So in last week's video,
we covered a very important topic.
And what that was, was copyright infringement
and trademark infringement
when you're creating t-shirt designs,
leading to your listings,
being taken down and removed from print-on-demand websites.
So in today's video,
I'm going to walk you guys through step-by-step
here on the camera and here on the computer
to show you how I make my personal designs
to make sure that I'm not infringing
on any copyrights or trademarks.
So with that being said,
today's video is going to be straight to the point,
but I do just wanna make one quick note
to say, welcome to the channel if you are new,
my name is Greg and I like to talk
about online entrepreneurship.
A lot of the videos you find on this channel
are about print-on-demand and affiliate marketing.
Those are the two business models that I personally do.
So if you're interested in making money online,
feel free to look around the channel
and consider subscribing.
Now, lastly, before we get into this video,
to all of you guys who have been supporting these videos
and this channel overall,
thank you guys so much.
Without further ado, let's go ahead and get started.
So the very first thing when creating t-shirt designs
for print-on-demand is to find out if the niche
that you're thinking about printing designs in
is actually profitable.
Now this is a step that many people overlook,
especially beginners, because they're just excited
to create designs and put them out there for sale.
However, creating designs about random topics
that you wanna design on in the very beginning
will hurt you a little bit because you may be going
into very competitive and saturated niches.
What that means for you is if you're not looking
into these niches before creating designs,
it may take a lot longer for you
to start seeing your first sales coming in.
So with that said, my very first and highly recommended step
before you start creating designs for print-on-demand
is to quickly do some niche research.
Now, there are a lot of niche research tools out there
both free and paid, however,
I recommend being careful which one you choose
to use for print-on-demand.
Most of these tools out there are using Google search data.
However, for print-on-demand, we really need a tool
that's using t-shirt print-on-demand data specifically.
So with that being said,
I'm going to save you guys a lot of time,
instead of comparing all of these tools.
I just want to jump into the tool that I personally use.
Now, switching over to the computer here,
the tool that I personally use is called Merch Informer.
Now it is a paid tool, however,
they have a three-day completely free trial.
So everything we do in this video,
you can do on the free trial.
So I'm going to go ahead and get logged in here
so we can start using this tool.
And once you're logged in whether it's on a free trial
or a paid plan, you're going to see this dashboard.
And all we need to do is come to the left side
and click on competition checker.
So right here in this top box called keywords,
this is where you wanna type in the niche
that you're considering making designs about.
In the beginning, it's very important
to find a good niche that has a good score
on this competition checker,
because that will give you the best chance
of starting to see those first sales coming in the fastest.
So to give you an idea of how to do this,
I'm going to show you a good niche,
and I'm going to show you a bad niche.
So first I'm going to type in tacos and we're going to see
if designs on tacos are good for print on demand,
or if it's far too competitive.
(keyboard clacking)
So just like that, this tool has given us a letter grade.
It goes from A to F so as you can see over here,
tacos rates at an F.
So this means that by the score of an F,
tacos is not going to be a good niche to go into,
especially as a beginner,
because there's far too much competition.
There are a lot of people creating designs
in the tacos niche so it's going to be hard
for yours to get found.
So with that said, I'm just going to come right back up top
and I'm going to search for another niche.
So when we searched for tacos,
it was just one word. So we just type in tacos.
However, when you search for any niches
that are more than one word
put parentheses around that search.
So in this example, I'm going to search for van life.
Since this is more than one word,
I'm going to put parentheses around it the search.
(keyboard clacking)
And then I'm just going to click search.
Now while this is loading for a second here,
for those of you who are not familiar with van life,
it's basically people getting into camping,
converting their own vans.
This is a pretty interesting niche
and I've been watching the trend go up.
And as you can see by the results right here, it got a B.
When you were searching these niches,
anything that gets an A score or a B score,
is something that I would recommend going into.
And just remember, you don't have to limit yourself
to just one specific niche.
With that being said, just a quick note.
If you need a full length tutorial on print-on-demand
from start to finish, I'll link it down in the description.
It will expand on why these niches are so important.
But as we look at these results,
we can see right off the bat that we have a B score here.
So that means it's a good niche to go into.
There's not a lot of competition in this niche.
So it's a good niche to create designs in because
there's a high probability that you will get seen
and you will get sales.
So one more quick thing, just to show you about this tool.
If you do scroll down,
you can see all the keywords that people are using
in their listings, and you can even see 10
of the best-selling t-shirt designs
in this niche currently.
Now these are not t-shirt designs
that you're going to wanna copy as is.
In the next section here, I'm going to show you
how to come up with ideas to create these designs.
So now that we've found a good niche to create designs in,
step two is to find inspiration for the designs
that we're going to create.
So coming back to the computer,
the way that I like to find designs
and get the creative juices flowing
is to come over to Pinterest.
So you don't need to have an account on Pinterest
to do this.
All you have to do is click explore and it'll bring you
right into their website.
So now what we're going to do is keep
that van life niche in mind.
And now we're gonna search for t-shirt designs
that have van life,
or have camping things in that niche
just to get some ideas.
So the overall niche of van life
may be a little bit specific,
but I'm going to search for it anyways.
All I'm typing in here is van life shirt
just to browse through and get some ideas.
So now, as you can see,
when you start scrolling through here,
you can see a bunch of t-shirt ideas.
Now you don't want to go in and just copy these designs.
That is completely not fair. It's not recommended.
But the reason we're doing this is to get ideas
and find things that we can build off of.
So looking at these photos,
these shirts look a little bit basic to me.
I'm just finding things that say van life on them.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to switch van life over to camping
(keyboard clacking)
and see if we can find
a little bit more interesting shirts here.
So this is the type of result that you wanna find here.
So these are all shirts here with great text
and designs on them.
So as you start scrolling through these,
you're going to gather a ton of great ideas for designs,
but this brings us into step three of this process.
Step three is finding out if the text on these shirts
is copyright or trademark protected
and if we can use that text in our own designs.
This is one of those very important parts of this process.
As we were talking about in last week's video,
if you use text on your design or images, company, logos,
anything that is protected by copyright or trademark,
your listings will be taken down.
So what we are going to do is one quick step here,
just to find out which ones of these phrases
we can actually use in our own designs.
Now, one more disclaimer,
I guess here is we're not going in
and copying these designs.
If the phrase is not copyright protected on a design,
that means that we can also use it.
However you wanna make sure
that you're not copying their design.
Later on in this video,
I'm going to show you how to create your own custom design.
So you don't have to copy these,
but I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea,
thinking that we're just coming in here
and copying people's designs.
So quickly, I'm going to show you three different ways
that you can find out which ones of these phrases
you are allowed to use on your designs.
So looking at all of these designs here,
I know from experience the ones that are typically longer
have less of a chance of being copyright protected.
However, it doesn't mean that you're off the hook
and you can just freely use them.
But for the example in this video,
I'm going to find one that I'm really not sure
if it's going to be protected
because it is a shorter phrase.
So if you look right up top here,
you can see one that says, keep it simple.
This is interesting, I don't know if keep it simple
is a tagline of a company.
So I'm going to show you how to find out.
So the first way to find out is to go right over
to the original tmsearch.uspto.gov
What this website is,
is the United States Patent and Trademark Office
and it allows you to search all of their records.
So what we wanna do is go right
into a basic word mark search.
And we're just going to type in that phrase,
which is keep it simple.
(keyboard clacking)
Now we don't need to select anything else here.
We're just going to hit submit query.
Now, what this is going to do is bring up a big list
of everything that has keep it simple that is protected.
Now there's two things that we need
to look for in this list.
First is to find out on this right side,
if it's live or if it's dead.
If it's dead, it means we are allowed to use it.
If it's live, it means that it's actively protected.
Now here's the second part that we need to look for
and this is the reason that I don't personally use
this website, but I wanted to show it to you guys.
The second thing that we need to find out is
if this phrase, just how we typed it in,
keep it simple, not anything else.
Just keep it simple is protected on apparel and clothing.
Now, as you can see, there are multiple, keep it simples
throughout this list.
So what you have to do is click in on every single one
of these and read through this description
to find out if it's protected on apparel, clothing, hats,
anything that you're going to be designing on.
Now as we can see from this one, it is protected on paper,
paper, stationery, all different things related
to paper and rubber stamps,
but it's not protected on apparel.
So now we need to go back and we need to look
at the other ones to find out
if they are protected on apparel.
As you can see, this can turn into a very lengthy process.
So this brings me right into the second way
to find out if a phrase is copyright or trademark protected.
This second way is going to be a lot faster.
But as you can imagine, the third way is the ultimate way,
which I'll get to just in a second.
So moving on to the second way,
this is a website called trademarkia.com
and basically again, you're going to type in keep it simple.
(keyboard clacking)
Give that a search.
And then you're going to have
a very streamlined approach here
that's going to show you in a more simplified way,
just for this phrase of keep it simple,
what the results say.
You can see on the right side,
if it is live or if it is dead.
And then it's going to show you
in the already opened description, what it is protected on.
So as you can see for this specific search,
we actually did get pretty lucky.
And in this trademarkia search,
it shows that keep it simple on clothing is labeled dead
and it is not an actively protected phrase.
Now this worked out very well and we got our answer quickly.
However, in other cases,
when you're using this website to search,
you have five pages that you need to scroll through
to find out if it's protected on clothing.
It doesn't always work out this easy.
Now with that being said, this brings us into the third way
to check if it's copyright or trademark protected.
This is the way I personally use because
it is ultimately the fastest way to find out.
So what this is is actually back on the first tool
we started on of Merch Informer.
This video is not sponsored by Merch Informer.
It's just, they have really good tools and again,
you can use it on their free trial.
If you wanna make a big list of this
and just get ahead of the game,
you can do all of this on their free trial.
This is a tool that I personally use regularly
and as you get further into print-on-demand,
you'll probably find yourself doing the same
for the tools that I'm covering in today's video.
So all you have to do is come over to the left side,
click on trademarks, and then click on trademark alerts.
Now, all you have to do is type any phrase
that you wanna search, which is keep it simple.
And then what's nice about this
is you can actually press Enter
and you can type in all of the other phrases
you wanna search at once.
So if we come back to Pinterest,
we can type in any of these other phrases
that we wanna check as well.
And it will search all of them at once.
So for this example, I'm actually just going
to search the first one, but I'm going to click Save.
It will add it to the list at the bottom here.
And all we have to do is click Check Trademarks.
Now, once that loads very quickly, just refresh your page,
and now you'll have a quick answer
on this check mark right here
on if you can use this phrase specifically on apparel.
Now, as you can see, keep it simple is safe.
It has a check mark, not a red X, meaning that yes,
we can use this phrase on apparel.
So as you can see, this tool is very quick and effective.
So if you're back on Pinterest,
you can gather all of the phrases you want
and search them all at the same time.
So just like that, we finished up step three
of this process and making sure that this phrase
is actually able to be used on a t-shirt design.
And it's not going to get taken down
for copyright or trademark infringement.
Now we've done all of the preliminary work coming up
to creating our t-shirt design.
So now we can go into a t-shirt designer
and actually create the design,
knowing that it's not going to get taken down
for copyright or trademark infringement.
So with that said, now let's get into step four
of this process and actually create t-shirt designs.
Now, when you're creating t-shirt designs,
there's a few important things to know.
One is that you wanna make sure that
if you're putting graphics in your design,
they are not copyright or trademark protected as well.
And the second is I highly recommend
using a t-shirt design tool. There's a few reasons for this.
Mainly it's going to be fast and efficient.
You're going to have templates you can build off of.
And second is also very important,
the graphics and the fonts that you find
on a t-shirt design tool are copyright and trademark free.
So there are going to be
a lot of different t-shirt design tools out there.
I have used a ton of them, again,
to save you time here, instead of comparing them,
I'm just going to show you the one that I personally use.
And what this tool is it's called placeit.net
Again, this video is not sponsored by placeit.net.
It's just the one that I personally use
and I highly recommend because they really are the best
and they've solved all the problems
that we face as t-shirt designers.
So with that said, I'm going to switch back over
to the computer and go into placeit.net
and show you how to create some awesome designs.
So this is placeit.net,
now placeit.net is not just for creating t-shirt designs.
They also allow you to create mock-ups with models on them.
They allow you to create logos, videos, all kinds of things,
but we are going to be using this
for creating designs right now.
When you hover over designs,
you can come down to t-shirt design specifically,
and then we need to sort this to find the ones
that are related to van life or camping.
Now there's something really cool about this,
which I'm about to show you.
And this is one of the reasons that I really like using
this tool is because van life is new,
van life is very niche and it's very specific.
So there's not a big chance that they're actually going
to have a lot of van life designs.
With that said, if we type in camping,
we can customize them to van life
and I'll show you how to do that right now.
So I'm going to type in camping up top,
(keyboard clacking)
and then I'm just going to click Enter.
And now you can see, these are all camping t-shirt designs
that we can customize,
and they're all going to be fully commercially usable.
And we can just bring in those phrases that we found
on Pinterest to customize these designs.
So right off the bat, looking at this one,
this one actually says simple life.
So that draws me to think that we can create
this to keep it simple.
Now, technically any of these we could transform
into keep it simple by just changing the font.
But I'm going to use this one, for example.
So once you click on this, it opens it up into the designer
and this is where you can customize everything.
So I'm just going to change the font,
which is over on the left here
and change it to keep it simple.
(keyboard clacking)
So now, as you can see, just like that,
we've changed the text,
but this is the part where it gets really cool.
All of these graphics on the right side,
and you can search them to sort whatever you're looking for
are all copyright and trademark free.
They're included when you're using Placeit
and they're all fully commercially usable.
So if we just switch this to camper over here,
I'm looking for a van, something that looks like van life.
So as we scroll through here, this one is perfect.
So this is a van, this is a camper van,
and one of the best parts to creating your t-shirt designs
with Placeit is all you do is click on that graphic
and it re-edits it into your design.
As you can see, the tires are lined up, they perfectly fit.
It just puts it in the place of the other graphic
and it does the hard work of formatting
and lining up that graphic for you.
Now, if you wanna go in here and you wanna change
this text or anything,
you can still click it and change the size or the colors.
But just like that in a matter of a couple of minutes here,
I just created an awesome t-shirt design.
Everything on this design is commercially usable.
It doesn't infringe on any copyrights or trademarks,
and there are a couple extra steps that I'll just show you
how to finish this process.
So as you can see, this design has a colored background.
And as you know, if you've watched any of my other videos,
when you're creating a design for print-on-demand
for a t-shirt, you want it to have a transparent background.
So you can put that design on any color shirt or item.
So all we have to do is click on the dropdown
for the background color,
switch it to the transparent checkerboard.
And now we have a design with a transparent background.
The next step here, all we have to do is click Download.
And just a second here, it's going to process our download.
And then in a second, it'll be ready for us
to download straight to our computer.
So just like that, our download is ready.
I can click to open it.
And just like that,
we have ourselves a high quality t-shirt design.
As you see, when you zoom in the quality on this is awesome.
But with that being said, this design as is,
would be good to upload to Teespring and Redbubble.
However, if you are someone that uploads to Merch by Amazon,
which I highly recommend uploading to all three of these,
you'll find out that Merch by Amazon
has a format requirement.
They want the size of your design to be 4,500 pixels
by 5,400 pixels.
So how do we make sure that this design is formatted
in that 4,500 by 5,400 pixel size?
Well, if you have a resizing tool on your computer,
that would be very easy. You can just adjust the size here.
However, if you don't, you can do this right on Placeit.
So all you have to do is go to view all of your downloads.
And then right on this design, we just hit the dropdown.
We go to crop and resize.
Now it's going to bring in our design right here.
All we have to do is switch it from whatever size it is
to 4,500 pixels to 5,400 pixels.
Now our design is in the right size
and I'm just going to move it to where I want it
on the shirt, which is in the upper chest area
in the center of the shirt.
All we have to do now is click download.
And again, this t-shirt design in 4,500 by 5,400 pixels
is processing, and now it's ready to download.
We can click and open it right on our computer.
And now this is sized for Merch by Amazon.
So all in a matter of minutes here,
we've just created an awesome design
that's not going to be taken down for any reason.
And it's precise to use on any
of the top print-on-demand websites.
Also, I'm going to link up on the side
and down in the description,
the full print-on-demand tutorial.
So it'll walk you through from this point on,
what do you do with these designs?
How do you get your first sales and how do you get
your print-on-demand accounts to start growing?
So as always, I hope you enjoyed this.
Feel free to give it a thumbs up,
share it with anyone who you think can use this information.
And with that being said,
I will see you all in the next video.