How to Make Money With Online Design and Print
Today I’m sharing a method of making money online that is truly open to anyone.
You can start this on a shoestring budget. No special skills are needed (beyond a little imagination). You can do it part-time to fit around your work and other commitments, and the potential earnings are unlimited.
I’m talking about designing and selling clothes and other products, from tee-shirts to tote bags, hoodies to coffee mugs. By designing I mean coming up with slogans and/or graphics to adorn these products that will appeal to a particular target market.
This opportunity has been opened up by web-based companies that allow you to design and sell your products online. They provide all the back-end services, including taking payments and fulfilling orders. They charge you a set fee for this, which is covered from the fee paid by your customer. You charge your customers a bit more, and your profit is (of course) the difference between the two.
Clearly, you won’t make a fortune from a single sale. You can only charge what the market will bear, so your profit will typically be no more than a few pounds per item. Nonetheless, if you come up with a popular design, it may sell hundreds or even thousands of times. Even if you are only making £2.50 per product, that could mean thousands of pounds flooding into your bank account for little or no extra work.
Selling on Teespring
Teespring is one of the best-known (and longest running) companies in this field. I have used their service myself and recommend it as a good place to start. The site is US-based and by default prices are shown in dollars, but you can easily sell to a UK audience as well.
As the name suggests, Teespring started off as a site for making tee-shirts, but you can now have your designs printed on a growing range of other products. These include sweatshirts, hoodies, tote bags, coffee mugs, and even socks and leggings.
Anyone can join Teespring free of charge and use the powerful design tools on the website. There are lots of stock images and fonts available, and in general it’s all pretty intuitive. It’s well worth having a play on the site to see what you can come up with.
As for the financial side, TeeSpring uses a crowdfunding model. The way it works is that you set up a “campaign” for your shirt (or other product). This involves setting a target figure for total sales and a target period for this to be achieved (between 3 and 21 days). Only if you actually generate this number of orders before your deadline will payment be taken and the products printed and dispatched.
You might therefore think the target should be set as low as possible and in some ways you’d be right. However, the drawback with this is that the unit cost per item is higher with small numbers, so your profit per sale will be lower. The higher you set your goal, by contrast, the more money you will make per sale, as long as you do actually achieve your target. Most people set a target between 10 and 50, and for your first campaign it’s probably best to aim for the lower end of that range.
To give you some idea about what is selling well on Teespring, take a look at the TeeView website. This lists the current top-selling Teespring designs. At the time of writing the number one design (which is nothing special in my opinion) has sold over 17,000 copies!
Of course, Teespring isn’t the only company in this business. Others you may want to check out include CafePress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt. You can apply your designs to a huge range of products on all these sites, and they work in UK pounds rather than US dollars.
Or if you just want to focus on tee-shirts, the UK-based Teemill is worth a look. They have a number of cutting-edge features, including same-day shipping, custom packaging including your own logo (for premium members only) and a handwritten “thank you” note with every order.
Top Tips
- Don’t try to create designs that appeal to everyone. Target a specific niche such as nurses, football fans, cat-lovers or gamers, and try to come up with something that will grab them.
- Look for trending topics using social media and tools such as Google Trends. These subjects are often ripe for a product idea.
- If design really isn’t your strength, get a designer on Fiverr.com to do it for you. Tell them the slogan and image you want and/or show them an existing design you want them to adapt. This link will take you to a list of people on Fiverr offering this service.
- Don’t rely on the sites to sell your products for you when starting out. To prime the pump it’s well worth spending a few pounds on Facebook advertising. This can be very cost-effective, as it allows you to precision target people in your chosen niche.
- Spread the word about your designs by other means too, including blogging, online forums, social bookmarking sites such as Reddit, and your own social media accounts.
- But if your product still doesn’t fly off the virtual shelves, don’t be too depressed. Cut your losses and try something else. Even big retailers such as Next and Marks & Spencer don’t hit the bullseye every time.
I hope in this post to have opened your eyes to the money-making potential in online product design. It’s quick and easy to do, and the risks are small. So why not sign up today at Teespring or one of the other sites mentioned and start work on your first best-seller?