In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you everything you need to know about paid advertising for print-on-demand.
So if you're interested in print-on-demand or if you're thinking about doing paid ads, please watch this video first.
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the channel.
If you're new here, my name is Greg and I like to talk about online entrepreneurship and sharing the resources that I wish I had along my journey.
So if you're interested in making money online,
feel free to look around the channel and you might find some stuff that you like.
In today's video, I'm going to share with you everything I think that you should know about paid advertising for print-on-demand.
This should save you a ton of time of trial and error and hopefully you can learn from my mistakes over the years
and take some valuable pointers out of this video.
Now before we get into this video, if you do enjoy these videos and the other ones on the channel,
I always appreciate the Thumbs Up on these videos.
It tells the YouTube algorithm that these videos are good and it shares the content with more people.
So that's all I ask of you guys, if you can hit the Thumbs Up button, I really do appreciate it.
Now without further ado, let's get right into this video starting with two very important things.
Number one is for most people, (and I'm talking 99.9% of people)
paid advertising for print-on-demand is not your solution.
Now I will definitely explain that further and break that down as we go through this video as to what I mean by that.
But the second thing that I want to say before we get into this video is that there is one use case
where I can see and I can support you using paid advertising for print-on-demand
and I'll explain that in this video as well.
So first things first, in this video
I want to go over what the common popular print-on-demand paid advertising methods are.
So when you get through all of the one-off small different ways of doing paid advertising,
it really boils down to two main ways of paid advertising for print-on-demand.
The first way which is the most common is paid Facebook or paid Instagram advertisements
and the second way which is also pretty common is paid Instagram shoutouts.
So first let's dive into the paid Facebook and paid Instagram side of this,
so I can explain what most people are doing, what I've done, what the results have been.
So if you start doing this yourself and you see these results, you know, what's going on.
So traditionally how this works is as the print-on-demand seller,
you create a niche specific design, you upload that as a listing and then you go over to Facebook
which is the Facebook Ads manager and in here you can create ads for Facebook and Instagram.
Since they're owned together by the same company, you create the ads on Facebook
and you can choose to put them on both Facebook and Instagram.
Now, what you do from here is you take that niche specific design you link to it in a post and then you choose a target audience.
Now in this target audience,
you can choose for that post to be shown only to people interested in that niche.
Now alternatively and a little bit more advanced is you can create a custom look-alike audience to target people who might be a little bit more
specific interested in this niche, but that is so overkill for print-on-demand.
It's not going to bring you a return.
So I'm not even going to talk about that further in this video. And then once you've set your audience for this ad
where it should be showing to people interested in your shirt design because they're interested in that niche
then you set your budget which is typically about $5-$10 per day and that's it.
That's all you really have to do.
And then you launch it whether that's on Facebook or Instagram or both.
Now I've easily spent over $1,000 testing on this
to see if it returns a positive return, and the short answer is No. You'll be lucky if you're going to break even.
But the most common thing that you're going to see once you launch your ad is it might get a lot of Likes.
It might get a lot of comments, you may be able to track that it gets a lot of clicks.
But you're going to get no sales. Now for some people you may get a sale,
you might get two sales, but I'm telling you as a vast majority, a lot of people are going to get no sales.
I see this through the comments on my YouTube page all the time.
People are saying I tried Facebook ads, but I got a lot of clicks, a lot of likes but no sales.
I just want to let you guys know that from my experience and from what I've seen from all the people commenting
This is the most common experience. Now a lot of people want to know why.
So briefly without getting too far into this, it's because so many people are trying this Facebook Ads as I just explained to you as well.
As Instagram ads are so easy to set up now and target people, so people are getting oversaturated with these types of ads
This is why this method really just doesn't work. So without going any further into paid Facebook and paid Instagram advertising,
that is generally how it goes and the overall experience that most people will see.
Now let's move into paid Instagram shoutouts. So essentially how this one works is you go onto Instagram
as the print-on-demand seller and you may have a niche in mind, where you have a niche specific storefront
and you go find pages within that niche that are already built up. Just generally a big page and then sometimes these pages will
have right in their bio
'shoot us a message if you're interested in doing a shout out or advertising' and all you have to do is send them a direct message
or email and say 'hey, what are your rates? I'm interested in doing a shout-out on your page'
So traditionally what this will look like is they'll message you back.
You can have a conversation about what is a good deal for you.
And the shout-out is typically going to be temporary, either two hours up to 24 hours.
That's the most common and then you'll pay something like fifteen dollars all the way up to
maybe a thousand dollars for that post, depending on how big their page is.
Now it's up to you to determine what is a good deal and what is a good fit for you.
And then just know that the payment is going to be sent through a third party.
You can't pay through Instagram. Ideally you want to be paying through PayPal
The reason for that is if they do scam you, they don't post anything and if something goes south,
you can go to PayPal and get your money back no matter what.
And then once you guys have set up a deal and everything,
you'll send them a photo that you want them to post.
This can be a few photos in a carousel post with multiple photos in it or something that you guys agree on.
Typically,
this is going to be photos of your shirts or some type of advertisement
that you make up and then the caption that will go blow on that post.
Now either that will link to your Instagram page or it'll link to your Teespring storefront or your print-on-demand
listing where you want that traffic to go to to make the purchase.
Now I definitely tried this in the past and the things I can share with you are it's definitely going to be hit or miss.
Anyone that you talk to who has done this before you don't know if the audience is really going to be engaged with it
and make purchases.
Sometimes it is a huge hit. Sometimes it is a massive miss and you don't get a single sale from it.
So from experience my recommendation for you guys is definitely don't look at this strategy of using paid Instagram shoutouts as a long-term profiting strategy.
This is definitely going to be temporary and although you might make big profits on one of these shoutouts,
you may lose everything on the next and barely break even at the end of the day.
Now there's a youtuber who did a great case study of this. I don't have a case study of my own,
so I'll refer you out to his video, a link to it down in the description.
I recommend watching that.
It goes through everything, his whole experience and he had the same experience I've had, which is hit or miss and you'll see more details in his video.
So this brings us to the huge question and the main point of this video that I want to get at is,
what is the best strategy if both of these are not really going to work long-term?
The best strategy from my experience and all the other students that I've taught is that you need to do the opposite of this.
You don't want to be focusing on making a few designs and then using paid advertising to get short-term wins.
Rather you want to be creating and uploading a lot of great designs.
Now, I know that sounds simple, but you have to behind-the-scenes.
Teespring, Merch by Amazon, and Redbubble are the biggest players in print-on-demand and they're all non-exclusive.
This means that if you create one design,
you can upload it to all three of these sites.
Now it doesn't end there, the beauty of it is all three of these sites, they do marketing for you.
And not only is this just marketing. This is actually very advanced marketing. They're doing retargeting. They're doing email marketing.
I'll put up a screenshot just from Teespring showing the different types of marketing that they do on your account.
Now there are a few stipulations to this and I will talk about them over the course of the next couple minutes.
But just know that creating and uploading a lot of great designs is going to solve 99% of your problems.
And that is the best strategy for print-on-demand.
So the first question that you may be having is, if it's so simple as just creating and uploading a lot of great designs,
why isn't everyone having success on print-on-demand?
The short answer to this is that most people on print-on-demand are thinking so small.
They see the traditional strategy of making 5 to 10 great designs and then doing paid advertising and getting huge profits on it.
And as soon as they go through the first scenario that I explained to you and they spend their money,
they get likes clicks, but no sales,
they just write off print-on-demand because it doesn't work for them.
Since there are so many scammy ways to make money online nowadays,
people easily write off away, if it doesn't work right off the bat.
For most of these people, like I said, they're only creating maybe 5 to 10 designs
and probably only uploading it to one of the three site not knowing that you can upload it to all three of the sites
and they just don't have enough lines in the water to see the benefits of these sites free marketing.
So that brings us into the next point of, why is this so good for us?
And that's because we understand that if we create a lot of great designs,
we can actually upload it to all three of these sites, not just one.
And they're going to be doing the marketing for us. This gives us the advantage of scale.
Most people are only doing those 5 to 10 designs.
If we're doing maybe 500 to a 1000 designs and uploading it to all three of these sites,
we may have 3000 designs out there just being marketed for us.
The sheer level of scale combined with all of their advanced marketing that they do for us for free,
leads to a lot of sales.
So just to give you a little bit more value in this video, Merch by Amazon, Redbubble, and Teespring,
like I said are the three biggest players, all not exclusive, so you can upload the same designs to all three of them.
Now Merch by Amazon and Redbubble,
they start doing marketing for you from day one, a couple little things that you may only learn from experience
so hopefully this can save you some time is that Redbubble has no limits,
so when you start on red bubble, you can start uploading all of your designs.
Merch by Amazon has a tier system so when you start and you open your account,
you can have a total of ten uploads on your account at any given time until you get ten sales.
The second part of that is when you're still in this first tier of only having ten slots available.
You can only do one upload per day. So it'll take you ten days.
You can only upload one per day until you hit those ten slots and then they market all ten of those designs
But you kind of just have to wait once you get ten sales on your account
You'll be upgraded into tier 2 where you'll have 25 slots.
Now my account is way past tier 2, but if I remember correctly this upgrades you to two uploads per day,
so you're no longer limited to just uploading one per day
and then the same thing goes on through the tiers.
Once you've reached 25 sales, you're upgraded into the third tier which I believe is 50 shirts.
Maybe a hundred shirts, and then it keeps going from there up and up and up
So essentially on Merch by Amazon, the more sales you get on your account the more listings you can have uploaded to your account.
So for a Merch by Amazon and Redbubble your only goal here and the only thing that you were responsible to do is create and upload great designs.
They will do all the marketing for you. You don't have to lift a finger.
Now the other one of the top three is Teespring,
and Teesprings is the only one that's slightly different.
Teespring has something that they call a TrustScore and essentially what this is is you need to prove that your account
is worthy to get all of their free marketing.
Now all you really have to do in order to get the marketing started on your Teespring account is get a few of your own sales on your account.
This shows them that what you're uploading is being purchased, so they should be marketing it.
Teespring is getting so big that they can't do all of their advanced marketing on all new seller accounts.
They have to choose wisely and the way they do
this is by if you can get a few of your own sales,
they see okay, what you're uploading is, so it's worthy of us doing the marketing on it.
The number of how many sales you need to get on your Teespring account before they start doing the marketing has varied in the past.
Right now they're saying it's just one sale, but from experience,
I think it's more between two and ten sales before all their marketing kicks in. So that kind of leads us into the question of,
what is the best way to get those first few sales on your account?
For Teespring until all their free marketing is going to kick in, the first thing that may come to mind especially on this video is that
you may want to use paid advertising just to get a few of these sales and my short answer is No!
I'll explain a better strategy and this is the one that I preach on this channel because it works so well.
It involves a little bit of hard work and that's why a lot of people don't want to do it.
But I'll explain it to you briefly and then link out to a full video on this channel that shows you how to do it, start to finish.
Essentially what you want to do is go to your Teespring account and create a storefront.
You can just create one. You can create two if you like, you only really need one.
Make sure that that storefront is niche-specific and then you want to create a few designs that are
specifically in this niche and then put them into that storefront.
This is all free to do. And on a side note, you want to have at least eight designs in that storefront.
You can have more than that.
But you don't want it to be a bare, empty storefront that you're sending traffic to.
Then once you have this niche specific storefront on your Teespring account, then you want to go over to Instagram and create a new Instagram page,
specifically about this niche, an indie little link that you can put in your bio, you want to link that to the Teespring storefront that we just created.
Then all you have to do is make posts on this Instagram about the products that you have in your store,
about models wearing your products and I'll show you how to put your designs on models.
I'll link that in the other video that you'll see, but you just want to create good posts about the niche on the Instagram page.
And the biggest key here is that you want to be using niche specific hashtags.
This is all completely free to do and essentially how this works is you create posts on that brand new Instagram page,
but you have hashtags that are within that niche.
So people interested in that niche are looking through these hashtags and it's being suggested to them and they're recommended on Instagram.
So when you have those niche specific hashtags on your posts, your posts will be shown to people on Instagram,
even if they're not following your page and if they like it, they see the shirt.
They think it's awesome, they click on it, go to your profile.
Now they can click the storefront link, go over to your Teespring storefront and see if they want to make a purchase.
This is how you get free targeted traffic to your Instagram account putting them right into a storefront.
So all of the options are all your shirts and any one that they buy is going to credit your account and work towards getting
your Trust Score, so that all the Teespring marketing kicks in afterwards.
Now the big part of this that a lot of people tend to misunderstand or just overlook
is that once you get those first few sales from Instagram and you get them over to Teespring and you get those sales
on your Teespring account and you've gotten your Trust Score and the teespring marketing kicks in on your account,
the big thing is you no longer need to use Instagram.
The goal of that Instagram and the niche specific storefront is just to get the first few sales
So you get your Trust Score on Teespring and the marketing kicks in.
Once the marketing kicks in, you no longer have to focus on a specific niche. You no longer need to use Instagram at all.
And you no longer need to use in each storefronts at all Teespring will be marketing all the listings on your account.
This includes past ones and future ones and they market them all individually.
So if someone's interested in this type of niche, they're going to market your design
individually to them via email, via retargeting, via all different types of their marketing methods.
So this is where it brings us right back into the overall strategy of
creating and uploading a lot of great designs. Now as promised in the beginning of the video,
there is one use case where I recommend using paid advertising for print-on-demand and I'll explain that to you.
Now the only time that I recommend using paid advertising for print-on-demand is when you're trying to build up your Trust Score
on Teespring or if you want to tier up on Merch by Amazon by hitting those sales photos,
so you rank into the next tier, if you want to do either of those faster.
Now, as I said before, paid advertising is definitely not a long-term strategy.
However for your Teespring Trust Score or Merch by Amazon tiering up you just need to hit the sales
numbers if you're spending a lot of dollars on marketing, but you're getting those sales numbers
You're going to get your Trust Score or you're going to tear up.
Now the reason that I say this is only for this use case is because you may be paying $100
for that paid social media shout-out and you may only get two sales from it, profiting
you may be $15.
Now although you're going to lose money on the front end, that will qualify you for a Trust Score on Teespring
And then all of their marketing is going to kick in and you can jump right over the Instagram strategy,
or doing it all organically and just jump into creating and uploading a ton of great designs.
Now if you're willing to take this financial risk in the beginning in exchange for
potentially speeding up the process of getting those first few sales,
then I would recommend to you to go with the Instagram paid shout out over the paid Facebook and paid Instagram
advertising. The paid Instagram shout-out is not as straightforward, but it typically has better results.
Like I said,
it's going to be completely hit or miss, but if you do get a good hit you will get maybe two to ten sales
right on your account pretty instantly.
Now a big pointer that I can give you if you are going to go the paid Instagram shout out where out is
to look for quite a few different pages and reach out to all of them be very friendly with them over direct messaging however make sure that
negotiating and getting a good rate for yourself. Now by you reaching out to multiple pages,
and not just one, it will give you a point of reference of how much you should be paying for how many followers and how many likes on their photos they're getting.
Now again, just be professional in your negotiations, but try to get the best rate for yourself.
The second pointer like I said before is make sure that you're going to be paying through PayPal,
so if anything goes wrong,
you can request your money back directly from PayPal and you don't have to do it through the Instagram page.
The third pointer I can give you is to watch the other video I was talking about before, I'll link to that down in the description,
so you can watch that for a bit more information and behind-the-scenes of how it actually works.
Now the last thing I want to add to this video because you're likely going to have this question very soon
is once you get those first few sales on your Teespring account,
how do you know that your Trust Score has kicked in by Teespring and they're doing all the free marketing on all of your listings?
The short answer is it can take somewhere up to a month.
It is really all over the place of when your Trust Score kicks in and all that marketing starts.
But a great way to find out if that Trust Score has kicked in on your account and the marketing has started is
if you search on the Teespring marketplace for your designs and you can actually find them in their search results,
that means that it is a great indicator that you likely have your Trust Score and the marketing has started.
As with all things in print-on-demand,
the biggest piece of advice I can give you is to be
consistent and to be patient.
If you're not seeing the results that you're expecting, give it another month and check back and chances are you're going to be seeing those results then.
All good things, especially making money online, they take time and a lot of patience.
But just like that, that's the end of this video. I hope you guys got a ton from it.
If you enjoyed it, I really appreciate the Thumbs Up.
If you have any questions at all, let me know down in the comments
and I'll be seeing you guys in the next video.