Hey everyone,
welcome back to another print on demand video.
In today's video,
I'm going to be sharing with you what the true cost is
to start a print on demand t-shirt business.
For those of you who don't know,
my name is Greg and I've been a print on demand seller
for well over seven years now
and my whole thing on YouTube here is,
I wanna keep it real with you guys and give you the honest,
real information about print on demand.
So a question that I often get is:
How much does it cost
to start a full-fledged print on demand t-shirt business?
So in this video, I'm going to give you
the two different options you really have.
One is as a beginner,
how much does it cost for print on demand,
and then the other is as a full-fledged
print on demand advanced seller,
how much does that cost
with all of the tools and everything.
So stick around for this video.
It should be a good one.
Now before we get rolling in this video,
I just wanna make a quick note to say,
if you enjoy this video, please give it a thumbs up.
That helps YouTube know that this is good content
and they share it with more people.
So I really would appreciate that.
Now, without further ado,
let's go ahead and get right into this video.
So starting out with a beginner.
In order to start a print on demand t-shirt business
as a beginner, you can do it entirely for free.
There's no catch here.
All of the things that you need
for a print on demand business are entirely free.
You don't have to spend a single dollar,
and I think that's really unique to print on demand
because not many other business models can say that.
So with that said,
there's kind of five things you need to do
for print on demand that could have a cost
and I'll show you how to do all of them for free.
The first one is niche research.
So essentially finding the low competition niches
and what kind of designs you should create.
For a beginner to do this entirely for free,
you can simply go to Amazon
and search through their marketplace,
typing in different niche ideas that you can come up with
or that you can find in lists on Google
and seeing how many other designs there are.
This isn't the best or most efficient way to do this,
but it absolutely works.
Try to get as specific as possible with your searches,
and then just type in t-shirt after that search
and see how many come up.
If there are very few that match what you are searching for,
that means that's a low competition niche.
The second part of the process
for print on demand is creating your slogans.
So once you've found these low competition niches,
you now need to come up with
what your shirt design is going to say.
The free ways to do this are ChatGPT.
If you haven't heard of that, it's a really cool thing.
It's artificial intelligence.
Currently, it is free, so that's a huge win for a beginner.
You can use this totally for free.
It's not necessarily an advanced tool,
but it is something new.
So I'll link up a video on step-by-step how to use it
on screen recording so that you can see how to use this.
But I highly recommend ChatGPT for coming up
with these slogans, especially because it's currently free.
Now once you've found these ideas,
it brings us into the third part of the process
for print on demand.
This third part is checking those slogans
for trademark protection.
Now, although you may come up with a great slogan
for a t-shirt or you might find it somewhere,
that slogan may be trademarked by someone else,
which means that you can't use it.
So you need to be able to check for trademarks,
type that slogan in, and see if it's already protected.
Now the free way to do this is
by going to tmsearch.uspto.gov,
and although this is definitely not the fastest
or most efficient way to do this,
you can, in fact, find out if it is protected on apparel.
This is a part of the process
that will be a little bit time consuming for you,
but if you wanna do it entirely for free,
this is the way to do it.
Now assuming that those slogans are not trademarked
and you can use them freely,
that brings you into the next part of the process
for print on demand which is design creation.
Now there are a number of different ways
that you can create print on demand designs for free.
You can use tools like Canva or Photoshop.
The main thing that you're going to have to be careful here
if you're doing this for free
is to make sure that the design tools
that you're using or the elements
that you're pulling into Photoshop are not copyrighted.
Now to clear that up a little bit,
for trademarks, it's basically the slogan is protected.
That's a trademark.
Copyright is going to be if a design
or a graphic or a font or something else is protected.
That's what a copyright is.
Now on some of these tools like Canva
or different graphics that you find on Google
that you wanna use in Photoshop,
they have different fonts or graphics
that are copyright protected mixed into their library.
So you may be creating a design totally for free
and it looks great and you upload it
to a print on demand website
and all of a sudden that design gets taken down
a couple months later.
Although you check the slogan for trademarks,
the actual graphics or the font might be copyright protected
because you got them off of a tool like this.
So technically, you can create designs for free,
just my word of caution is be careful with copyright.
And then assuming you've done all of this
and you've gotten this far,
the last part of the process is uploading your designs
to print on demand websites.
Now this part is entirely free.
My best advice to you is to upload your designs
to passive print on demand websites.
These are websites like Amazon Merch on Demand,
Redbubble, TeePublic, Zazzle.
These websites are all the passive style.
And what that means is,
those websites get their own traffic organically
and they do all of their own paid ads.
So you as the seller, you don't have to pay anything
for your own ads to bring your own traffic.
It's all done for you.
By uploading to those sites,
it's a totally free way to get people
in front of your designs.
So as you can see, as a beginner,
there are ways to do all five
of these steps of the process totally for free.
However, if you wanna take your print on demand business
to the next level and you do have some money to invest
in paid tools, let's have a look at what that looks like.
So we have the same five steps of the process.
We're just going to bring in some paid tools now.
So for the first part of the process,
we have our niche research,
essentially finding the low competition niches.
So there is a tool that does this for you.
It's called Merch Informer.
I've been using it for years,
and it essentially gives you a list
of different low competition sub-niches to go into
and the keywords to use for your listings.
This tool costs $10 per month,
but I have a coupon code that I can share with you
that brings it down to $8 per month.
Now by using that tool, you'll be able able to find
these low competition niches very easily
and that brings you basically right into the next step
which is coming up with your slogans.
Now in this step, we can use the same tool,
which is ChatGPT, and right now it is 100% free to use.
Now something to know about ChatGPT
is that nobody quite knows what's gonna happen to this tool.
It's a very powerful tool and currently it's free.
So what that likely is going to lead to is,
they're probably going to change it
to you have to pay every month to use it.
I don't know what that amount is going to be
because it's still free right now,
but expect that you're going to have to pay
for this tool down the road.
The next step is the trademark checking
and that actually goes back
to the first tool we were talking about.
So, Merch Informer also checks the trademarks for you.
It's a really good tool.
Merch Informer has a bunch of small tools within it
and the trademark checking is one of those tools.
So if you're paying that $8 a month
to find the low competition niches,
you'll also be able to check your slogans for trademarks
included in that $8 a month.
Moving on to the next step which is creating your designs.
The tool that I use here hands down is Placeit.net.
The reason that I use them is,
they have tons of templates for t-shirts.
It makes the process really quick
to create professional designs, and most importantly,
all of their graphics, all of their fonts,
everything on their website is 100% copyright-free.
So this way, anything that you create on Placeit,
whatever that design looks like, whatever elements you use,
as long as you have checked your slogan to make sure
that it's not trademarked,
you won't have to worry about any issues with legal issues,
copyright trademark infringement.
Now Placeit.net costs $15 a month to use,
and I have a 15% off coupon
that I put down in the description
that'll bring it down to $12.70 per month.
And then as far as uploading your designs
to the different print on demand websites,
that is still entirely free.
There's no cost to do that.
So as an advanced print on demand seller
and I've used a lot of the tools out there,
I find myself only using two paid tools.
With ChatGPT still being free
and the Merch Informer being $8 a month
and Placeit being about $12 a month, your all-in cost
as an advanced print on demand seller is only $20 per month.
So hopefully that answers that question for you guys,
and I'll link up the full-length print on demand tutorial.
It goes through everything step-by-step,
how to do this more advanced side of print on demand.
Besides that, if you have any questions,
just let me know down in the comments.
And if you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up.
I will see you guys all in the next video.