Tis’ the season for mugs!
If you’re looking to make money from the comfort of your home, start selling drinkware
online.
Personalized mugs are not just a beloved personal item to all hot drink fiends; they’re a
true gifting staple.
In this guide, I’ll teach you where to find coffee mugs to sell, how to design them without
any design skills, and how to successfully market them to your customers.
And how you can do all of that with a $0 investment.
Interested?
Keep watching!
You might be thinking—okay, selling mugs sounds like a good business idea, except that
I don’t have a stock of cups or a sublimation printer.
No worries!
That’s what we’re here for.
We take care of stocking blank products, printing, packaging, and shipping out the product to
your customer.
All you have to do is take care of the creative and marketing side of your business.
As Printful is a white-label partner, your customers won’t see our name attached to
your products at any point.
You have the opportunity to create a truly authentic brand experience for your customers
with the branding options Printful offers.
Learn more about customized branding by watching this video.
I’ve put a link to it in the description.
We offer a wide range of products that you can choose from, including a variety of mugs
for every taste.
You have classics like the 11oz and 15oz all-white ceramic mug.
Or a fun twist on the classic—an 11oz ceramic mug with color inside.
You can also pick the travel-safe enamel mug that’s always ready for Instagram.
Or surprise your customers with the glossy black magic mug that reveals your custom designs
when in touch with hot liquids.
Depending on the audience and niche of your store, consider which type of mug fits best.
Mugs are a practical utensil and a great gift, especially with a custom design.
That means you can sell mugs that fit a specific style or mugs that match a particular holiday
or celebration.
Now, to choose a specific niche for your mugs, I suggest we do research and see what people
are already buying.
We created a poll here on YouTube a little while ago, asked our sellers about the mugs
their customers like the best.
The results are in, and the most popular cup is…
A drum roll, please!
The white ceramic mug with color inside.
With the white ceramic mug as a close second.
While you can rely on others’ experiences, it’s best to do market research to see which
mug type is best for your audience.
More on that in our next segment!
I’ve opened up one of the more popular marketplaces for the US audience—Etsy.
I’m suggesting that you use Etsy because you see what products are coming up for each
search term, and see how well they're doing in terms of sales.
I’m simply typing in the keyword coffee mug to start our research.
In the drop-down box, we see some of the most popular searches that contain our keyword
coffee mug.
Let’s explore the coffee mug dad keyword.
A coffee mug for dads can be a great gift on Father’s day, on a birthday, or any other
celebration.
That means you can make sales from this product all year round.
Most of these designs are text-based and have either funny or heartfelt quotes.
Keep in mind that it’s illegal to copy a design..
I suggest that you rather use the designs that are doing well for inspiration.
Once you find a potential niche, such as coffee mugs for dads, the next step is choosing a
suitable mug type.
By taking a quick look at the products on Etsy, I see that most of them are white ceramic
mugs.
For my own product, I’ll be picking a ceramic mug with color inside, to fit the customers'
expectations.
When picking the mug type, keep in mind when and how your customers will be using it.
So for example, if I wanted to create mugs for dads who love camping, I would choose
the enamel mug.
The enamel mug is lightweight and durable, which is perfect for campers.
Now that I have a niche and a mug type, the next step is creating a design.
To create a design for your store, you’ll need to go through these three steps:
* Create a product template * Add a design to the product
* Save the template To create a design for your mug, head over
to your Printful Dashboard and click Product templates on the side menu.
The reason we’re using product templates is that once you’ve created the product
template, you’re able to push it to different stores.
Then click here to create a new template, go to Home&Living, Coffee mugs, and choose
the product you want.
If you’re making a design without Printful’s Design Maker, check out file guidelines.
These guidelines help you make sure your product turns out exactly as you’ve envisioned.
You can download the print file template; it’s in the necessary size, so you’ll
have an easier time when creating your design.
Once your design is ready, click on the Start designing button.
Here you can upload your design file.
You can place the design elements on the left, middle, and right side in the design view.
If you want the design to appear next to the handle, put it on either side, like this.
Or create a pattern by clicking here.
Let’s check the 3D and mockup views to see what the mug will look like.
You might not be a design expert, and that’s alright, neither am I. You can easily create
a fantastic mug design with all the tools and resources offered by the Design Maker.
Different patterns and design elements with transparent backgrounds are here for you to
use for free.
You can also choose from a wide variety of clipart and Quick Designs.
You have high-quality illustrations covering many different topics that you can combine
with text, adjusting everything to your liking.
Let’s create a mug for the world’s best dad using only the tools available in the
Design Maker.
I’ll start by clicking on Text and typing in a quote.
Now, let’s pick a font and text size and place the text on the side of the mug.
So far, so good!
Now let’s spice things up and add an illustration.
To do that, I’m heading over to clipart to find a suitable one.
I want to add an illustration of a mustache on the mug for those dads whose defining facial
feature is a luscious stache, so I’m picking the Build a human section.
To place this clipart on the cup, click on it and place it in the desired spot.
Perfect!
The design looks exactly how I wanted it to look.
Now let’s check the 3D view to see how it’ll look on the mug.
Looks amazing!
Now, click Continue to save the product template.
I’m typing in dad mug as the template name.
Finally, click Save.
If you want to add this product to your store, hover your mouse over the template and click
Add to store.
Now that we’ve created the product, the next step is reaching our customers and getting
them to purchase!
When coming up with a marketing plan, there are several areas to cover:
* Who are you selling to?
* When are these people likely to buy your product?
* What keywords to use when advertising your product?
Keep watching, and I’ll show you my best practices and tools to tackle each of these
questions.
When it comes to the mug we just designed, it’s probably best to market it as a gift
for, well...dads.
The customers who'll buy these mugs will most likely be partners, children, and friends
or relatives of the giftee.
It’s crucial to understand who your audience is first.
If you market to the wrong crowd, it won’t matter how good your product pictures, descriptions,
and prices are, as they just won’t be interested in buying your product.
So, if you already have a niche in mind, ask yourself—who’s going to buy this?
We have a quick video guide that helps you figure out your ideal customer.
I’ve put a link to it in the description.
Make sure to check it out if you’re struggling to figure out who you’re selling to.
The perfect customer for my dad mug could be their partners and children.
If I wanted to target their partners and children, I would likely target men and women aged 30-60.
To specifically target their partners, I would also include people who’re in a relationship.
I would market this mug on platforms my potential client might often use, such as Facebook,
Instagram, and YouTube.
It might be a bit tricky to target their children if they are younger than 16, as they might
not have a bank account and permission to buy products online.
It might be best to target people aged 16-30 who’re more likely to be able to make online
purchases and might buy a mug from your online store.
I would advertise this product on platforms people this age often use, such as Instagram,
YouTube, and Snapchat.
Let’s think of possible events and celebrations when people could gift such a mug.
So, the first celebration that comes to mind is Father’s Day, a day for honoring fatherhood.
Another occasion is the winter holidays, as a cute mug is perfect for the cold season.
And, of course, your customers can gift mugs to dads on their birthdays any time of the
year.
Now that we’ve brainstormed several occasions when customers could buy this product, we
have a better idea of when to market our product and a starting point for keyword research.
Keywords are terms that help search engines understand what type of products your store
sells and who your product is for.
To ensure potential customers can find your product, it’s important to invest time in
keyword research.
Keywords can both describe how the product looks, as well as who it’s for.
We can try looking up such keywords as fathers day gift, gift for dad, gift for dad from
wife, gift for dad from husband, gift for a new dad, and Christmas gift for dad.
Not all of these keywords will work well, but we can refine them with keyword research.
Once you have your keywords, search engines can then understand what your product is and
put it in front of potential customers.
For example, mugs for dads can have such descriptive words as mug with a cute quote and father’s
day gift.
Once you’ve researched keywords for the product, you should use them for the product
name, description, and in your social media posts and hashtags.
An excellent tool for keyword research is Google Trends.
Once you type in your keyword, choose the Worldwide region and a period of 12 months.
You’ll see a graph and a world map, and two boxes of related topics and related queries.
We chose Worldwide region to find out where this particular keyword is most popular and
decide which areas we want to sell in.
We picked the time frame of 12 months to see the popularity of this search term in the
past year, as it helps us gauge the interest your keyword has all year round.
Based on the search results, the popularity of this keyword grows at the beginning of
May, and decreases after June 19, Father’s Day.
We can market our product in five countries: Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom,
the United States, and Canada.
So instead of focusing our marketing efforts on the United States, we can expand our reach.
In the Related Searches box, we see related search terms people often look up.
This box is an excellent source to pull more keywords from, like fathers day gift ideas
2021.
If I wanted to use this keyword, I would change the year to the current one instead of 2021.
The reason to add a year to your keywords is that people want to buy the most up-to-date
products.
So including the current year in your titles and descriptions will help signal to your
customers that the product is trendy and relevant.
Users will want to visit the site with the most up-to-date items available.
One way that sites demonstrate the novelty of their listings is by including the date
of the most recent update in titles or meta descriptions.
You can research some more keywords just like this to see when they’re more likely going
to be trending, as well as find more related words to use for your product titles, descriptions,
and social media posts.
If you’re out of ideas on what your keywords could be and you’re not sure what to research,
we can head over to Google Trends for some inspiration.
Let’s type in dad mug in the search bar, pick a worldwide region and a time range of
five years.
Scroll down to the Related Queries section to see what else people are searching for.
Next to each query, we see a percentage and the term Breakout.
The percentage shows how the interest has grown over time, and the term Breakout means
that growth has increased over 5000%.
Depending on the topic of design, you can pick some of these terms as keywords.
If I want to choose keywords that describe the cup I designed earlier, I will pick these
keywords: best dad ever mug, fathers day mugs, personalized dad mug, super dad mug, and best
dad mug.
We can see some of the top search results involve keywords that don't match my mug design,
such as donald trump dad mug and cat dad mug.
Although these keywords are popular, they have nothing to do with our mug.
Make sure to only use keywords that describe your product so you don’t deceive your customers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you use the wrong keyword, people who search for
it won’t click on your mug and you have a chance of getting ranked lower in the search
results.
If you want more in-depth guidance on using Google Trends, check out the Printful Academy
course How to Use Google Trends for Ecommerce.
Click here to watch [point to your upper left] or find a link in the description.
Once you’ve found keywords that fit the product you want to sell, it’s time to put
them to good use.
Where you add your keywords depends on whether you’re using a platform or a marketplace.
If you’ve built your store on a platform, like Shopify, Wix, or others, the right place
for keywords will be the product title and description, your meta titles and descriptions,
as well as the SEO settings of your products on your store.
Let’s add your product’s keywords to the title and description.
If you haven’t yet pushed your product template to your store, go to your Printful Dashboard
and click on Product templates.
Now add the template to your store.
When pushing the product to your store, you’re able to go over product details.
Here’s where we can already add plenty of our keywords, making our product discoverable.
As a title, I’ll set Father’s day gift, Behind every great kid is an amazing dad.
This title now includes a keyword for an upcoming celebration and the quote of our mug.
I’m also editing the description and adding some extra keywords.
That will help search engines understand what your store and products are about, and help
customers find you.
I want to include different keywords father’s day gift ideas, and father’s day mug.
There’s already a sample text added; I’ll edit it to include our keywords.
Now that our potential customers are searching for Father’s Day gift ideas, they’ll be
able to find our product as well.
And I suggest you add your tags to the Tags section as well.
And you’re all set with the product listing!
Once you’ve pushed it to your store, go over and open it on your platform.
Here you can also edit the SEO settings.
For this example, we’re using the Shopify platform.
Here you can see how your product appears on a search engine.
As it might already contain text, you might want to leave it as is, but I suggest you
make changes.
This will significantly improve your visibility on Google.
When writing the description and title for your search engine listing, you should answer
the following questions: 1.
What do you sell?
2.
Why should people buy from you?
Avoid using flowery language; get straight to the point.
It takes mere seconds for people to decide whether they click on your site.
You have a concise window of time to make an impression, so tell people what you’re
selling and what problem you’re solving for them.
For my example, I’m deleting some of the details from the description, such as the
specs.
If people are interested to find out more about that, they’ll click on our listing.
I think the rest of the description tells precisely what problem we solve for the customer—we’re
giving them a practical Father’s Day gift.
Now, I’ll edit the title and add keywords that describe my product—Father’s day
gift—a coffee mug with a sweet quote.
Our potential customers can now see that we sell Father’s Day gifts, to be exact—Father’s
Day mugs.
If you’re using a marketplace, these steps stay just about the same.
When pushing the product to the store, add your keywords in the title, description, and
tags box.
For this example, I’m using Etsy.
Once you head over to your marketplace listing, you can add in extra keywords there as well.
That is all!
I hope you found this video useful.
If you’re already selling mugs, share the marketing tactic that works best for you in
the comments section.
See you in the next video!