If you're looking for a new profitable side hustle that has a really low barrier of entry and does not take a lot of time to get started, selling print-on-demand mugs could be the perfect opportunity for you. Now, if you've never heard of print-on-demand before, it is my absolute favorite side hustle because you don't have to have a lot of products or inventory in your own home. You are going to be partnering with a manufacturing partner who is going to do everything from printing, packing, and shipping your orders. So, all you are in charge of is finding really great niches and creating some designs to put on whatever product you want to sell. So, in this video, I'm going to walk you through step by step every part of the process, from finding a great niche, creating a design, uploading it to your products, and doing all the SEO to sell on a place like Etsy. At the end of this video, you're going to have all of the tools you need to actually go out and start creating your mugs so you could get

started today. Now let's just jump right into it. Now, the very first step you're going to need to do is pick which product you actually want to sell. So, I have logged on to Printify. They are the manufacturing partner that I have used for a long time to actually fulfill all of my orders. They are completely free to use, so if you've never tried them out before, I will have them linked down below in the description. Now, to actually make sure that you can sell any of these products on Printify on an Etsy shop, you're going to have to integrate them. Now, it's a really simple process to set up your Etsy shop and then integrate it with your Printify account, and I have a complete tutorial that I'm going to link here that's going to walk you through step by step. But just know, to actually sell products here, you're going to have to have them integrated first. So, first, what I'm going to do is I want to go over to their mug section so I can pick out the one that I actually want to sell.

So I'm going to go over here to the catalog section, go down to home and living, and then just click mugs. Now, Printify has quite a few different mug options, but I'm going to show you the one that I think has the best profit margin and is really easy to get started with. There are tons of different color options and different styles that you can choose from, but really just their generic ceramic mug is a fabulous one to get started with. You can really do anything that you want with it, and it's just a fabulous price point. Now on Printify, these are going to start at just $4.40, but if you subscribe to Printify Premium, that is going to get you up to 20% off on any item you want to sell. So if you're thinking about starting in a print-on-demand store, this definitely could be worthwhile investing in. But if you choose to just go the free route to begin, that is totally fine too. You're just going to pay a little bit more per item. So let's go ahead and push

start designing now. This is going to take us over to the place where we are going to upload our artwork, but right now we don't have any artwork to get started with, and we don't even know what niche we want to be selling in. Now, something super important if you are a print-on-demand seller is going to be picking a niche that has low competition and high demand. So, if we think about something like a generic Christmas design, there are so many other people also trying to sell items and competing in that same niche against us. So, we really want to focus our attention on really sub-niching and picking very hyper-specific things that might not have as much competition, but people are still really looking for. Now, one kind of category that I have made so much profit in my own print-on-demand business in is getting really hyper-specific and selling items for people in specific hobbies. So, I actually have a free downloadable tool for you guys, which is my cross-niching guide. You can get it

down below in the description, but it helps you come up with some really great sub-niches and cross-niches. So, I'm actually going to head over there and look for a niche that would be really profitable and have a lot less competition for us to target. So, I have just pulled up my free cross-nation guide again. You can get this below in the description, and it has everything, everything from holidays to careers to family relations and hobbies. So, I'm actually going to go down here to the hobby section and just pick out one that is going to be a great jumping-off point for us to make a really hyper-specific design for. So, there's everything from knitting to sewing, pottery, collecting stamps. Those are all great ideas. Now, there's antiquing, bird watching, fishing. Any of those could be a fabulous place to start if you really just don't have any ideas about what niches you should be targeting in print on demand. So, for today, I'm actually going to be targeting this bird watching niche and making

something that could be a great gift for someone who is a bird watcher. Now that we know exactly what we are going to be doing, it's time to actually start working on making our design. Now, this is personally my favorite part of the process. It's really where you can let your creativity shine. But if you don't really have a ton of experience in designing products or graphic design or illustration, that is totally fine too. I'm going to share with you where you can find some really fabulous graphics and designs that you can use for any of your print-on-demand products. So first, let's head over to our design suite and get everything started. Now, the place that I create pretty much all of my designs is going to be a site called KD. They are really tailor-made for print-on-demand sellers, and they have tons of templates and graphics that you can use on any of your products. I'll also have all of their information linked down below. So on KD, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go over here and click

new project. Now we're going to have to decide what the size of our canvas is going to be. Now you can get this information over on that printy page where it said start designing. It's going to show you the exact pixel size that you are going to need to design for. If you're using a different site, but the really cool thing about kle is they have a ton of print on demand presets, and they've collaborated with a bunch of the top print OnDemand sites. So if we are selling a mug on printify, it's actually going to have the preset size for that mug. So I'm just going to select that, and then I want to make sure that the orientation is going to be horizontal. So I'm just going to click that, and all of the pixels and DPI is set up completely perfectly for us to go ahead and start designing. So I'm just going to push create, and it's going to create a new canvas for us. Now that we have our canvas set up, one thing that I always

like to do is get some kind of graphic that is really going to make our designs stand out. Now, there are some print-on-demand sellers that they hand-draw in; they create all of their graphics 100% from scratch. Personally, I think it's a way better use of your time if you can get more designs out and uploaded instead of spending that same amount of time maybe just drawing one design for one product. So, I always download pre-made graphics and illustrations that I'm going to use on my designs. Now, the site that I get these from a lot of times is called Creative Fabrica. So, I'm going to head there right now. Now, if you've never heard of Creative Fabrica before, they are a subscription service that you pay a monthly fee for, and then you have access to all of their hundreds of thousands of graphics, many of them you can use commercially for your print-on-demand items. So, all you have to do is come to Creative Fabrica and then search for what you're looking for. So, in this case, I am going to be looking

for graphics of some kind of birds that we can use on this bird-watching design. So I'm just going to go ahead and look up birds, and then on Crea a Fabrica, an important thing for you to do is go down to the left-hand side, and we are going to, on the special licenses, click print on demand because we want to make sure that we can use this commercially. And then another thing that I like to do if I am specifically looking for an illustration, maybe I don't want any words on there, I'm going to add that later. I'm just going to go ahead and push illustration. Now it's brought up a ton of different items that we can use commercially on our print-on-demand products. Now I really love kind of that watercolor, really beautiful illustrated style, so I think that is what I'm going to be looking for for this mug design. All right, so after looking through Creative Fabrica of all of the free resources that I can use with my subscription, I've kind of landed

on this watercolor bundle of bird images. So, I think at least a few of these are going to be perfect on my design. Now, it has full commercial and print-on-demand usage allowed, which is exactly what we want. So, I'm going to go ahead and download that now. I'm going to head back over to KD so we can actually upload those assets that we just downloaded from Creative Fabrica. Now, all I did to actually get those assets that I just downloaded from Creative Fabrica onto my K account is I just selected all the images and I dragged them onto my KD uploads right here. So, now I have all of them ready to use. So, I think for this mug design, I want to have maybe two different bird images on each side of the mug. So, depending on which way you face it, the design is going to look a little bit different. And then, I want to include some kind of text on it. I found that personally, designs that have both a graphic and some really fun text on them do really, really well for me. So, that is

definitely something that I want to incorporate, and I think a really fun phrase that I could do on something like this is the phrase easily distracted by words. Now, this is a phrase that I've used for a ton of other hobbies before, so it's something that you could definitely switch out that last word for any design that you are doing, but I think it's going to work really well for what I want to do for this mug today. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is just pick out a couple of birds that I think are going to work really well on this design. I definitely really love how this bird looks, and let's look at one that is going to coordinate with this a little bit. I think this guy here, since he also has kind of that watercolor background, could go really well with this type of design. Now, all I'm going to do is I'm just going to start playing around with the positioning of these, so I'm going to move this bird around here and move this

bird to the other side, and then I'm going to select both of them and just make them a little bit bigger. Now, this one I definitely want them to both be facing different directions, so I'm actually going to right-click on this, and then I am going to flip him horizontally. Now it's time for us to actually add the text here, so I'm going to go over here to the text section. So, one thing I really like to do when adding text is go over here to the text section, and instead of adding line by line, we can actually select one of their preset text templates. That's just going to save a little bit of time. Now, I'm going to go ahead and position this how I think looks good, and then I'm going to change what it says. So, I'm going to right-click on this, and I'm going to ungroup it, and I'm going to get rid of this bottom line of text because we don't need that. And then I'm going to change what this says, so I'm going to

put easily distracted by Birds. Now this easily looks a little small, so I'm going to go ahead and resize that. Now I'm going to go ahead and group those again, and I'm going to right-click and copy, and then I'm just going to paste that so I can add the exact same thing to the other side because we do want this to be somewhat symmetrical on each side of the mug. Now something we can do to just add a little bit more interest to this is actually change the color of some of the text. So this word distracted, I'm actually going to change it to a coordinating color. So all I'm going to do is over here on the text color, I'm going to select this dropper here, and then I'm going to pick the color on the forehead of this bird to change the distracted to so it looks coordinated, and it's just going to stand out a little bit. And then I'm going to do the same thing with this bird over here. Now

instead of yellow, which I think could kind of get washed out a little bit, I'm going to actually select this blue color here. Now, that looks really fun and unique, and it gives each bird kind of a different style. Now, once we're happy with that, all we're going to do is go over here to the upper right-hand corner, push download, and then we're going to make sure to remove the background and download that as a PNG. Now, we've headed back over to Printify, so let's go ahead and upload the design that we just created. So, I'm going to go to my device and select that artwork. All right, so that artwork uploaded, and one important thing to note is this gray area here. Yes, things will still print in it, but because anytime you print an item, there is always a slight shift to the printing. If you put any text or image above this gray area, there's a chance that some of it could get cut off. So, typically, I like my most important elements to stay within that white area. So, this is

looking really good. Now let's go ahead and preview this item. Now this looks super cute in this context photo, and I can go and see the other side too. Now if you don't like exactly how it's laid out, you can always go and adjust that over in the edit section, but I'm happy with this, so I'm going to go ahead and push save product. All right, so now we have saved our product, and it's going to bring us over to this page on Printify. Now this is where we can start to edit a few things, but a lot of the editing we're actually going to go ahead and do over on Etsy. So Printify has quite a few different mockup options here, but I find that these are really generic. They don't help your products to stand out a bunch. So typically what I like to do is create a mockup from another site that I'm going to show you in just a minute, but really there's only a couple things that I'm going to edit on here before we move

over to edit editing things on Etsy now the product description and the title. These are things that we definitely want to spend a lot of time working on, but I'm not going to go ahead and edit them on Printify quite yet. All I'm going to do is I'm going to put something like bird watching and then leave that until we edit it in a few moments. Now on Printify, it's automatically going to create a shipping profile for it, so you don't have to calculate any of that shipping here. It's going to do all of that for you. But we do want to make sure that we are pricing this correctly, so I'm going to go ahead and select SCT this, and I'm going to edit the price here. Now typically for mugs, I found that $12.99 is a pretty good price that people are comfortable paying, and it's going to ensure that you make enough profit to justify selling this. Now this is one area that a lot of people get tripped up because we know the price of

the item, but we also have to factor in things like the fees that Etsy takes, the listing upload fee. We have to factor in shipping, all of those little things. So, if we tried to just price this at $8, even though it seems like we might be making $2 to $3 a profit after all those fees, we might be left with just cents. So, I'm going to price this at $12.99. Now, it shows that we're going to make an $8 profit, but this is probably going to get more down to like $5 or $4 after everything is said and done. All right, so what I'm going to do is scroll down to the bottom here, and I'm going to push publish now. On Printify, it can take a few minutes for this to actually finish publishing, but once it's actually done, the status is going to turn to a green publish, so you know that it's ready for you to actually work on and edit. All right, now that that has finished uploading, the status on this has changed to green. That means it's

actually ready for us to work on Etsy, so let's head over there now. All right, so I am logged into my Etsy test shop, and I've gone over to my listings, and we can see that this product has been published. So let's actually go down here to this gear icon. We're going to click it, and we're just going to push edit. Now, one of the first things that's really important to do is we are going to want to change out these thumbnails here. So this just looks really generic. People are not going to stop and look at this. It's just going to look like every other auto-uploaded mockup on Etsy. So it's really important to get something that stands out, and especially because this design has two different graphics on each side. I want something that's going to be able to show off both of those sides at once. So I'm going to head over to Placeit, which is where I create all of my mockups. Now, if you've never used Placeit before, they are a subscription that you have access to all

of their mockups, and everything that you upload, they are going to auto-format it for you so it actually looks like a real product, which is super important when you are making mockups. So, I went over to their mug section, and I'm just going to look through these until I find one that has two mugs that has a really fun background that's going to let these products really stand out. So, let's just take a look through these. There are some fabulous ones that we can use, but again, I want one that has two different mugs in it. All right, so scrolling through these, this one here actually caught my eye, and I think that we could crop this to be a really good mockup photo. So, right now, it's a little bit zoomed out, but definitely we can crop that to be the perfect size for essay, and it's going to show both of these in an in-context photo, which I really like. I like when people are holding it; it just makes it look really real and not like this is

just some computer-generated mockup, so let's go ahead and upload those designs we created. We're just going to pick the design for both the right and the left and enlarge it so that we can only see one of the sides on each mug. So, I'm going to push upload for my device, and then so right now it has both of them, and I'm just going to zoom in until on the preview it looks good, and I'm going to go ahead and crop that, and then do the exact same thing on the right. I'm going to zoom this in, but then this time we're just going to do the right side. All right, and when that looks good, I'm going to go ahead and crop that. Now, once we feel like your design has been formatted correctly, you're going to go over here to where it says crop, and this is where we're going to get it perfect for our thumbnail. Now, thumbnails are something that really sell your product on Etsy. Usually, it's the first and maybe only encounter that someone is

going to have with your listing, so we really want to make sure our mockups pack a big punch. Now, before actually zooming in and cropping this, I'm going to go ahead and change it to the optimal thumbnail size for Etsy that I like to use, which is 2700 pixels by 2025 pixels. Now that that has been set to the right size, I'm just going to go ahead and slide this and zoom in until I'm really happy with it. So, I want to make sure these can be seen, but also, we don't want to go too far so that you can't see anything about the image. I like kind of a good balance where you can see what's going on around, but the products really stand out. And then, I'm going to go ahead and download that. Now, once it's finished processing, we can just click here, and it's going to download to our computer. And we can head back to Etsy and actually upload that. All right, so I'm just going to click here to add that photo we just created. Now, I'm going to

go ahead and move this so it is the primary thumbnail that people are going to see, and then this photo here, it's not doing really anything for the listing, so I'm going to go ahead and delete that. But I am going to keep those other two mockups just so people can see each side, but that is looking really good. Now, the next thing that you want to edit in your listing is probably one of the most important things because it's how you're going to get seen, and that is your SEO. So, what I'm first going to do is I'm going to change the title, then the description, and then we're going to add some tags that can really get our product found. So, even if you have the best design in the world, if you don't really spend any time working on your title, your description, your tags, you're not going to get found, and you're not going to make sales. So, this is super important to pay attention to. Now, you can definitely just look at a bunch of similar listings on Etsy and take some

inspiration from those. Never copy what you see there, but I tend to like to use an Etsy keyword research tool. The one that I have used for a long time is called Sales Samurai. So I'm going to show you how I get some inspiration and ideas for what keywords are really important for this type of listing. So let's head over to Sales Samurai right now. All right, so I am logged into my Sales Samurai account. If you've never used them before, I will link them down below along with a discount code. But I'm going to go over here to the search section. Now what I generally like to do is just kind of start with that broad niche that I'm trying to target. So I'm going to look up bird watching or bird watching mug. So let's search that right here. All right, so not only is this going to give us some keyword information, it's going to let us know what the click-through rate is going to be, how much competition there is, and if that is a good long-tail keyword. So this is a

good longtail keyword. The click-through rate is pretty good for something like this, and there's not a ton of competition. Even though 2,000 listings might seem like a ton of other items on a place like Etsy, 2,000 is actually pretty low competition, and we can definitely stand out in a niche like this. Now, let's go down here so we can actually look at these trending keywords that we're going to want to make sure we include in our listing. So, what I typically like to do is have a notebook and pen in hand, and I'm just going to start jotting down some of the most important keywords that I want to make sure and incorporate in my listing. All right, so in scrolling down, I can see that the word watcher gifts is going to be a really important longtail keyword to include. And then something like bird watcher tumbler, even though this is a mug, I might want to include the word tumblr in there. If someone is just looking for an item, if someone is looking for a drink or item, they might

see mine and buy that as well. Also, the keyword gift for bird watcher is a really good one. We probably also want to include something like Christmas gift for bird watcher. That could be a great long-tail keyword. And then we also want to think about things like including the word bird watching, birders, things like that. And then if we keep scrolling down, it's actually going to give us some of the listings that are ranking really well, so we can also take some inspiration from these and see what other keywords they are including here too. And then the other really important part is going to be the tag section, so it's showing us some of the best tags to add to an item like this, and we can copy these and use them in our listing. So once we've jotted out some notes about the keywords that we do want to include, we're going to go back over to our Etsy listing and start editing the title, tags, and description. All right, so for my title, I wanted to include some of those most important keywords. I also want to keep in mind

what this is and who it's for, and for what occasion this could possibly be for. So, I said bird watching ceramic mug for bird watcher Christmas gift, easily distracted by birds, birding tumbler for bird birthday, funny bird lover. Now, that definitely kind of sounds like a mouthful, but with Etsy, it's really important to get some of those really important keywords in your title, even if it doesn't flow exactly. But for the description, it's going to be a little bit different. For the description of this item, we are going to want to make sure to keep it in plain readable text, but also include some of those keywords in there. I typically like to do two to three sentences at the beginning of my description, and then I also keep in all this auto-populated text from Printify because that is going to give the customer some more information about the product itself. So, I'm just going to go ahead and fill this in, and I'll tell you what I did. All right, so I just added a couple plain text sentences that pack a

big punch with a lot of those keywords, so I just said this cute and funny bird-watching mug is the perfect gift for a bird lover or bird watcher. Get a bird-watching grandma or grandpa the perfect birding Christmas or birthday gift for a funny burer. Now, I also included the words Grandma and Grandpa because these are popular gifts for both grandma and grandpas, but you could also include some other keywords like Mom, Dad, aunt, and uncle too if you did want to target that demographic as well. Now, let's scroll down to the next section. Now, the price we already set on Printify, so we don't have to adjust that. All right, for our next section, we are going to make sure that this is set up correctly. So, this is a physical item, and we are going to make sure that we have our production partner in here. So, right here, I have listed Printify as my production partner. Now, the customer is not going to see that, but that is just for Etsy. Something we have to let them know is that we are

using a print-on-demand production partner. Now it's been categorized as mugs, which works great. And next, we're going to go down here to the tags. Now I am just going to copy some of those most important ones that we saw on Sales Samurai and add those right here. All right, so just using those tags from Sales Samurai, I filled up all 13. You should always make sure you are filling up all 13 tags. Now for shipping, Printify is going to create a shipping profile for us, but we can edit the price if we did want to do something different. So let's click here, edit. Now for mugs, typically the shipping is going to be a little bit more expensive because they do have to add a lot of packaging, but that's something pretty normal. Now since the shipping is so high, I don't typically offer free shipping on my mugs like I do with some of my other products. But a lot of times what I do is I'm going to split the shipping with my customer. So instead of $6.39, I might put $4.99 here, and then I'm

paying a little bit of the shipping, but they're also covering a lot of that. But if you do something like this, you got to make sure you are factoring this into your price. But with that $12.99 price I set, even if I'm splitting the shipping with that, that should work really well. And to other countries, I am not going to change the shipping whatsoever because it is quite a bit more expensive. But I'm just going to scroll down here, and I'm going to save and apply that. Now for my settings, I have no returns or exchanges. And then my shop section is something that I also want to pay attention to. This is something a lot of people skip out on, but your shop section is also really important to your SEO. It kind of acts as an extra tag. So I could put this in a category like bird watching gifts or funny bird mugs or just a funny mug section, but I'm probably going to put it in something like bird watching gifts. All right, and then the last thing that we want to make sure we pay attention to

is the renewal options, so you can have this automatically renew every time the period is over for that 20 C fee. But typically, for my print-on-demand products, I'm going to put them into manually renew because if this product hasn't sold in four months, I typically want to know, and I'm going to re-evaluate maybe what I can change about this item and see if I can give it a better opportunity to actually make a sale the next time I renew it. So, I'm going to keep that on manual, and then I'm just going to go ahead and publish those changes. Now we see that our product has actually been updated. We can see the new mockup photo, but let's actually go take a look at what this is going to look like on Etsy itself. So, we're going to click the gear icon here and just push view on Etsy. All right, that looks really good. We can see the price here, and then we can see all the updated information that we put on this as well. Now to add even more mugs to

your shop. All you're going to have to do is repeat this process over and over. A great place to start is going to be for my cross-nation guide. You can find a ton of ideas from that and just kind of go through the same process with a bunch of different hobbies or careers or something else that you're interested in. But this is definitely one of the easiest side hustles to start, and it can be so profitable. I will have all of the information for any of the tools that I use down below in the description if you do want to use one of those to get started. And if you do want to start the process of integrating your Printify account with an Etsy shop, I'm going to link this video here, which is going to walk you through everything from starting your Etsy shop to integrating it and everything in between so that you don't have to get overwhelmed by that process whatsoever. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in my next video.

How to Sell Print on Demand Mugs on Etsy with Printify (2024): Easy Online Side Hustle Tutorial

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