Hey everyone, welcome back to another print on demand video.
In today's video, I'm going to be showing you
how to create print on demand T-shirt designs
that actually sell,
and how you can do this starting as a beginner.
Now, for those of you who don't know,
I've been selling print on demand
for just about 10 years now,
so I've used all of the print on demand
T-shirt design tools out there.
I'm going to show you how I personally do it
and how I would recommend it for a beginner,
showing you on my computer
going through everything step by step.
By the end of this video,
you should be able to literally start creating designs today
and you can upload them to print on demand websites.
You might even get your first sale
by the end of the day today.
As a side note, people that I have talked to in the comments
have literally gotten sales doing this within 16 hours.
That's the fastest that anyone has told me
they've done it before.
Okay, so switching over to the computer here,
I'm going to bring you into the tool
that I personally use for print on demand.
It is called Placeit.net.
The couple other main ones
that you're likely going to see are Canva,
which I actually pay
for a premium account on Canva every single month.
I just don't use it for T-shirt designing.
I find that their T-shirt design templates are very limited.
They're very basic, and they're not really design templates
that are going to sell in print on demand.
But as you're doing your research here,
you're probably also going to run into Kittl,
which I also have an account with.
However, if you're starting out as a beginner,
this is a tool that is very advanced for T-shirt designing.
And the biggest downside here,
the reason that I don't personally use it regularly,
is because it takes a lot of time to create designs.
When you go through their library
and you add graphics and fonts to the design,
it doesn't really integrate them directly into the design.
You still have to do a lot of editing and lining up
in order to get that design ready for print on demand.
So, with that being said,
that leads us right into my first tip that I have for you.
I have heard all different types
of strategies for print on demand.
What personally has worked for me so much over the years
is creating a high volume of good designs.
The main other strategy
that you'll see a lot of people suggesting
is to spend a lot of time creating one design
and then trying to promote that as much as you can
with paid advertising, with social media marketing,
to try to get that one design to take off and be a winner.
This is something
that I have spent years trying and testing,
and it simply is just not worth the time.
If you can just get a lot of really good designs out there
onto the big print on demand marketplaces,
you're just going to have
a much more consistent source of income
because you're going to be so much more diversified.
Now, if you're looking for a full detailed
kind of every step of how the strategy works
that I've been doing,
I'll put a link to a full video here on YouTube,
that is a step-by-step tutorial,
literally from start to finish for print on demand.
It'll go over the entire strategy.
But with that being said,
let's switch back over to the computer
and let's get into actually designing.
Okay, so getting into this Placeit,
the first thing to know here is that
in order to use Placeit, it is a paid software.
Now, the other tools I was just talking about
are also paid softwares.
They're all just about the same price.
As far as pricing goes,
the pricing for Placeit is about $9 per month
if you are subscribing on an annual basis.
So you pay for the whole year upfront.
If you just pay for a month-to-month basis,
it's about $15 per month.
Now, something important also
is that Placeit gave me a discount code
that I can share with you guys,
that will be linked in the description below.
I believe that gives you 15% off.
When you click on it, it instantly takes the discount off
so you don't have to enter any codes or anything.
Okay, with all that being said,
let me get signed into my Placeit account
and I'll walk you through all of these steps.
Okay, so inside of Placeit,
you have a bunch of different tabs up top.
They offer a lot in this tool,
but all we need right now is Designs.
We're going to go to Apparel & Print,
and then we're going to go to T-shirt Designs.
Now, what this is going to do
is show you all of the T-shirt designs
that you can use for print on demand.
There are a ton on each page.
If you scroll all the way down,
you can see there's almost 800 different pages of templates.
A couple cool features to know here
is that over on the left side,
you can sort with this big dropdown,
you can sort Most Popular, Bestselling, and Newest.
So we're currently on newest,
so these designs are all just added to Placeit,
so other print on demand sellers
shouldn't have these templates yet.
You'll be among the first to use them.
That's always going to be a good thing
as a print on demand seller.
Additionally, if you scroll down this left side,
you can just go straight
into a bunch of different categories.
Now, although some people would say
just scroll through here and try to find templates,
as an experienced print on demand seller,
the most efficient way to do this is to figure out
what niche you wanna be creating designs in,
and then search for it directly.
It's just going to show you the designs
that are specifically in that niche,
and you can create a bunch of designs
and then move on to the next niche.
Now, if this is sounding a little bit confusing
or like gibberish to you
talking about the niches for print on demand,
essentially, the thing to know, the key takeaway,
is that in print on demand a few years ago,
you could go in and create designs on any niche,
and you're probably still going to get sales and succeed.
In more recent years,
there have been a lot more people
coming into print on demand.
However, they are all still in the mindset
that you can create designs in these big overall niches
and they're going to try to succeed.
What I have figured out
is that there is actually a lot of search traffic
on these print on demand marketplaces
looking for the sub-niches
that there are not many other designs in.
So, if you can basically go and find
all of these low competition sub-niches
and then come into here and create designs about them,
you're going to watch your print on demand business
really take off.
Now, as far as finding those sub-niches,
I will link a video up here.
It's another video on the channel.
I'll also put a link to it down in the description.
That is, "How to find the low competition sub-niches
for print on demand."
Okay, so with that being said,
let's say that we've done our research
and we wanna go into the camping niche.
So, what I would recommend doing
is coming up top and typing in, camping.
Now, what this is going to do
is give you everything from Placeit that you can use
in regards to camping.
However, what we are looking for right now
in the designing stage, is going to T-shirt Designs,
just click that category on the left,
and it's going to give you just the T-shirt design templates
that we're looking for, for print on demand.
Now, in this category, if we look up top,
there are 48 results.
There's 48 different templates currently.
If you search for this when you're watching this video,
they may have already added more templates,
but all of these templates we can customize the colors,
the graphic, the fonts, what it says.
We can move things around. We can add things.
All the customizable tools that you need
to make these templates your own,
you can do all of that in the editor.
So you can go through and you can pick any of these.
I'm just going to show you an example with one of these.
I'll click in on this one and show you what it looks like
to customize this design
and make it your own for print on demand.
So once you click on the design,
it brings you into the editor here on Placeit.
Now, this is your canvas
that you're going to be changing things on.
This is kind of your design template right here.
Just know that the things we're going to be changing
are all here on the left side.
I'll walk you through each one step by step,
and I'll give you my tips and tricks as well.
But, over on this canvas right here,
you can literally move things around.
You can make 'em bigger and smaller.
And then if you did something that you wanna go back,
you just hit the back button right here.
This is going to undo the changes that you've made.
Or if you get it really out of whack
and you're just too far along,
you can just hit Reset layout.
It'll keep all the changes that you've done,
but it's just going to realign everything
to how that template started.
So, with that being said, starting on the left side here,
this is corresponding to the text.
So as you can see, if I take the R off of here,
just hit backspace,
it automatically updates the design in the template.
Now, if you take more off of this,
it's literally going to center it.
All of the editing and the formatting
is done for you in real time.
All you have to do is go in, change the slogan,
change the colors, change the graphic,
and you'll see as we go through this,
how quick it is to create a design.
Now, in addition to being able to change what the text says,
you can also change the font.
So all of these fonts here,
and even if you click more fonts,
you have a ton to choose from.
These are all copyright free and commercially usable fonts
so you don't have to worry about using one of these,
uploading it to a print on demand website,
and then your design gets taken down
and you have no idea why.
It's because someone else owns that font.
So, with that being said, let me X out of here.
You can select any of these fonts,
and again, it's going to update it in real time,
and you can just hit the back button
and it'll go back to where you started.
Another thing for the text,
is if you do wanna change the color of the text,
just hit the color dropdown.
You can choose any of these colors.
You can literally even go into custom.
You can enter a hex code if you had a specific color in mind
that you wanted to use for your design.
Now, beyond that,
if you do wanna add more text to your design,
just hit the three dots on one of these texts
and hit Duplicate.
That will add you another line of text
that's in the same color, the same font,
and you can customize that.
So, this is a great example to show you
if you created something
or you added an element to your design
that you don't want here,
how you get rid of it.
So, for text like this,
you can hit these three buttons and you can hit Hide,
and that's just going to take it out of your template.
Or you can hit the back button
like we talked about before,
and it's literally going to remove it on this left side,
and you're back to where you were before you added that.
Okay, so at this stage,
now let's add in our phrase to this design
and then we'll keep going through this.
For those of you who need to know
how to find good phrases for print on demand
that are not trademark protected,
phrases that you can actually use,
that full print on demand tutorial that I referenced before
that's going to be down in the description,
that will walk you through how to find all of those phrases.
You'll find that in that video.
With that being said,
a phrase I really like for the camping niche
is, "CAMP MORE, WORRY LESS."
Now, a tip that I can pass on to you here
from designing for so many years,
is some of my bestselling designs
have very few words on them.
They're very minimal designs
that are not elaborate big designs
that you see a lot of people creating for print on demand.
No matter what niche you're going into,
if you can create designs that are very impactful
and very easy to comprehend,
just in a split second, you see it, you read it,
and your emotions click, you like that design,
that's what works really well for print on demand.
Okay, so as you can see, we entered in this text,
it formatted it for us already.
We didn't have to spend any extra time
making this fit properly.
It's all done.
Now brings us into my favorite part of using Placeit,
which is the graphic.
So, not only the font,
but the actual graphic that's going into your designs
can be protected by other people.
The graphic is the hardest thing to find
for print on demand T-shirts,
and to make sure that you have rights to use that graphic
and someone else didn't create it,
and wants your profits from your print on demand listings.
So by using Placeit,
you have full access to their library of graphics.
So sometimes when you click in on the Graphic,
it is automatically going to show you
a bunch of other graphics that you can just simply click
and it'll sub right into this design.
They're all copyright free and commercially usable.
In this instance, there are no other ones right here.
So I'm just going to come into the search bar,
type in camping,
and now here's their whole library
of copyright free, commercially usable graphics.
Now, something that you'll find out
if you use other graphic design tools for print on demand
is that when you click on a graphic on these other tools,
it just adds that graphic
in addition to the current graphic,
and then you have to delete this one,
and you have to format this one into that template.
The reason that I love Placeit so much
and how it saves so much time,
is you literally click on one of these graphics
and it's going to sub it into your design.
So, the vast majority of the time,
you don't have to do any additional editing.
If anything, you just do some minor tweaks
to make it fit perfect how you want it to fit,
and that's it.
You don't have to do anything else.
It just saves you a ton of time here.
And I'll show you some more of this.
So when we click on this,
you can keep scrolling through here.
You can click on these other graphics.
So let's click on this one.
Okay, this one perfect example.
It's a little bit high, but if we bring this down here,
we have another custom graphic right here,
and it took all of five seconds to create that.
Okay, one more here we'll go through,
and we'll pick another one.
This actually looks like a perfect one.
Let's click on that.
And for instance, this one's already formatted,
so I don't even have to move this around here.
The design is already
exactly where we need it in this template.
This is what usually happens on Placeit,
but I wanted to show you a couple of them
so you can see that it might take a little bit of tweaking
just to make that design perfect.
Okay, so this graphic is already subbed into our design,
all of the heavy lifting is done.
I do wanna change the color of this graphic
because I can tell that it is blue in here,
and I'm going with a dark gray color scheme.
So, the colors on your graphics are going to be up here,
and you'll be able to adjust them individually.
So I'm just going to click on the blue,
and I'm going to change it to a darker gray
so it matches the rest of our design.
The tan color, I think,
actually works really well for this design,
so I'm going to leave that.
But just like that,
we have literally just created a design for print on demand.
That's why I use tools like this.
If you were to create this in Photoshop,
or even one of the other tools I just showed you,
it would take you a lot longer
than the time it just took us.
Now, the last couple things to know about this
is that if you have different elements in your design,
you can change the color of those elements here.
We have circles here,
so that's what we're changing the color of.
And then extra elements
that they have added into this template, like the dots,
you can change that color here.
And then probably one of the most important features
to using a tool like this,
is being able to remove this background.
So as you get into print on demand,
you'll find out that
when you create a T-shirt design template,
it needs to have no background.
So just this design that we created
gets printed on the shirt,
and you don't get this big green rectangle
printed on the shirt as well.
So, if your design tool does not allow you
to just simply click and remove this
and save it as a transparent background,
then you are going to have to use a third-party tool
or basically a tool afterwards,
to try to take all this background green out.
It is pretty much a nightmare to try to do this manually.
So, with Placeit, you just click on Background Color,
you come down to the bottom here, which is the checkerboard,
you click on that,
and now you have literally a transparent background.
So when we save this,
all we're going to get is the design that we created
and no background color
is going to be printed on that T-shirt.
Okay, from here, our design is literally done,
so all we have to do is click on Download,
just give this one second to load here,
and then we can click on it
and we can download it to our computer.
And just like that, we have a design
that is ready for a T-shirt and print on demand.
As you see when you scroll in here,
the quality of this design is great for printing.
You won't have any issues there.
And there is no background.
Now, the last thing that I would do here
is just click on the title.
I'm going to double click that,
and I'm going to do, CAMP MORE, WORRY LESS,
and then click off of that, it'll save it.
This will literally be the file
that I upload to print on demand websites.
Okay, so as promised, let me give you some tips and tricks
for creating T-shirt designs,
things that I've learned over the years,
especially with Placeit here.
If you click off of this,
all of the T-shirt design templates that I just showed you
were all found in designs,
and then you go to the T-shirt templates.
However, another thing that not many people know
is that you can go into Logos,
just click on Logos overall,
and then you have a whole another batch
of different templates you can use.
So just click the Show More button.
These are all templates
that you can use for T-shirt designs as well
that not many other people are going to even know exist.
And then beyond that, you can do mockups,
but not only photo mockups.
So all of the photo mockups are going to be in here,
and then we go to T-shirts.
This will show you all of the mockups that you can use.
Obviously, you can sort them by the different niches
like I had shown you before,
but there's over 500 different pages of mockups to use.
But then another feature
that not many other people know about,
is that you can go to Videos,
and then you can go over to Merch Videos,
then all of these are actual videos
that you can post on social media or advertisements,
where someone is actually
wearing your design on their shirt.
This is super impressive.
It's just another feature that's included.
And when you scroll down to the bottom here,
there's over 70 pages of these video mockups.
So if you're creating an advertisement
or you're doing social media marketing
or social media posts,
these are really good templates that you can use.
Something that would be very difficult to do
if you were doing it yourself.
But with these tools, it's actually really impressive.
Okay, and then the last hack that I can share with you
that should save you a lot of time when you're doing this
is go to your Downloads,
just hover over this
and do click here to see your downloads.
And then hover over the design that you've just created,
click the down button right here,
and go to Crop and Resize.
And from here, you can change the size of the graphic.
So when you're uploading
to specific print on demand websites,
for instance, Amazon Merch on Demand,
their size requirement is 4,500 pixels by 5,400 pixels.
So having a good process in place
to resize your designs to fit that,
is going to make your life a lot easier.
All you have to do to do this here
is just switch this to 4,500 by 5,400,
and then instantly it's changed to that size.
You just hit Download,
and now you've got that design
in the specific size requirement that you're looking for.
So, guys, hopefully this video has been helpful.
The couple links to the videos that I talked about
will be down in the description,
as well as the coupon code from Placeit for 15% off.
As always, if you guys have any questions or anything,
just let me know down in the comments,
I'd be happy to help you out.
Otherwise, I will see you guys all in the next video.