Beginner's Guide to Starting a Print-on-Demand Business

Beginners can successfully start a print-on-demand business on Etsy by leveraging proven products and effective marketing strategies.

### Starting a Successful Print-on-Demand Business: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
* 📹 This video serves as a **comprehensive guide for beginners** looking to start a print-on-demand business, covering **essential steps and methods for success**.
* 🖨 Print-on-demand is explained as a dropshipping model where you sell **customized products**, with Printify being the **most popular platform** for this purpose.
* 👕 For example, a standard t-shirt costs around **$13.50 to produce**, allowing you to sell it for **$25** on platforms like Etsy, generating a profit of **$11.50 per sale**.
* 🛒 Etsy is highlighted as the ideal starting point due to its **low initial costs and extensive customer base**, making it easier to **gain traction without the need for a full-fledged website**.
* 🎨 The importance of creating appealing designs is emphasized, stating that **successful designs are key to attracting customers**, and that **market research is essential to understand what sells**.
* 💡 There are three main types of designs: text-based, graphic designs, and combinations, with AI tools being recommended for **creating unique graphics without needing design skills**.
* 📈 Marketing strategies are discussed, focusing on both **paid advertising** and the effective use of **organic traffic** through optimized product listings to **increase visibility and sales**.
* 📦 Finally, the fulfillment process is streamlined by Printify, allowing sellers to **focus on design and marketing** while the platform handles **production and shipping**, making **scaling the business feasible**.

this is probably going to be one of the most valuable print-on-demand videos that you can watch if you're a beginner. We're going to go step by step as to how you can start a print-on-demand business for yourself. Over the past year, I've posted tons of videos covering how to make individual products, how I generate all my sales, different marketing methods, and how I've done everything, but I've never really made a completely beginner-friendly start-from-scratch guide that you can use if you've never done print-on-demand before, so that you can do the same. This is the 2024 most up-to-date method, so if you're just getting started out, you should have the best odds of success now and into the future. So let's just get right into what print-on-demand is and clear up any confusion you might have about it. Print-on-demand is a dropshipping business model where you find a blank product to sell on a website like Printify. There's other websites, but Printify is the biggest, most popular, and

best one. For example, you might want to sell a standard t-shirt, a super popular product, but just for example, it costs about $13.50 for print toi. Once you choose the product, you just have to upload some kind of artwork or design to it to make it unique. Then, we have to open up a shop on Etsy, which is a platform that allows you to create a store on their marketplace where you can post your products for sale and collect orders and payments. Your Etsy Shop is where you can sell the T-shirt to customers for a higher price than it costs you, maybe $25. Now, we'll cover this in more detail later on, but you can advertise your products on Etsy directly or on social media. And then, when someone orders the product from your shop, they'll give you that $25. Printify will take the order information from the customer, print the design on the t-shirt, and ship it directly to them. Since the customer paid you $25, you gave Printify $13.50. Just like that, you made $11.50 in

profit from there as your ads perform better, or you get more traffic to your product listings. You'll make more and more sales. I've had multiple stores where I've been able to scale into the hundreds of thousands and even into that seven-figure range. So don't worry, you're not just doing this for $11. It's a quite scalable business, and that's it. It really is a simple business model; it's just a bit more difficult in practice. So in this video, I'm going to show you everything that you need to know to go out there and start making that Wi-Fi bread for yourself. It starts by having a place to sell your products online. Now, I teach Etsy print on demand, which is where you're opening a store right in Etsy's Marketplace. This is where you'll be able to publish your print on demand product listings for sale. Etsy is the perfect place to start your business because instead of having to pay for Shopify's monthly subscription, Etsy's just $15 one time, making it much cheaper, especially

If you're just starting out, and they have millions more customers than other print-on-demand websites like Redbubble, Teespring, or Society 6. And because they drive so much traffic to their site, marketing your products to the people already coming to shop is a lot easier. And then, not only is it just 20 cents to post a product for sale, but when you're selling on Etsy, you get to leverage their brand and reputation to get sales on your shop. So even if you're thinking about opening a Shopify website down the line, I think Etsy is the perfect place to start out and get some sales coming in without having to open and manage a website or create a ton of ads or waste a bunch of time on a platform that isn't going to work. Now, once you've decided to start on Etsy, you have to pick a product to sell. Etsy allows you to use suppliers like Printify to fulfill your print-on-demand orders, so we can look at their catalog to find products to sell. Since the products are blank, we'll be making

and uploading our own designs to the products to separate them from the rest of the competition. I always choose already proven to work bestselling products like t-shirts, mugs, and posters, but I know other people who have had success selling all types of other products as well. But it's important to pick just one product and stick with it until you get good at selling it. Then, once you get good, you can open a new shop and start selling other products. There's a misconception with print on demand that if you sell t-shirts, for example, you're competing with everyone else who's selling that product. But in reality, you're selling the design that goes on the product more than the product itself. So, while it seems like there's more competition, this is why picking best-selling products from the catalog is usually going to get you the best results. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, get super creative, and then having to make designs for some kind of weird product. Once you've chosen your product, the most important job is to make good designs for it. This is the

sticking point for almost everyone trying this business now. To be clear, you do not have to be a professional designer to get this to work. You just have to figure out what kind of design will sell on the product you're selling and then how to make or get that design. Now, I'll show you several methods for how to get designs, but you also have to understand why customers are buying print-on-demand products in the first place. It's not because you have some ultra-rare product; it's obviously because of the design on the product. This means that we have to make designs that people like and enjoy enough to buy. Market research is how we figure out what designs people want, what designs they're already buying, and then how to make our own variations. All we have to do is figure out what's currently working for other shops, build out our own versions of that product so that we can turn around and sell it to the same audience. If you aren't doing product research, then the product designs you make aren't going to be relevant to

anyone and you aren't going to get any sales if you're making products that you think are cool, but your customers don't. Then, your shop isn't going to perform well. Now, there's only three types of designs that you can make for your product, the first being text designs. This is simply a design that's made out of text, and it's the most popular option. It's usually some kind of saying that's stylized with a good-looking font. These can be extremely simple, using basic fonts and layouts like this, or they can be a lot more complex, using combinations of fonts and different icons and elements like this. The point being that the saying is what people are buying the product for, so it needs to be relevant to whatever interests that customer has. And by the way, you can also sell the same design in completely different styles to target these same groups of people. Design type two is a graphic design. Now, these are usually some kind of artistic image or graphic, and this is what scares a lot of people away. They think that they need to be able to

create this type of image from scratch. Now, I can tell you that after selling tens of thousands of print-on-demand products alone, that I've never made a graphic like this by hand. See, you can usually hire a freelancer to make these types of graphics for you, or you can find a shop that's selling these types of designs that you can use commercially on the products that you want to sell, or you can find this type of graphic on a subscription website that will let you download them. But the newest and best option is to use AI. Now, Etsy recently came out and publicly endorsed the use of AI as long as you create the prompts for yourself. This means if there's a design in your head, you can use the AI to make it for you, and you don't have to worry about hiring a freelancer or paying for a graphic subscription service. I've made a ton of videos on this, so you can go check them out on my channel. And the third type of design is a combination of any of the

above the point being getting a good-look design to sell on your product is extremely easy. From simple text designs to text and graphics to just graphics or even patterns, making the design is surprisingly easy. You just have to figure out what's currently selling, assemble your own version of the design in a program like Figma, and then upload the design to the product you're selling in Printify. Then, to make our design a lot more appealing to sell, we take it and we slap it on a mockup that looks nice, that's already proven to work in other shops. Even if your design is like a 4 out of 10, you can make it look like a 7 out of 10 on a good mockup. The tricky part is getting that product to sell, and that's where marketing comes into play. Marketing is about getting the products that you made in front of the people who you made it for, who might want to buy it. Now, if you did good market research and your product looks good, then you'll have no trouble selling.

it, but if it looks bad, then your products won't get any views, and you'll never get any sales. There's really just two things that have to happen. Your product has to get seen by the right person, that person who you made the product for, and that person has to feel some sort of emotion when they see it. Paid advertising is what you might be more familiar with, where you pay to put your products in front of customers, forcing them to see it when they're shopping, which might tell you whether they like it or not. This usually looks like giving Etsy a daily ad budget to push your products to the top of search results or paying to drive traffic from another website like Pinterest or Facebook, wherever your target audience spends their time. But the method that I prefer and that almost everyone is doing right now is using free organic traffic. See, instead of paying for ads, this strategy relies on posting more products for sale with optimized keywords so that the Etsy algorithm knows exactly who to show those products to. Using this strategy means you have to post more products for

sale trying to get some of them to land on the first page of search results without paying. This is the strategy I teach my students that they've had the most success with. I've scaled shops to over seven figures using nothing but organic free traffic. I think the important thing to remember here is that there are no shortcuts. If you choose to pay for ads, then don't underestimate how much it's going to cost. And if you choose to go with free organic traffic, then don't underestimate how many products you need to make and post to land some of them high up in the search algorithm. And again, if you decide to pay, pay for ads. It doesn't mean that your products will sell or that your designs are going to be good enough to sell. That's just another reason why I like the organic approach, because it gets you better at making products the more you make. But eventually, if you do either strategy for long enough, customers will start to buy your products. And once they do, it's smooth sailing from there on out. The products that do sell will naturally

work their way up in the algorithm, making you more and more sales each day. When a customer orders, they give Etsy their address and the payment for that order. Etsy sends that address and the order details over to your Printify account, and they'll print the design on the product you sold and ship it directly to the customer. Literally, all you have to do is click submit on their order, and Printify will handle the rest. Since Printify handles all of the fulfillment, you can scale as much as you want, and the more orders and the more sales that come in, the more money you make over time. Your job is literally just to make good designs, upload them to your product on Printify, and post them in your Etsy shop to get them to sell. It's super simple in principle and just a little bit more difficult in practice, but it's totally worth it in the end. If you want, you can download my 99-minute quick start guide, which will help you get your Etsy shop opened, connected to Printify, and ready to sell in about 10.

minutes. There's a bunch of other coupon codes and discounts and things linked in there as well. I hope this video helped you, and I'll see you next time.

Beginner Guide to Print on Demand in 2024

E-Commerce, Business and Finance. I'm sharing my financial journey, and the things I've learned along the way.

Alek

Starting a Print-on-Demand Business: A Beginner's Guide

Print-on-demand is a dropshipping model where you sell blank products, like t-shirts, and customize them with your designs.

Opening an Etsy shop is a cost-effective way to sell your products, with a one-time fee of $15.

The business model is scalable, allowing you to make significant profits as you generate more sales and traffic to your listings.

Starting a Print-on-Demand Business on Etsy

Etsy's large customer base and traffic make it an ideal platform for starting a print-on-demand business.

The low cost of posting products and the opportunity to leverage Etsy's brand and reputation can help drive sales.

Choosing a proven bestselling product and creating unique designs are key to standing out in a competitive market.

Successful product design requires understanding customer interests, with three main design types: text designs, graphic designs, and combinations of both.

Text designs are the most popular, while graphic designs can be outsourced or created using AI.

Marketing is crucial for getting the products in front of the right audience, and a good mockup can enhance the appeal of the design.

To succeed in selling products, they need to be seen by the right person and evoke an emotional response.

Paid advertising can drive traffic to your products, but using free organic traffic through optimized keywords and multiple listings is a preferred strategy.

Both methods require time and effort, but with persistence, customers will eventually start buying your products.

Etsy customers place orders, providing their address and payment, which are then sent to Printify for fulfillment.

Printify handles printing and shipping, allowing sellers to scale their business effortlessly.

The process involves creating designs, uploading them to Printify, and posting them on Etsy, with additional support offered through a quick start guide.