, all these and the platforms that work, I will not discuss Spod print on demand and Apliiq print-on-demand here, but I will give you between five different platforms you will learn from this tutorial which could be for beginners and those already in the business. You will also learn keyword research for this particular article because you will need keywords to rank your products. The tools you will need for keyword research, both paid and free versions, will also be revealed to you right here in this article.
Now, let’s start from the beginning.
What is Print on Demand?
Print on demand is a process where you work with a supplier to customize white-label products like t-shirts, bags, and baseball hats with your design to sell them on a pre-order basis under your brand, that is, without paying for the products until it is purchased, hence no need to buy in bulk or have inventory.
Print on demand is cheap, and easy to start because you don’t have to invest your own money, which makes it a low-risk way of making money online. So, if you are an artist, designer, writer, or entrepreneur, your physical products can be perfectly monetized by using Canva design studio for your creativity. This means from your t-shirts to posters to backpacks to books can be created by yourself every day, hence we are going to concentrate on the print on demand of clothing, though we have clothes, hats, bags, books and every other thing on that niche most concentration would be on clothes.
PYRAMID OF PRINT ON DEMAND
The major point here is that you need to understand the 3 pyramids of print on demand.
1. The niche: You need to understand the niche market.
2. Keyword Research: You need to research the profitable keywords, what would be the need for designing or having a beautiful design without keywords to sell or present it to buyers, that would be a total fail
3. Design: You need a good and attractive design.
These 3 in this pyramid come together simultaneously to form one of the best ways you can make money online. Then another important thing you would want to learn about is the merchant sites to sell your products. Yes, you need to know the websites that sell these products, and I am going to show you 5 of the best websites where you can sell your products online.
Why am I going to give you five merchant websites? Yes, the fact that you have a design on one of the sites doesn’t mean you cannot sell the same designs on the other websites, it is non-exclusive, which makes it very sweet and profitable. These websites will also give you organic customers or clients that would come to you for your designs themselves even while you’re not the one driving down the traffic. You can also drive traffic to your products which you would learn how in this article, free organic traffic to your designs, Read on to learn all the facts.
Free tools and paid tools for print on demand.
For print-on-demand business, you have tools to help you maximize your earnings, some are free while others are premium tools, now depending on the level of income or money-making height you’ve grown into, you can either use the free or paid tools but you can start with the free tools first and once you start making money, its better you switch to the paid tools to enjoy the benefits.
But don’t worry, you will learn all this nitty-gritty after consuming this article, the most important thing is that you need to learn how to make your designs, you need to know your niche and you need to know the profitable keywords to drive sales, that is why you have to work on this tutorial after going through it all.
Don’t worry, all that your job entails is the elements and design production, and afterwards, the merchants or the websites will handle it from there. From the printing to packaging and shipping would be done by customer care. They handle everything thereafter. Yours is to make the designs, which means you can concentrate on making huge designs, that is, different designs, loads of them, which is the success key to climbing on these platforms, because the more designs you have, the greater your chances of ranking and being found, but with fewer designs, the probability of being seen or found is small. So, if you have around 500 designs, at least daily, you can have between 5 and 7 seen daily.
MERCHANT WEBSITES FOR PRINT-ON-DEMAND OR PRINT-ON-DEMAND PLATFORMS
Please take note of all the websites while I use one of them for our exercise. They are all the same, be it Print on demand Deutschland or Print on demand Europe and whatever you do on one applies to the other ones. The beautiful thing about print on demand is that you don’t have an exclusive franchise to any of these websites, not like if you place a design here you can’t use the same on the other sites. No, no; you can place all your same designs on all the 6 websites I will be showing you here.
1. Printful: the traffic on printful is so enormous, it has a monthly visit of close to 4 million users, and an average person uses the site for like 8 to 9 minutes, meaning they shop on the website and also use printful dropshipping. The site traffic has the US with the highest visitors with close to 50% of all traffic, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, and Turkey. This is valuable traffic on printful, likely due to printful pricing or printful products.
2. Printify: This is also a print-on-demand website where you can design and sell t-shirts, hoodies, accessories, phone cases, etc. Printify products are much more and they offer the Printify coupon, which is also a good avenue to drive customers. Let us take a look at the traffic generation; they have a monthly visit of around 2.2 million users with an average visit duration of close to 10 minutes to show the shopping practice. These are factors you need to know to be prepared for which website you’re going to trade with or sell your products on when you start selling. The traffic on printify shows the US with 56% of all the traffic with Canada following and the UK.
3. Lulu Express: this is also a print-on-demand platform that can allow you to sell your designs. Let us look into their traffic algorithm. Lulu Xpress has a monthly visitation of 1.5 million visitors, which is very decent. These 1.5 million people use an average of 3 minutes on the site, which is very OK by shopping standards. Traffics from the US, UK, France, Canada, and Italy.
4. RedBubble: this site has almost 33 million users every month with an average view of 6 minutes, which shows a good sign of shopping, RedBubble experiences from members (RedBubble erfahrungen) are very positive, with lots of discounts from coupons (RedBubble gutschein). Visitors of RedBubble include the US, with 14% of the traffic, followed by the UK, Germany, Canada and Australia. These traffic sources should get you thinking of the kinds of designs you’re going to make since you’ve already known where your customers are coming from. You are going to be designing this clothing mostly based on the culture of these buyers. For instance, it would be difficult for an American to buy a hat or cap designed with the African culture unless that person is married to an African or has an affiliation with Africa, so your designs should be all-embracing of their cultural heritage.
5. Teespring: Teespring is another big website for print-on-demand, also known for Teespring t-shirts, and it has 18 million visitors monthly with an average duration of 3 minutes. The traffic sources are the US with 44% and the UK on 5%, Canada, Germany and India are also part of traffic sources.
6. Merch by Amazon: This is the biggest of them all, owned by Amazon, which is a household name in eCommerce. has a volume of traffic of 2.8 billion monthly visits. Did I hear you shout “wow!”? The average duration of users is 8 minutes, with the US claiming the highest source of traffic with 82%, Canada, the UK, China and India sharing 1% of the traffic. So you now have a feel of what is happening on these sites and generally on print on demand.
Get to read the full tutorial on Teespring and RedBubble.
HOW AND WHERE TO GET YOUR DESIGN IDEAS
1. Bubble Trends: This free tool site gives you ideas of what you can design for your clothing. Start by hitting on the “get today’s ideas”, scroll down and you will see a lot of designs and the number of results each is pulling out, remember, the design are sentences or words written on the front or back of your clothing. So, on this page, you will get to see ideas of what you can use or write. Search through and pick up beautiful wordings that will give you nice ideas of what you’re going to design that attracts buyers.
2. Etsy: etsy.com is a site where you can find things you love and they support independent sellers. You can replicate all the designs and images listed and put them on your shirt on the site.
Go to clothing’s where you will notice “women’s clothing, dresses, stuff etc” click to get ideas of what you can be producing. Please you need to replicate the ideas and NOT copy, don’t copy because of copyright. You only need to use it as ideas to create something incredible for yourself, even logos.
3. Google Trends: Google Trends gives you a powerful tool that you could use to determine if a particular keyword is worth following and whether it is a good idea to create a design. Please note that you can’t brand any artist or celebrity on a cloth and want to sell them. No, they would have been copyrighted already, so you can’t sell a brand belonging to someone. You have to create your own element, which is very important.
4. Twitter: this is a very good avenue to get great ideas because Twitter gives you trending images and stories, so it is easy to create trending ideas from the news and take notes, Twitter is a great avenue for traffic ( we will be treating how to generate traffic from Twitter here soon, how to generate free traffic from Twitter, watch out for it ). So here, search for a particular keyword and scroll to see different images you can choose to create an idea around that looks gorgeous and unique.
WHERE TO GET FREE TRAFFIC
Merch informer: This site is a paid tool but also gives you a free version; if you were to register for free, it would prompt you to add your card, meaning it’s going to start charging you once you exhaust your free trial days. You can check the pricing to see if it’s something you can go with and register. So, just sign in for free and use the free version for the few days it gives you.
How To Use The Free Version Of Merch Informer
If you want to use the free version, it is usable and also has a good advantage. So you just need to go to the keyword cloud and there you’ll see the Niche Hunter under it, hit on that and it brings you to where you will see as it pulls out information about shirts, this is going to give you the idea of what’s happening in every niche and the amount of volume that they have there, so it will help you pick up one or two things before you make your design which is quite important.
You will be able to see the right keywords, search volume, top-ranked for this week which is always updated every week. You can sort from highest-ranking to lowest, you can use the highest-ranking basically, that’s pretty much better to get these ranking ideas and get designs to create your own from them as they are trending for the week on the chart.
Like I said earlier if you want to be successful on print on demand, only three things you have to look out for; the niche is very important because if you are situated in a place where nobody is asking to buy what you’re selling there’s nothing there you going to sell and two, you need your keywords; you need to be able to rank higher for those keywords people are going to be searching for, that’s going to give you a lot of sales. Then the third one is your design because even if you have a good niche and then you have good keywords if your designs are not top-notch nobody’s going to buy them.
So those three are like the pyramid of print on demand you have to keep that in mind every time you produce and this is free to join, so you can invest your time in thinking and not looking for things that work because you’re not going to deliver the product to anybody the company in the website does all of that on your behalf, all you need to do is get this elements and designs are good and then you upload it on this shirt and they finish it off from there, you then pick your profits.
Okay, in all of these you can still dive deeper into it and research more but now let me go into details for example of high girl shirts I hit on the column, it pulls up the information then you’ll see the estimated monthly sales volume on this particular keyword and the competition score which shows if it’s safe to use, that’s how you could go deeper and then you have some other keywords that you could use together in this particular niche. You can also check through the male shirts one after the other, all through them all individually if you want to get the best out of the best that you’re going to concentrate on. Generally, this is a fantastic tool for you to get something good.
Now that you have the niche that you would want to go into, which is the shirts, now let’s get to see the keyword in these categories; on the site below the keyword cloud, you will see the Keyword Finder. If you hit on that, it will search for keywords, Merch Informer tool can get you everything you need for this business, using the keyword finder, you can see the keyword or phrase that is being put to use, the Amazon search volume, the Google search volume then the CPC and the competition cost per click. The CPC is the amount that people who want to make adverts are willing to pay for this keyword then the competition on this keyword, you will see if it is high or lower than other keywords.
Other depths within the site enables you to dig deeper by clicking on the buttons to go deeper into each keyword and make more research; the secret is to get the ones that have low competition. Now the free version of this tool, if you don’t have Merch Informer is to use Google, you can search for the article on “How to find low competition keywords” and you will learn more on how to get keywords that rank your products. Another tip here is that if you can blog, you can create a blog and place the link of your store on your blog to generate traffic from your blog, this can give you monthly unique visitors and it’s another link building services idea for you.
So that’s how you go over it and search for low keywords on this site, keep searching and use it, that’s pretty much how to get keyword and if you don’t have Merch Informer, you can do the same thing practically on Google.
HOW TO FIND AND CREATE DESIGNS FOR PRINT ON DEMAND
Now you have your niche and you have your keyword, perfect, what do you do next? You got to know how to design because after you get your niche, you get your keywords, then you find and create designs for your print on demand. Now, how do you get your designs, let’s start from the free version, go to Canva.com, there are some basic things you have to know, the reason why one is paid and one is free, is because on Canva if you have to create your design, you need a particular size that you have to follow through and it’s very important, when you get to your page on Canva, what you do first is to create a design, don’t go straight into looking for shirt designs, no, create your design first because there is a size that is acceptable for these designs and if you go straight to searching for shirt designs, that may not work well for you.
So now, here on the new design column, input shirt designs, after that, on T-shirts, you input or go to custom size, then you have to fill in your custom size, the custom size for normal designs on the entire platform is 4500 pixel by 5400 pixels. Hit the ‘create new designs’ which it would do and you can now start to customize your design based on the design and that you love, now, if you do not know how to use Canva for either to create a logo or any of the creations you want to use it for, then comment on this article with your request and I will send you the tutorial on how to create graphic designs using Canva.
Just go to elements and then the logo, search for free designs and click on it to paste on your white background. You can change the background to give different beautiful designs and also other images to create your design. This is all you need to create designs on Canva, and as I said, it is the free version and paid version will give you something better and more rewarding. Browse around the designs and create something enterprising, be it wordings, logo or image, create a sellable design and see how it would attract buyers out there in the market, you will be shocked at how the market would turn to favour your design.
For a paid version of design creation, you will be using Placeit. Place it is an incredible tool for you to use, though there are Placeit alternative just go to placeit.com and check out the price to know if you can afford it and use it. It is around $7 monthly, for a year if you’re paying for the multiple subscriptions and $14 for a monthly subscription, so check if you can afford and use it for better designs. They have incredible designs and mock-ups which can be used for your marketing (also check out Printful mockup generator). You will see enough unlimited videos and logos to go by, they also have a free account which you can use to check how profitable the paid version can be, so, log in and start the free version where you can also get a lot of designs and logos to redesign and create your designs but you cannot download on this free version, it has their watermarks on it.
Lastly, you need to upload your design to either Teespring or any other platform you want to sell your products. Let us use Teespring as an example, log in to your Teespring account, click on start designing, you will need to download first your design created from either Canva or Placeit. Now, search for Shirts because you are looking for t-shirts, search for your regular unisex shirt and click on it to add your image or text. Your downloaded image has a background you’ll need to deal with first, you have to remove the background first, if you’re using a premium version of Canva, you can directly remove the background before downloading but if it a free version, just go to www.remove.bg and remove the background of your downloaded image before going back to Teespring to add the edited image to your cloth design.
Thereafter, select your preferred colour and image customers would see first, set your price and hit continue, now on the name of the design is where you’ll have to input one of the keywords that you’ve researched that is pretty cool to go by it, likewise on your description, always use your first keyword, and add two or more three keywords on the description to form a good description, you’ll get your design URL, makes it public and then you publish.
On Teespring, you have to bring in between two to ten orders by yourself before Teespring will start giving you organic traffic, which means you’ll have to sell this first product by yourself, and start marketing it on all social media platforms, especially on Instagram.
Hey! Go and explore the world of designs that makes money.