Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to another print on demand tutorial.
In this video, I'm going to show you
the easiest way to start print on demand in 2024.
Now, I've been a print on demand seller
for just about 10 years now,
and there is a strategy that I have been using
for all of this time
that not many people are sharing online.
So with that being said, I'm not going to waste any time.
I'll switch over to the computer
and show you how this works step by step.
So the very first thing here
is I'm going to start on Shopify.
Now, personally, I do not use Shopify or recommend it
if you are just getting into print on demand,
and I'll explain why.
Most new sellers who are just getting into print on demand
think that they have to use Shopify
just because it is heavily talked about online.
However, the couple main reasons
that I don't use it are first,
if you're going to use Shopify,
Shopify is basically just a website
that allows you to sell things.
Shopify itself is not going to bring you any buyers.
The way that you will be taught
how to do print on demand on Shopify
is you go to their app store, you type in print on demand,
and then you pick
one of these print on demand fulfillment services.
Most likely in other tutorials,
you're going to see Printify or Printful recommended.
They're simply just two
of the biggest print on demand fulfillment services.
However, the big picture to understand here
is that these services are just going to do
the print on demand part for you.
They are not going to do any marketing,
they're not going to take care of customer service,
they're not going to do anything else
that some of these other print on demand websites
that I'm about to show you do it all for you.
Now, in addition to all of that,
the important things to know here
before we move on from this Shopify topic here
is that Printify and Printful are 100% free to use.
You don't have to pay to use those apps,
but what you do have to pay for
is the actual subscription to Shopify.
So when you look at Shopify's pricing,
if you're going to pay on a monthly basis,
it's at least $39 per month.
Now that is a subscription that you're going to have to pay
every single month
just to have your print on demand store live.
So with that being said, there is a much easier way
to start print on demand, and that's what I'll show you now.
So if you go over to Amazon, what most people don't know
is that Amazon actually does print on demand as well.
So if you come up to the search bar
and you type in a topic and then t-shirt,
so we'll type in gardening t-shirt,
we'll give that a search,
and then all of these results here
for the most part are all going to be print on demand,
meaning that people only uploaded the design here
and Amazon is doing everything else.
And to show you what that looks like,
if you click on any of these here
and you see this little label here
that says Amazon Merch on Demand,
that means that the seller who created this listing
is using Amazon for print on demand.
So the seller uploaded this design,
and then when someone picks out
what kind of shirt they want it printed on, in what color,
and then what size,
and they go over here and add it to their cart
and actually purchase it,
Amazon is the one that's going to print that shirt.
They're going to ship it out to the customer
and they're going to handle all of the customer service
just like Amazon handles customer service
for anything else sold on their platform.
This way of doing print on demand
is not only 100% free to do,
but since they handle all of the customer service for you
and they bring their own traffic
and buyers to the marketplace,
it makes it so much easier for you
as a print on demand seller.
So with that said, I'm going to literally walk you through
how to do this on a marketplace like Amazon.
But then also there are other free print on demand websites
that you can use for this as well.
I'll tell you about them in this video as well.
So the very first thing here is to figure out
what topic or niche you want to start creating designs in.
Now, keep in mind, you can change this at any point in time.
You don't have to create kind of storefronts
like you used to, for example on Shopify.
Rather by using these marketplaces,
you can create a couple in this niche,
a couple in that niche,
and they're all going to find their home
on the marketplace in the corresponding niche.
So once you've got your first niche picked out,
now you need to come up with your design ideas.
So the first part in this is figuring out
what the text is going to be on that design.
This is called your phrase.
The first way to do this is literally just to scroll
through the listings of the other designs in that category
and just see what they say.
This is my gardening shirt.
You can turn that phrase
into a million different types of designs.
"I'll be in my office,"
and the office is supposed to be a garden.
"Gardening is my therapy."
These are all types of phrases
that you can turn into designs.
Now the important thing to know,
especially coming from an experienced
print on demand seller,
is really you don't want to just copy these designs.
That is the unethical way of doing print on demand
and it is really frowned upon.
So if you are going to start print on demand,
use these as inspiration,
but then come up with your own phrases.
So with that being said,
once you've kind of had a look at
these other phrases in here,
another way that you can come up with your own phrases
is just to go to Google and type in funny gardening phrases.
And then usually there's a bunch of lists here
that you can go through
and you can get some additional ideas.
So just looking to see what we have here.
The first couple phrases are,
"I don't need therapy, I just need my garden."
"I'm not anti-social, I'm just pro-garden."
You can get a bunch of different ideas here.
As you can see, not all of these would work on t-shirts
because some of them are longer.
But I just wanted to show you
this quick and easy way of coming up with your own phrases.
Now, this is a really good point for me
to take a couple seconds to say
that this video is a very rapid fire pace of how to do this.
Just so you can simply get started in print on demand today.
If you want these super detailed tutorial
on my current print on demand process,
literally step by step, it's totally free here on YouTube.
I'll put a link to that video down in the description.
So with that said,
I have a bunch of phrases in my own head
from doing this over the years
that you can kind of swap out whatever the niche is.
So you can get some ideas here.
I've got some of my own ideas just from experience.
But once you have some of these ideas picked out,
you're actually ready to take that phrase
and turn it into a full fledged print on demand design.
So with that being said,
if you do not have experience with graphic design,
what I would recommend you to do is use t-shirt templates.
This is something that I have been doing for years.
Now simply because you start out
with a professional template,
it only takes you a couple seconds to customize it
to whatever niche you're going into.
You can save that directly to your computer
and upload it to these print on demand websites.
So the tool that I personally use,
I've used a ton of different tools out there,
is called placeit.net.
And I'll get logged into my account
and I'll show you how to use it.
Now, if you're new to print on demand,
you may not have a subscription to this,
it's only a couple dollars per month,
but I will put a link to it down in the description
with my personal coupon code.
So if you do wanna sign up, you can save some money here.
Now with that being said, all you do is come up top here
and type in the niche or category that you're going into.
Now this is going to give you
all of the results on their website for that niche,
but we want to come over to the left side.
We wanna scroll down and go to t-shirt designs.
Now this is going to show us
that they have 41 different t-shirt design templates
that we can use just for this topic of gardening.
So literally, you can scroll through all of these
and you can pick any of these.
You can change the text on it,
you can change the graphic that's in the middle
and you can save it directly to your computer
and upload that to the print on demand websites.
So I just wanna scroll through here
and show you some of the ideas
that they have on their website.
But then I'm just gonna come up here
and I'm just going to pick one of these to start with.
So once you click on that design itself,
it brings you into their editor.
So all of these things you can click,
you can move them around,
you can make 'em bigger or smaller,
and then you can actually go back
if you just hit the back button,
it just undoes what you had done previously.
And if you move things way out of whack
and you just wanna get them back to how they started,
you just hit the reset layout button.
It brings everything back to the same place
where you started on this template.
Now as far as using a t-shirt design tool,
as long as you are customizing something here,
you are changing something on this template,
you can then download that to your computer
and you can sell it on these print on demand websites
as your own.
That is the main reason
that I like using a tool like this
is because it saves you so much time
and you don't have to start from scratch.
So I'll go through this with you right now
and we will create a design in real time.
So this is what we are starting with in this template,
and I can first off see that this is a cactus
and we are creating a gardening type of shirt.
So I'm going to first start by changing this graphic.
You can change it by coming over to this side over here
and hitting the edit button.
This is your couple options on the side,
but the edit button is for your graphics.
We just hit Edit,
and then it's going to show us all of the related images.
All of these you can literally just click
and it will sub them into this design.
If you don't like anything that's in the results here,
which they usually give you a ton to choose from,
you can just search their whole library for anything else.
So if you type in garden,
you're going to get a bunch more results
that you can use here.
And literally all these, you just click on it
and it's going to sub that into your design.
It removes the old one,
which is going to save you a lot of time.
You don't have to delete the old one,
replace it with the new one.
Placeit makes it really easy like that.
And then this is actually a perfect one
that we'll just use here.
So I'm going to drag this down.
I'm going to lock that to the center of the design.
It kinda snaps into the grid.
So once you get those pink purplish lines,
just hold it right there, let go.
And that'll be dead center of this design.
Now I'm just going to bring this text up here
and I'm going to put it
so it looks like it's in a good spot here.
And now I'm just going to write in my phrase.
So the way to edit these phrases here, the text,
you can't actually just click on it.
You have to go over to these boxes on the left.
So the first box is going to be corresponding
to this first line of text.
So if we type something in here, gardening,
it's going to enter that into this first box.
And I'm just going to align that back to the center
right on that pink line.
And then I'm going to type in the second box here.
And then it's just going to autofill that for you.
I'm just going to make one change here
and make that lowercase, that'll make this look even better.
And then literally we have a design
that we just created right here.
This is a phrase that I've used on other shirts
and other niches.
It tends to do really well,
but it's kind of just saying like,
"Hey, gardening, because therapy is expensive,"
gardening is therapeutic in itself.
So in the matter of seconds here,
we've literally created a design.
Now, one pointer I will give you here
is that you have this entire rectangle
to create your design.
So best practice here is to really fill up that design.
So I'm just going to stretch this to be a little bit bigger.
And as you can see,
the resolution on these as big as you make it.
It stays really good.
It kinda recalibrates that image
just to make sure that it is staying high quality.
But I'm going to align that to the center here.
And I'm just going to make this text
a little bit bigger as well.
Align it to the center,
and then I'll make this one bigger as well.
Now just like that, we have made a gardening design
in maybe a couple minutes here.
It's so much better than starting from scratch.
If you're going through this
and you see that the font or the colors or something,
you want to change it on that template,
all you have to do is go over
to the corresponding text box over here.
You can hit the dropdown.
And all of these are different fonts that you can use.
And then again, it's going to be the same thing
with the color here.
You just hit the color and you can choose any of these.
So from here, we've got our first design.
There is one step we need to do before downloading it.
It's super important.
You always wanna save this to the end
and you will see why here.
So this background color is a tan color
and it's actually the full size of the rectangle.
If we were to download this design as is right now,
save it to our computer
and upload it to a print on demand website,
it would print on the shirt with this full tan rectangle.
So we actually wanna go to the background color
and go to this tiny little checkerboard down here.
This is going to turn it into a transparent background,
so that once we upload this
and it gets printed on a t-shirt,
only the green is going to print.
It's not going to print anything
in this rectangle background.
So just like that, we've got our first design.
Literally, you just hit download up here.
Give it just a couple seconds to load.
It's going to process this,
and then you can save it directly to your computer.
And then just like that,
you have this whole design saved on your computer.
You can zoom in,
you can see that the quality on all of this is great.
And then all I would do is just pull this down
and you can click on the name of this file
and you can actually change the name of the file.
What I would change it to
is the name of what the phrase is on that shirt.
And I'm just going to hit Enter,
that that'll save that directly to my downloads.
So now that you've got this file saved on your computer,
all you have to do is go over
to the print on demand websites,
create a free account,
and you can literally upload this design,
create the listings,
and everything else will be done for you.
So with that being said, let me quickly walk you through
how to do this part of the process.
So I'm going to go back over here.
I'll go to Google,
and there are three different print on demand websites
that I would recommend uploading to.
All of them are 100% free to use,
and they're all the type of website
that has its own marketplace.
They do all the marketing for you.
You don't have to worry about bringing your own buyers.
They are going to do the printing and shipping,
and they're going to do the customer service for you.
So once you've uploaded your designs
and created your listings
and they're all out there doing their thing
on the marketplace,
you literally just get a split of the profit
on every time those items sell.
So the first of these websites
is what we spoke about earlier,
which is Amazon Merch on Demand.
So if you just type that in,
and you go to Amazon Merch on Demand,
this is going to be their page where you can sign up
and become a print on demand seller.
Now, I will say that Amazon Merch on Demand
is by far the largest print on demand website out there.
So they are the only one that requires you
to actually apply to be a seller.
Again, this is totally free,
but you have to hit this sign up button here.
And when you create your account,
you can't sell right away on there.
You have to wait.
It's typically one or two weeks until they get back to you,
whether you've been approved to be a seller
or denied to be a seller.
If you do get denied, all you have to do is come back here
and hit Sign up, and sign up with a different email address.
It'll allow you to go through the same process again.
And I've spoken to many people
who have gotten in on their second or third try
with different email addresses
without changing anything on the application.
The other two that I would recommend are TeePublic.
And if you just go to TeePublic, they are a marketplace,
kind of like Amazon, but specific to print on demand.
So everything that you see here, gardening t-shirt,
they're literally just going to be
all of the people uploading their designs here.
When you click on any of these,
it's going to show you what that would look like
on a t-shirt,
and people can come in here
and they can just add it to their cart and purchase it.
Again, TeePublic does all of the printing,
shipping, customer service.
And then the last website that I would recommend to you
is called Redbubble.
And when you go to Redbubble,
it's the same layout as TeePublic.
So again, it's just going to be a marketplace
specific to print on demand.
Now, the really cool thing
with doing print on demand this way
is once you have this design file saved on your computer,
you can upload this same design file
to all three of these print on demand websites,
and it will be sold
on the three different marketplaces individually.
So somebody might find it on TeePublic,
another person might buy it from Amazon,
and literally, there's nothing wrong with that.
You're just going to get sales
from all of these different websites all at the same time.
Okay, so getting back to this,
let me show you how to actually upload your design here.
So of the three websites, you've got Redbubble,
you've got TeePublic, and you've got Amazon.
Obviously, you're going to have to wait on Amazon
until you can upload, and Redbubble is good as well.
They actually get a ton of traffic,
but TeePublic, I think has hands down
the best uploading interface.
So I'll show you on TeePublic how to do this,
and then you can just do the same thing for Redbubble
and Amazon Merch on Demand once you get approved.
So let's go back to the homepage of TeePublic here.
And all you have to do is go over to create an account
and literally just fill in this basic information
and hit create your account.
Again, for all of the details explaining all of this
and literally going through this step by step,
that full tutorial covers all of this.
That link will be down in the description.
But once you create your account
and you get logged in here,
which I'll do here real quick just to show you,
then literally all you do is go to Upload Art,
and you go to Single File.
Or if you have multiple different files
already saved on your computer,
you can do multi-file upload.
But for right now,
we just created that one gardening design.
I'm going to go to Single File Upload.
I'm going to click on the PNG here,
and I'm going to select it out of my downloads folder.
And then just give this one second to load here.
And then your design is literally going to be right here.
As you can see, it has no background, so that's perfect.
It has the checkerboard.
We are going to scroll down here,
and I'm going to type in phrase that is on that shirt.
And then I'm just going to copy this same title.
I'm going to paste it down in the description.
And then for tags over here, I'm going to do gardening.
And then something I love about TeePublic
is it's going to give you
all of these suggested tags as well.
So as soon as you click in here,
it's going to tell you,
here are the other tags that we think relate to this shirt.
So you can just select them,
we'll do nature,
we'll do flower,
floral,
plants,
gardener,
and out of all those, perfect.
These all match what we are going for here.
And then just say, no,
this does not include any mature content.
I don't recommend making that type of content.
Although you can sell it.
I think it's just going to lead you
into potential problems down the road.
This is what your listing is going to look like.
If you want to make your design bigger or smaller,
you can do that with the scale here.
I would say just leave it at 100%
as long as nothing is cut off in your design.
And then you can change the color of the shirt.
So if you want it to be shown on a darker shirt
or black shirt,
whatever color you want to be
the first color that someone sees that design in
when they open up your listing.
And then go through here
and select all of the default colors for the rest here.
And once you have all of those selected,
you can just go through them one by one,
make sure everything looks good.
But these are all the potential items
that someone can purchase your design on.
You don't have to do anything extra.
Just by uploading your design file,
literally someone can come in
and purchase that design file
on any of these different items.
So from here, all of that is literally done.
We can scroll down here and we can pick the colors
that these items could be available on.
So my only word of caution here is to hover over these
and make sure that you can, in fact, see your design
on that color shirt.
So if any of them become really hard to see,
like that's pretty much where I would draw the line asphalt.
That's going to be risky for someone to buy
because you may not be able to see that dark green on it.
But then again, in the gardening niche,
people might like that dark asphalt color.
So I'll leave it in this instance,
but keep scrolling through here.
Just make sure that everything is easy to see that green on.
Once you get to these greens,
this is where I would start to uncheck them.
So you can't really see green on green.
This is going to potentially just lead to customer issues.
Granted, we don't have to deal with those issues
because the websites themselves
will deal with all the customer service,
but if someone orders a green design on a green shirt,
they may not be able to see that design printed there.
So I'm going to uncheck that green.
This one, I'm going to uncheck as well.
It just seems too close to me,
and I'm going to take this one out as well.
And I'm just going to take out a couple more
that might be hard to read.
And just like that, we look good.
So that's a really important step here
just to make sure everything goes smooth,
you don't have any customer issues.
And then this last section down here
is what other types of items would you like that print
to potentially be able to be purchased on.
So you can have it sold on stickers, phone cases, mugs,
wall art, a bunch of different items.
Now if you watch that full tutorial
that I was talking about,
you will see why I personally turn all of these off.
But for this video, I just wanna keep it quick and easy.
So I would turn all of these off here
and just leave apparel turned on.
And then literally you come down here,
I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions,
and hit Publish.
Just like that, in a couple minutes here.
If you followed along in this tutorial,
you literally are a print on demand seller already.
You have your first listing up here.
People can buy it in all different colors,
they can buy it in different types of clothing.
It doesn't have to be just t-shirts.
And then they can literally add it to their cart
and make a purchase.
And whenever someone does that,
these websites literally take it from there.
We don't have to do anything else,
and we just get our split of the profit.
So guys, that is literally the whole process.
Before you go, two things.
First, I highly recommend
watching that full print on demand tutorial.
It goes at a slower pace than this,
and it gets into much more detail.
That link, again, is down in the description.
And secondly, once you've watched that video,
if you still have any questions about this whole process,
just let me know down in the comments.
I'd be happy to help you out.
So guys, I hope you enjoyed this one.
Please give it a thumbs up if you did,
and I will see you all in the next video.