Hey everyone, welcome back to another video.
In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you
the seven most common mistakes
that new print-on-demand sellers make.
I see these mistakes time and time again,
and some of these mistakes can even get your account banned.
So, if you are just getting into print-on-demand,
please watch this video through.
I think you're going to find it very helpful.
(gentle, upbeat music)
So, the first mistake that I see new
print-on-demand sellers make is probably the most common.
What this is is expecting sales overnight.
Now, I don't blame anyone for this,
because if you're starting a business,
you wanna start making money,
you just don't really know what that timeline is.
So, I talk to a lot of you guys in the comments
on my full print-on-demand tutorial here on YouTube,
explaining that you followed the whole tutorial
and you posted a couple designs.
When should you expect to see sales?
Well, I'll say that the average time
is about 30 days from when you start posting your designs
to when you start seeing sales.
However, personally, and talking to you guys
in the comments, I have seen people get sales
in the first day or two or three days
from when they've posted their designs.
This is obviously going to depend on your niche,
or your industry that you're creating designs in.
If it's something that is trending right now,
you might get sales a little bit faster.
If it's something that's really competitive,
you might take you 60 days or more to get your first sales.
Now, I should also mention as a helpful piece of advice,
that full print-on-demand tutorial
that I was just referring to,
I'll put a link to it in the description,
but that goes through everything
you would need to know to start
in order to expect to see sales in that amount of time.
All right, the second most common mistake
from new print-on-demand sellers
is not uploading enough designs.
Think of print-on-demand as fishing.
So, the more lines that you have in the water,
the more fish that you have the potential to catch.
Print-on-demand has been taught by other people
to focus on one design, really nail it,
and then try to just make that one design your total winner.
In my experience from doing print-on-demand
for about 10 years now, I find that
if you just focus on creating good designs
and uploading as many of them as you can
to the big print-on-demand websites,
you're just going to get a sheer volume of sales.
It's a lot less risky to do it this way.
You're more diversified,
you're in multiple different niches,
and you have tons of different designs that can sell.
If you put all of your eggs into one basket
with one or just a couple different designs,
it's really risky, because other people
could start copying that design
and taking your sales away from you,
or ultimately, that design just might not be a winner,
so you don't get sales, because it doesn't take off.
So, as a general rule of thumb,
create as many good designs as you can
and upload them to the main big print-on-demand websites.
That'll put you in a much better position.
The third very common mistake that I see
new print-on-demand sellers making
is they're not customizing their designs enough.
So when I started print-on-demand,
I was creating my designs from scratch.
Just coming up with ideas and trying
to make them look good with text and images,
and they weren't the most professional designs,
but they were absolutely my designs.
Now, a few years into it,
I found out that you can use T-shirt design templates.
They're basically copyright-free,
commercially-usable templates
that you can then go in and customize those templates.
So, you're not starting from scratch,
you're starting from a pre-made template
that's made by a professional graphic designer.
Now, I've used multiple different websites
that offer these templates,
and what I find a lot of new sellers doing
is they take this advice of using T-shirt design templates,
but they're downloading the designs as is,
and then they're uploading them to print-on-demand websites.
Well, what happens here is, although that design
is copyright-free and it's commercially usable,
it is a duplicate if someone else has uploaded
that exact same design before you.
So, if you're using T-shirt design templates,
make sure that you're customizing
the colors, the font, the graphic.
Make sure that you're customizing
the text that's on that design.
There is no exact amount that you need
to customize these designs, but our goal here
is to make that design ours,
so when we upload it to another website,
there is no exact duplicate of that design,
so ours won't get taken down.
That brings us right into the fourth mistake
that I see new print-on-demand sellers making,
and this one has become very relevant recently.
What this one is, is uploading your designs too quickly
to the print-on-demand websites.
Now, when you're a new print-on-demand seller,
you can go to multiple different print-on-demand websites.
You go to Merch by Amazon, you go to Redbubble,
you go to TeePublic, a bunch of other ones, as well,
and you can upload your designs there,
and then they sell your designs on their marketplace.
This is a great business model,
but the problem that these websites are running into
is people are flooding new accounts with designs,
and the websites essentially take those accounts down
because they think that they're spam,
or they're being uploaded by bots.
With the rise of artificial intelligence,
these print on-demand platforms are just trying to be safe.
They wanna make sure that, if you are uploading designs,
you're a real artist, you're a real person like you and me,
and you're uploading them to start a business.
You're not trying to beat the system,
or set up software that's going to upload them for you.
So, my advice here is when you start a new account
on these print on-demand platforms, start off very slow.
Start by uploading just one design per day,
and then work up to two designs per day,
and then three designs per day
to start off nice and slow on these websites.
The fifth most common mistake that I see
new print-on-demand sellers is they're uploading designs
that are in too general of niches.
This is another one that's become very relevant
in the last couple years, because as print-on-demand
has gotten more popular, which is okay,
we can work with the competition, but that means
that the general niches have gotten very full.
So if you think about the general popular niches,
like dogs, cats, tacos, coffee, all of the big broad niches,
all of them, just consider them to be full.
They're filled with competition,
and if you create designs in them,
you're just going to go to the back of the pack
because you're the new guy on the block,
so you're not going to rank on the first page.
This is where we start to get creative.
So. as a new print-on-demand seller,
if you can find these sub-niches
that people have not discovered yet
that's where your designs, even as the new guy on the block,
are going to show up first on that page.
Now, I recently made a video on this channel
showing how to find these sub niches
Takes me about 10 minutes to explain,
so I'd like to keep it out of this video,
just keep this video going along.
So, if you're interested in that,
the link will be down in the description,
and you can check out that video.
It'll show you how to find the low competition niches
that other people haven't discovered yet.
That brings us into the sixth most common mistake
that I see new print-on-demand sellers,
and that is infringing on trademarks.
This is one of the unforgivable things
that you can do in print-on-demand
that will get your account banned.
Now, what this is, is if you create
a design for print-on-demand, and it has
a company's logo or a company's slogan in it,
something that is protected by another company,
and you upload that to a print-on-demand website,
that design can get taken down
for copyright or trademark infringement.
Now, the other part to that is not only the design
but also the listing's title and description.
You can't put anything in there that is owned
by someone else or copyright protected.
The pieces of advice that I would give you
to avoid this one because, it's very important,
is if you're using a T-shirt design tool,
make sure that it is copyright-free and commercially-usable.
I've used multiple of these T-shirt design tools out there,
and not all of them are both of those.
So, I'll put a link in the description
to the one that I personally use,
if you need a good recommendation on this.
And the second piece of advice
is to check all of your slogans, which is basically
the text that's going to go into your design,
to make sure that they're not protected
before you use them in your design.
I'll put a link to another video down
in the description that shows you how to do that.
And that brings us into the last of these seven mistakes
that I see new print-on-demand sellers,
and that is not using keywords
in their titles and descriptions.
I'm constantly seeing new print-on-demand sellers
making this mistake, and they could have the best design
and upload it to the print-on-demand websites,
but it never shows up in the rankings
because they haven't put the proper keywords
in the title and description,
so the print-on-demand platform
doesn't know where to rank it.
This is a very simple fix, and once you start
putting those keywords of what that design is about
in the title and in the description,
you will see that your designs
start to work their way up in the rankings.
Now, if you thought this video was helpful,
I think you'll really like the full print-on-demand tutorial
that I was referring to in the beginning of this video.
I'll put a link to it down in the description,
along with all of the other videos
that we talked about throughout this video.
So, hopefully this video saved you
from making a lot of mistakes
and the videos down in the description
will help you get your business off the ground.
Alright guys, that's it for this video.
If you have any questions at all,
just let me know down in the comments,
and I'll see you all in the next video.