Building a Print on Demand Business

1. Welcome to the Course: Creating a print-on-demand business can be one of the most enjoyable things if done right. Hi, I'm Shimmy Morris. I'm a YouTuber and an online entrepreneur. I ran various businesses such as Amazon FBA, print on demand, YouTube, a podcast, a blog, and when I'm not doing any of that, I absolutely love socializing and traveling. I've been in and out of print-on-demand for the last nine years, and I think I've done quite well with it. More recently, I've been helping people out through YouTube. Many people who watch my YouTube videos asked me to create a more structured approach to the print-on-demand business, and that's where this course came from. This has been in the making for the last six months, and I'm really excited to finally bring it to you. I hope you enjoy it. It's a culmination of everything I've learned and implemented over the years, which should hopefully help you in your own print-on-demand businesses. Thank you so much for joining. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them down below, and I hope you enjoy all the other videos. 2. What We'll Cover: This course is going to be split into six parts. You're currently watching part 1, welcome to the course. We then have part 2, creating a store; part 3, research; part 4, designing; part 5, selling, and part 6, recap. We are going to fully go over setting up a store with platforms like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Printful, Moteefe, and many more as time goes on. We're then going to be looking at finding designs, creating designs, and adapting designs to make them your own. We'll also be creating brand-new ideas from scratch. We need to populate our stores with something, and this is where we'll do that. We'll then learn how to create the best possible designs. If you want to create text-only designs, we're going to do that, or if you want to learn how to create the most incredible graphic design, we're going to learn how to do that as well. We also have color theory key principles to follow and, best of all, programs to actually create designs in. There is a full Figma tutorial. I chose Figma because it is a free tool that is incredibly powerful, and as well as that, as time goes on, I'm going to be adding new tutorials for different tools like Photoshop and Affinity Designer so that you can learn so many different ways to create amazing designs. I'll also be going over where you can actually find royalty-free images, and I have a really cool surprise for you later on in the course where I give you a whole bunch of niches ready to go. We'll then go over the selling side of things: keywords, what to charge, how to pick products, what products you should be picking, and how to create powerful descriptions so that when people land on your page, they feel like they want to actually buy your products. At the end, we'll recap everything we did, and then you can join in on a little project, which I think you'll really enjoy. This will, hopefully, get you even more help with your designs and your business. I just want to stress, this is not a get-rich-quick scheme at all. This is all about how to create really cool designs and learn all the different elements of creating cool design with the added benefit of potentially selling those designs later on, but the core concept of this course is about how to create really cool print-on-demand designs. 3. What Is Print On Demand: What is print-on-demand? Print-on-demand is a way for you to sell customized products to individual customers without having to worry about shipping, managing inventory, or printing their design. You would create the design and put it on an item of clothing or an object of some sort. Once a customer places an order for one of your items with your design on it, the printing company you've partnered with will get automatically notified and they will print it, package it, and ship it out to that customer. The reason it's so cool is because you don't really need any money to do it. You don't need to order anything in bulk, nothing. You can just focus on creating and researching new designs. It's awesome because you're selling something from scratch. You're not reselling someone else's design. It's not like drop shipping where you're already selling an already made product. You're selling something that you have made yourself and you don't have to worry about ordering the items in bulk and not knowing if they're going to sell because the printing partner will send it out on an individual level each time someone buys. That is what print-on-demand is. 4. The 2 Types of Printing Companies: There are two types of print on-demand production companies that you could partner with, ones that have an integrated marketplace and ones that don't. Let me explain a little bit further. We have the ability to self print on demand products on our own websites. We're going to go over this in more detail later on but for now, let me quickly tell you what it's like. You'd have to send your own traffic via advertising, social media or other forms of marketing to get people to your website. What we would do here, is set up our website with one of the various print on demand printing partners and then when we get an order, that partner will get notified automatically and send that product out to the customer. But in order for us to get an order, we need to actually send the traffic ourselves via various forms of marketing. Otherwise, how is anyone going to really know about our websites? Print fold would be considered a print on-demand production partner that does not have an integrated marketplace, meaning you have to connect it to your website or to a platform where customers can actually go and buy your products. On the flip side, there are companies that do have an integrated marketplace where individuals can browse and buy your products all from an organic approach without having to be marketed to. Companies like Amazon, Redbubble, Etsy, eBay all have integrated marketplaces that get a serious amount of traffic every single month that lots of people randomly browse and could stumble across some of your designs. The benefit of using a platform like this is you don't have to worry about the marketing side of the business, which can be very, very difficult. The only thing you have to focus on is creating designs and uploading them and because these websites get their own traffic, the chances of getting organic sales is possible. Saying that, I would always recommend building up some form of audience at the same time, whether or not you've chosen a put on demand company that has an integrated marketplace or one that doesn't build up your own audience because that will allow you to get far more sales down the line. What do I recommend? For new time print on demand sellers, I would always recommend picking companies that have an integrated marketplace just so you can dip your toes in the water and have a feel for what it's like, companies like Etsy, Amazon, and eBay. If you have already done that or you have an audience before even starting, I would recommend creating your own store, either with Shopify or Xero or any other website builder that you want to do. You can then integrate that store to various different printing partners like Printful, sometimes Motif and with that, you'll be able to have your own website, your own store, and you'll be able to make a bit more money as the modules will be slightly better. Then at the same time, I would also recommend uploading some of your designs to Amazon, eBay, and Etsy just so your designs have even more exposure and even more chances of getting sales. 5. Creating an Amazon Merch Store: [MUSIC] If you are able to sell on Amazon Merch, then you are in an amazing position. But for a lot of people, sell on Amazon Merch is just a dream. It's really hard because you have to get accepted and not everyone gets accepted. Sometimes you get rejected and then you get rejected again and again and people just stop applying. Merch by Amazon is a merch-focused part of the bigger Amazon. It's a really great way to sell your products because Amazon gets so much traffic. They have so much trust and you can make quite a good amount of profits. I have in the past created a step-by-step video on how to get accepted. As I can't keep setting up new Amazon Merch accounts because it will get flagged up and I will get in trouble, I'm going to show you a video that I have already shot in the past about how to get accepted to Merch by Amazon. I just want to quickly say, if you don't get accepted first time, then apply again. I know some people say you're not allowed to apply again and other say you are allowed. But at the end of the day, you should just keep applying because when you stop applying, it doesn't really matter. You're not applying anymore, it doesn't matter if you're allowed or not allowed. You're not going to be accepted if you're not applying, so you should just keep applying and hope one day you do get accepted. Let's go and watch this video on how to get accepted to Amazon Merch. Please bear in mind, nothing is guaranteed. You can still get rejected and you might need to do the whole process again and again until you do eventually get accepted. Step 1 is to go to this page. This is just a Merch by Amazon page where you would click "Sign up" over there. Now if you already have an account, all you have to do is login and it will take you to the service agreement page where you just have to click "Exit" and move on. Let's do that. You can see I've logged in here. Now I haven't logged in with my account because I already have an Amazon Merch account, so I use my wife's account. But you can see service agreement. I just have to click "Accept". Now what I need to do is I need to go through and do all these steps. Sign up for Merch account. You've got business and contact information, bank account and routing numbers, social security numbers, and other tax identification number. Let's click "Continue". First things first, we've got to put our country in. Let's put in our country of United Kingdom. Now you can see there are some unsupported countries. Obviously, if your country isn't supported, then you're just going to have to wait. I don't know what would happen if you used a VPN. I've never tried that, but obviously you could try that. Next, we've got to put on our business name. Now if you don't have a business name, you could just use your name. That's absolutely fine. If your name is Shimmy Morris, that would be very odd. But you could just put in Shimmy Morris. If you do have a business name, then use it, but only use it if it has something to do with graphical design, print-on-demand, that kind of thing. If you have a business in something totally random, you don't want to use it here because it wouldn't make any sense. For me, I'm just going to put in Shimmy Morris. Address, obviously you want to put in your address. I'm going to put all this in. If it's blurred out, it's just because I don't want to share that stuff. Make sure to enter genuine information here. This is really, really important. You check this, double check this, and triple check this to make sure you're entering everything correctly. The next is putting in your bank information. Again, I would put in the United Kingdom because that's where I'm located. Then I put my account holder name, my IBAN, my BIC code, and the name of the bank. If you don't have the ability to do this, then you can use something like Payoneer and that should work absolutely fine. Once we've done that, we now have to complete the tax information. It says you have unsave changes. Let's click "Save and Continue" and now we're going to be completing the tax stuff. The tax stuff can be a bit complicated. You have to decide, are you an individual, are you a business. For US tax purposes, are you a US person? I'm going to say no. If you are a US person, then you'll go through all these things. If you're not from the US, if you're from the UK, we have a tax treaty, so there shouldn't be any extra tax. But if you're not, it's going to be dependent on whatever country you're from. I can't really save every single country. What I will do is I'll try and put a link down below that will give you a bit more information about this. If you are in the UK, your unique tax reference could be your national insurance number or your unique tax code, whatever it could be. Once you've done that, you want to scroll down, click "I consent", put your signature in here, which will just be your name, and click "Save and Preview". Then you are led to this page. Let's just click "Submit Form", and now we're good to go. Now we can click "Exit Interview". Once you've done that, we are led back here with all our information. Again, it will be blurred out. We can just go and click "Save and Continue". This will take us to the next step. Now the next step, this is where the important step is. You want to start by choosing industry types. You could go novelty t-shirt business if that's what you are, you could go brands, small business wherever it is. Novelty t-shirt business is fine. Organization name, again, you could put your name or your business name. Now, additional information. This is where it's super, super important. You have to spend time on this. The punctuation has to be perfect, the spelling has to be perfect. This is what they're going to be reading. Imagine it's an interview and you are trying to get the job. You need to really make sure that you stand out. There's a few things you're going to want to consider putting in this box. I've written down a whole list here on my iPad. The first one is, if you have an active audience, reference it. If you have sales, print-on-demand sales elsewhere, reference them. If you have qualifications in design, graphic design, anything I like this, reference it. If you have any certificate for completing Photoshop courses or Illustrator course or anything, make sure to let them know. If you consider yourself an artist with a unique style or a cool style, tell them. If you have a portfolio of t-shirts or designs or something, reference that portfolio. If you're an influencer, let them know you're an influencer. A few other things, if you've been successful with Amazon FBA in the past or you're currently successful with Amazon FBA, tell them about it, all the same company. All of these things will increase your chances of actually getting accepted. You would write a whole essay. It doesn't have to be a whole essay, but it should have enough information where the person reading it on the other end really feels like they know you and they think you would be perfect for Merch by Amazon. Just a few more, if you've been doing POD for a very long time and you feel that you're very experienced, tell them. Say, "I've been doing print-on-demand now five years. I've got sales on Teespoon and Redbubble, TeeChip and Teezily, and now I want to start getting sales on Amazon and I've got all the designs ready to go in the right format, 4,500 by 5,400 pixels, and it's ready to go on Amazon." This is what you want to tell them because then they will look at it and be like, "This person knows exactly what he's doing. He's going to get sales on our platform, which means we're going to make more money." That's what they want to hear. They basically want someone with experience selling on their platform. They want someone who's not going to break any of the terms. Let's talk about a few big no-nos. If the portfolio that you are referencing is not completely above board, don't reference it. If it's got designs that are infringing, if it's got designs that are bad and not particularly creative, then just don't bother referencing it or maybe delete or hide those designs for the time being because you don't want Amazon to go and see those designs because that will not help your chances. You really want to make sure that your designs are fully up to scratch, only show the best of the best of the best. Now you could create a specific portfolio for this on a website, any website where you can display all of your design, maybe even on an Instagram account, whatever you want to do. This is a bit extra work and I can understand that you don't want to do it, but it will definitely help you just so that Amazon can see that you are pretty good at art design and you have a couple of designs ready to go. Another big no-no is please, please double and triple check your spelling. No spelling mistakes, no bad punctuation. Make sure a family member reads it, make sure a friend reads it, make sure an acquaintance read it. Make sure it is perfect when it comes to a grammatical point of view because they are going to read it and they want it to make sense. If it doesn't make sense in their minds, they're thinking, well, that means potentially titles on Amazon of this person won't makes sense and their descriptions and their bullets won't make sense. They want someone who's going to be able to write perfect sentences because they're thinking, if you are selling on their platform, they want the products to show perfect English. Now just a quick tip. If you feel like you have any good designs that you can reference, what you could do is you could go over to Fiverr and pay for a couple of designs, three, four, or maybe even five designs. It will cost you a bit of money, but it allows you to populate a portfolio with really good designs that Amazon can then go and see and be pretty happy with. Now as well as that, you want to try and read the terms and conditions. Reading the terms and conditions will allow you to reference them, which Amazon will really, really like because then they will think, "He's actually gone out there and read the terms and conditions, so he knows exactly what he's allowed to do and what he's not allowed to do. This person is not going to be a troublemaker for us." That's what you want to do. Finally, you want to copy and paste everything you put in your additional information into a notes file of some sort on your phone, on your computer. Because once you click "Submit Request" or "Send Request", you aren't able to access that anymore, and if you get rejected, you might want to write something different or change up what you wrote or read it back and see what you did wrong so that way you'll be able to reference it whenever you want. Now once you've filled it out, you could put your website in which could be your portfolio. Then you need to enter this CAPTCHA, and finally you need to click "Send Request". That is how you would get accepted to Amazon Merch. Well, what should you do now? Well, now you should head straight over to Merch by Amazon, login or create an account, and fill in that application to try and get accepted. Once you have got accepted, you'll be able to upload one design per day up to a maximum of 10 designs. Amazon works on a tier-based system. You've got tier 10, and then tier 25, and so on and so on. What this means is you're allowed to have 10 designs and 25 designs and they split out with how many designs you're allowed to upload a day. This way they're able to regulate the number of designs coming into their platform and make sure they aren't breaking terms and they are good design and all of that stuff. Now, that's not to say that some of these designs aren't breaking terms, sometimes a few fall through the cracks. But for now, all you should focus on is setting up an Amazon Merch account. If you already have one, brilliant. We can go to the next video. But also please bear in mind, you don't need a Merch by Amazon account in order to do print-on-demand. The other videos in this section is going to show you how to set up a print-on-demand account with many other platforms as well. 6. Setting Up With Amazon: As well as selling on Merge by Amazon, which has free. Obviously, if you get accepted, you could also sell on Amazon's main platform. This would be through Amazon Seller Central. This is quite a bit more confusing and it doesn't have that same vibe as managed by Amazon, but it has a lot of potential. If you have the time and you have the patience for Amazon Seller Central, it can be really good for you. You don't need to do this if you don't want the stress of selling on Amazon's main platform, is just another way for you to get some sales. The first thing you want to do is head over to Printful as the printing partner we're going to be using to connect Amazon to a t-shirt company. Once you are in Printful, if you don't have Printful, you can create a Printful account and you want to go to stores here on the left. Then you can scroll down and see all the different stores you can integrate with. Well, for now, we're integrating with Amazon's Marketplace. We need to click "Connect". Step 1, will be logging into your Amazon Seller Central account. If you don't have one, you can just click the link here and register for a new one, click "Sign-up". Very simple. The next thing you need to know is to connect Amazon to Printful, you're going to need an Amazon professional plan, which costs $39 and 99 cents a month plus referral fees. This is why I said you can skip this one if you don't want the hassle and you'd want to be paying, because the brilliant part of print-on-demand is that you can do the whole thing for free. You can use free platforms, free marketing and get free sales effectively. This costs $39 and 99 cents a month. It takes away from that element of it being free. But if you want to continue, let's continue. Now, you can sell onto your own brand, but if you do that, Amazon require you to take your own pictures wearing the item or a model wearing the item. You can't use Mockup images. Amazon needs real-life photos. Just another hassle in this process really. Honestly, if you do want to skip this video and not learn how to create an Amazon store with Printful, that's completely okay. The next thing you need to do is choose the regions you want to sell on USA, Canada, Mexico, UK, France, and so on. I would definitely recommend starting to sell in the US. Just start with that and then work your way across all of them. Once you've done that, once you have an Amazon Seller Central account setup, and once you have Printful setup, you can click "Authorize". Let's click "Authorize" and login. This is what it will look like once you click "Authorize" and once you login. We're going to head over to United States and click "Select Account". Once we've done that, it will say authorize a new developer. I understand. Click "Next", and then you're done. Click "Next". It should take us back to either Amazon Seller Central or Printful. Look at that. We're authorized on Amazon. It's amazing. All we need to do is click "Save". Let's click "amazon.com" and click "Save". Look at how easy that was. Now, I already have a GTIN exemption/a registered brand from Amazon, I need to apply. I'm just going to click "Create Store". Easy. Now, this did look a lot easier and that's because I already had an Amazon Seller Central account setup. The difficult part of this whole process is the setting up of the Amazon Seller Central. If you want to go and do that, then I'll recommend go in to do that and then coming back to Printful and connecting it all up. But once I've done that, once you connect it all up, you can now add a product and sync it to your store. It's very simple. We're going to start with the unisex basic soft-style t-shirt, and we're going to add a design to it. Let's just add a design. This was a cute layer of Valentine's Day design. We add that and we can proceed to Mockup. Remember you need your own images. Then we can click "Proceed to details". We can change the title, we can change the description, and then we can click "Proceed to pricing". Here, we can actually do all the pricing. We can pick how much money we want to make. We can up the price and we can see exactly how much we are going to be making. Then click "Proceed to marketplaces". You want to select the marketplace we're going to be selling on and click "Submit to store". Then it will sync up here. It's syncing over here, it will show up at the bottom and then you'll be able to go and view it on Amazon. Like I said, the process, once you have an Amazon Seller Central account is pretty straightforward. The only difficult part is creating Amazon Seller Central account. Go and try that out now, if that's something you want to do. 7. Setting Up With Ebay: [MUSIC] eBay is another awesome platform to sell your designs on. eBay is a huge powerhouse that gets over 800 million visits every single month, is definitely something you want to consider selling your designs on. How do we do that? Well, here's a quick step-by-step on how to set up eBay again with Printful. The first thing you want to do is head over to stores again in your Printful dashboard, click choose a platform over here, and then you can scroll down until you find the eBay marketplace. Then you have to click "Connect". Now you can watch this video with getting started with eBay, it's a brilliant video, very quick, very easy to follow, or you can just go straight into doing it. You can click "Connect to eBay" and then you're going to be filling out all the necessary details, you're going to have to connect the same PayPal address. You're going to select the handling times, you're going to do the payment policy, the return policy, and then you're going to finalize it and sync some products. Let's go through the steps, starting with connecting it with eBay. Once we log into eBay, we can click grant application access printful. Let's click "I agree". This will take us back to the Printful page where you can see I've connected to my eBay name and now I need to fill out all of this stuff, so the brand name, my PayPal address. Let's do the brand name, it can be anything, [NOISE] Awesome some. The PayPal address has to be the same one that is linked to my PayPal and the maximum handling time in days is five. They automatically fill that out for you. Then we can click "Continue". Now we can go to the next step, the payment policy. We can do printful payment policy, I'm very happy with that and click "Continue" and then return policy, I also want to do the print for return policy. Click "Continue", and then we have to click "Finalize". Let's have a look at that and you can see, "Hold on, the data is been synchronized. Your eBay account currently has a remaining allowance of 940 items and 24,000 retail value this month." Brilliant, all we have to do now is click, "Add a product." Now again, this is because I already had an eBay account set up. If you don't have an eBay account setup, you're going to want to do that first. Once creating an eBay account, you can connect it to a PayPal account, but you're also going to have to create, and then to set the whole thing up, you might need to create a mock listing, but don't worry, you can delete the listing, it won't cost you anything just to get your eBay account going and once you've done that, you can connect it to Printful. right, what do we have to do? We have to add a product and sync it. Let's go through the steps again of adding a product and syncing it to our eBay store. It's really straightforward again, let's find that super cheap t-shirt it is over here and let's add a mock design that we already have uploaded, it can be anything. Let's have a look, let's upload this turtle, another Valentine's Day design. Then we can click "Proceed to mockups", we can have a whole bunch of mockups. After that, we can proceed to the details, we can change the title, all of this. Very simple, click "Proceed to pricing". We can set all the price we want, so the profit we want, edit quantities, so we'll set the quantities, let's say 20, 20, 20, 20, and so on. Then we can click "Submit to store". Bear in mind how many products you're allowed to add to your store and how much it costs to add an individual product. Sometimes you get a free amount of product to add every single month and other times it does cost around 35 cents, so just bear that in mind depending on what your eBay account says you have. Then we have to click "Submit to store" and it's going to be submitting to the store over here and it's that easy. We can go and have a look at it in eBay and it will be right there. Let's wait for this to submit and we're going to go and have a look at it in eBay. Now if we go down here, we can click "View in eBay" and this is our eBay product. Look how easy that was. We got small, medium, large, all of that, the price, different mockup pictures and it's all the same picture, all different sizes. I would say definitely edit that description, but this is a great way to add tons and tons of products to eBay. Now one thing I recommend is always offering free shipping and just eating up that cost yourself, so charging a bit more extra money and offering free shipping because eBay love free shipping, you get ranked better, you get more sales, you get more conversions. Try and offer free shipping when you can. That's eBay. eBay is a very simple platform unlike Amazon Seller Central, I would recommend everyone to list their items on eBay, it just makes so much sense considering they get so much traffic. 8. Setting Up With Etsy: Selling print on demand products on Etsy is a must, it's a great marketplace. However, it's not as straightforward. Now the reason for that is Etsy isn't a print on-demand platform. It's a platform where you can sell lots of different things and print-on-demand products is just one of them. You would have to connect Etsy with a print-on-demand partner like we did with eBay and Amazon. For this scenario we're going to be connecting it to Printful. Now I have already shot the tutorial videos, so let's check that out. The first thing we need to do is actually head over to Etsy.com. I'm doing this in private browsing with a VPN because I've already got an account and I don't know the rules of setting up more than one account, so I want to be extra safe here. We want to do Etsy.com. Now let's sign in or create an account. Click "Register". Super-easy, barely an inconvenience. Now all we'll have to do, as you can see your account, so in your account, you've got all this stuff here. You've got a Notifications tab, you've got a likes button or a heart. You've got your account and you've got a shopping cart. You want to go to your account and you want to go to Sell on Etsy. Let's take Sell on Etsy. Once you pick Sell on Etsy it will take off to this, learn how to sell on Etsy page. Basically, trying to convince you to sell on Etsy, but you don't need to be convinced. What you want to do is you want to open your Etsy shop. Let's click "Open Etsy Shop." Now you have to just go through the shop preferences. You've got a name the shop, you've got to stop your shop, and you've got to decide how you'll get paid and you got to set up billing. We're going to speed through this. English, shop country, United Kingdom, the shop currency then that's for me. You might be in US dollars, you might be in Canadian dollars, wherever you are, that totally fine. This shop is going to be called a YouTube Test, which is available, brilliant. Then you want to click "Add a listing." Now, bear in mind it does cost $0.20 to add a listing which is completely fine. You just have to add a listing. It doesn't have to be an important listing, you're going to delete it after. Let's just say this, setting up a shop has cost you $0.20 is not the end of the world, but you want to put in all the information. So I'm going to go through and print all the information. I'm going to add a listing, but again, it doesn't matter because this listing is going to be deleted. This is just to create the store. Here it says production partner. This is where we're going to put in Printful. But again, don't worry because we're going to explain how to connect Printful and how to actually add Printful products as soon as we get through this stage. Once you've done that, you want to click "Save and Continue", and you can see it's right here. Now you have to say how you're going to get paid. So are you a business or an individual? How are you get paid? Let's put all this information in. If any of this is blurred out, it's just because it's my personal information, I don't want it shared. But it doesn't really matter, just put in your information is very simple. The next thing you have to do is click, "Save and Continue" and then it setup a billing which will be a card that you can pay for Etsy listings, Etsy ads, or whatever they may be. Now, I'm going to skip this step and go straight to my already made account because I don't want to make two accounts here. That's the whole process of creating the shop. Now, let's actually go to my already made account and talk about the different elements within that one. I'm now on the Etsy website, you should have created your Etsy store at the moment. What we're going to do is I'm going to login to my existing Etsy store and go through that with you. This is a fairly new store, I created a video about it just last week. Let's have a look. What you're going to do is you're going to click this marketplace "Shop Manager" tab and this will take you to your overall shop dashboard. I've actually been getting viewed, which I'm really impressed with. The first thing we want to do is we want to go and setup our profile. We want to click your name at the bottom, and you want to click your profile. Once you've done that, you'll be able to choose an image, you'll be able to choose your city, your birthday about favorite materials, literally anything. Put in a bit of information about you, so people know you. Remember, Etsy is a very personalized website. People want to be shopping handmade goods here from people that they liked the sound off. They don't want to be shopping from corporations, that's not why they come to Etsy. Once you've done that, the next thing you want to do is create a banner. Let me show you. Let's go to the Etsy store here, under sales channel you'll see Etsy. Mine is ThePugScene, this is the one that I created. This is what my shop will look like to anyone else looking. You've got the banner, you've got the different t-shirts, and it looks very similar to my Shopify store. Now we want to edit this, so we're going to go back and we're going to click the little pencil. You've got the little pencil or the pen, wherever it is, and that allows us to edit it. That allows us to edit the cover so you can do change layout, you can add a cover, so you can do a big banner, a mini banner, no banner. I am testing the big banner at the moment. The mini banner might do well, but from videos I've seen and people that I've spoken to, they have said use the big banner. So using the big banner, the minimum image size is 1,200 by 300 pixels, click "Done." The next thing that you want to do is add some image over here like a profile. I added ThePugScene logo again, you can add whatever you want. It can be a picture of you, it doesn't matter, and then to be honest, it's probably better to have a picture of you because it makes it more of that personalized home feel rather than the corporate shop feel, but again, I'm still just testing things out. You've got your name there, you want to change this, so I've put mine just as awesome the power of a pet lovers, but you can have it wherever you want. Then that's about it. You've got the contact owner, the shop owner over here. That's my name, that's my photo, and that's why I left the logo of ThePugScene as the shop image, just so that it all looked really professional and it looked good. Coming down here, you can have featured area to highlight specific listings and then you can rearrange your listings, which is very simple. You just click "Rearrange" and you can just drag listings. After looking at your analytics and seeing which listings are getting the most clicks, maybe even the most sales, you can rearrange those listings and put them at the front. Now, the next thing you're going to want to do is add a partner at a printing partner. You don't have any products on your shop because you haven't added them yet, unless you're going for a product that you have in your house and you can just add that product whenever you want. But in this video, I want to show you how to connect a t-shirt or a print-on-demand accompany to connect it so that you could actually start selling print-on-demand products like these t-shirts here. What we're going to do is we're going to go into settings on the left, and then we're going to go into production partners. Let's click production partners and now you can click "Add A New Production Partner." So click Add A New Production Partner. You want to do the production partner's name, the location, and about them, and then you want to say about your partnership, whenever. I didn't have a technical ability, I design everything myself, and they do everything for me, and then you want to click "Save partner." In terms of location for Printful they're located in Chatsworth, California. You can just do that, that's fine. Now when it comes to actually connecting Printful, you need to go to the Printful website. Let's go to printful.com. Again, the links to Printful or the links to Etsy will be in the description below. The link for Printful is actually an affiliate link, so if you don't want to use my link, I understand it doesn't really make a difference, but I've put it there to make it easier for you. Once in Printful, you want to go over to the left here and click "Stores." When you are in your stores, you'd be able to actually add specific store, you'll be able to add to the platform. You can see I've got my Printful store, which isn't really a store. I've got my pug scene on Shopify and the pug scene on Etsy. They make this so unbelievably easy. All you have to do is go ahead and choose a platform. Once you've chosen a platform, it will be Etsy, you have to click "Connect." What's going to happen is, we click Connect with Etsy. All we have to do, we click the "Connect to Etsy" button below and it will show us something that looks like this. You are signed in as Printful. You have to click "Allow Access" and this will happen on your Etsy, it will take you to Etsy, you'll click "Allow Access" and then it's super easy. You just have to create products. For example, Connect to Etsy. I don't know if I'll be able to to do this again because I've already done it, but here we go. You assign it as shimmymorris@gmail.com. You can see we're on the Etsy website right now, you want to just click "Allow Access." I'm not going to click it because I've already connected it and I don't want to screw anything up. Once you've done that and you've connected it, it will take you to this looking page where you can see ThePugScene store or your store, whatever that one is on your Etsy. You can see overall, I'm still on Printful here. What we want to do is we want to click "Add product" and then we can just click any product we want to add. Let's say we are adding a T-shirt, all shirts, and we're just going to add a quick test program. I'm going to delete it afterwards. We're going to add a quick test product. Let's just go for this one. Let's just design something in house over here. This is tes. Now, let's go to proceed to mockups. What I would suggest is, don't have a mockup of a man or a woman, have a mockup of just the T-shirt because that way you can attract both female and male customers. But as well as at, also have a mockup of a man and a woman, try to have it in many different mockups as possible. I'm going to actually show you a website that I use to get so many different mockups in just a minute. Let's click "Proceed to details". Now, you want to put a title in. This is just a test. You want to put a description in. A lot of people say, don't put description in. I think it's important to put description because this is just so standard, it's so fake looking. You want to just put description that makes it feel real and genuine. Try and put something quirky, something cool, whatever. Make sure to keep this area 100 percent combed ring spun, all of that stuff because that is important, and you can make it more interesting with emojis or whatever. You want to make it more homey, you want a homey feel. Then, you want to scroll down, you've got the size guide, and now you want to add tags. You want to add all the tags you can, and you want to make sure they're relevant. If this was a Christmas T-shirt, I wouldn't add tags for Mother's Day. This is adult t-shirt, I'm not going to add tags for St. Patrick's Day because St. Patrick's Day is trending. You want to make sure you're adding relevant tags so you show up at relevant searches. Let's just say this is a YouTube T-shirt, I'll put in YouTube, I'll put in YouTube T-shirt, I'll put in video, I'll put in vlog, all those things. You see what I'm saying? The next thing we'll do is style, unisex, find product. Pick one animal landscape, famous landmark, London. These are just different sets, different categories, but forget about that, doesn't matter. Then click "Proceed to pricing". Now, when you're in pricing, this is what you'll see. This is the cost $13.71 or in the UK, £9.78. That's how much it's costing you. The retail price I put here is, that I'll put here is £13.56. Now, I hit "increase it by either an amount or a percent." Let's say I want to increase it by three, that will up to profit of six pounds £6.78, and a product price of £16.56. A little tip here. When you're first starting on Etsy, the biggest thing you're going to have on your side is the price. You want to be really competitive on price. Forget profit at the moment. You just want to get some traffic and some sales, and some reviews to your store. This is a long-term gain, it's not to make money today or tomorrow. We just want to get traffic so that over time we'll eventually raise our prices and make money that way. When I first started, I put my increase, I increased one or two or something, a really small amounts, really, really small amounts. Overtime, I'll increase it just when I get more sales. At the moment, £14.56, this is the expensive T-Shirt. You can see it $13.71 as a base price. I always go for the cheapest one, which I believe is like $8.70 or something, which makes it a lot cheaper, allows me to charge £12 for T-shirt on my Etsy store, which is about £14 when they add tax. Then, when you want to click "Submit to store." Now, once you've done that, you can scroll down, and it will show up over here. This is just a test, it's uploading. You can see. Now, what you want to click "Edit in Etsy." You can edit in Etsy and it will take you to the Etsy product page. Now, you can see you've got your primary image, which is this guy. You've got your secondary image, which is the sizes, and you can add a photo, and then you can add more things. Then, you've got the thumbnail, you've got a video. If you can add a video, that's amazing, that's so cool, and it will do so much better because video does better than photo always. If you want to add a video, what you could do is, you can either get a mockup of a video or you could actually buy your T-shirt, which will cost you cost price plus shipping, and you can shoot a video of it. If you have a T-shirt that's just doing really well, it's getting a lot of sales, order it yourself and shoot a quick promo video of it, and then you can put that in here. Now, the next thing you want to do is, well, not really much because everything is done already. You did all the titles, did everything else in the print for platform. The next thing you want to do is you want to click "Production partners" just tick Printful. You want to go through and you want to click "Publish." Now, it might say straightaway, fill out all the required fields. That seems to happen every single time, and when I click "Publish" again, it does show up. You can see there's a non-refundable fee of $0.20 for each listing, which is completely fine. Don't worry about that. In terms of shipping, by the way, I'll start with the plentiful shipping, I've just stuck with that. I'm not changing anything around that. That is about it. Now, if we have a look at Etsy, the website, what we'll see is, we'll see over here on the homepage for me, you can see these, we'll have free UK delivery, which is really cool. There are so many items with free UK delivery. Now, it's very hard to say if free delivery boosts your listing up a bit, but it's definitely a really good incentive. How can you add free delivery to your listings? Let me show you. You've got your shop here. You want to go to marketing over here on the left, and you want to go to sales and coupons. This allows you to create either a sale or an offer. You can see I've got a free shipping offer, which is a duration of 15 days. It's live until the fifth of March. I haven't made any money from it. I made it a couple of days ago. But in terms of creating, it's very simple. You can click, "Add a new special offer" here at the top, click "New special offer." You can do run a sale, create a coupon, or send offers to interested shoppers. We're going to do run a sale. You could do percent off or free standard delivery, and then if you domestic only. Just a little tip. If you don't actually want to lose money on your end by offering free shipping, you can also just bump up price. If you're selling an item for $13 and you want to offer free shipping, click "Free shipping" and then bump the price up to about $15. That still looks better than $13 plus $4 shipping. It looks better just to sell it for $15 with free shipping, people like seeing free shipping. It's a weird thing. I think it's because of Amazon Prime nowadays, and basically so many different platforms offer free shipping and super far shipping. It's in people's heads, that they just want free shipping. I know me personally, I love free shipping. That's what I'd recommend. That's how you would do a free shipping coupon. Now, you can do other types of coupons. That you can create a coupon here, percent off, again, you could do free standard shipping, a fixed amount off. Then, you can also do send offer to interested shoppers. But we're not going to do that. But don't worry about that for now. That is creating a free shipping offer. I would recommend doing that straight off the bar just at least at the beginning. The next important tab is Etsy ads. Now, Etsy ads, just again, over here, marketing, and then Etsy ads. Etsy ads is very interesting. All you basically do is you click "Start" and it just starts at the ad. You can see my ad views, 1,203 views, five clicks. I haven't had any orders from it. It's been about four days. I don't know how well Etsy ads do. Just because you can't really put in any keyword, any targeting, it's just a matter of clicking on or off. I'm still testing out at Etsy to see if it's worth it. So far, I don't think it's worth it. I set my budget to $5 a day for five listings. If we scroll down, we can see the clicks. I've had two clicks for this listing, two clicks for this system, one for this, and none for these two. Etsy ads again, it's just something to click "Start with." If you wanted to test it properly, maybe do 25 to $50 a day just to really really test it. However, I just want to tell everyone based on videos I've seen, based on what people have told me, Etsy ad really aren't that good. They used to be a lot better apparently. But now because everything is just done automatically, they're not very good. What I've heard from someone who sells quite a lot on Etsy is, with Etsy ads, they just push your store to people, but don't actually try to get sales. Your store will end up getting a lot of likes, but no sales, and you'll get a lot of clicks, but no sales. So our Etsy ad worth it. It's too soon to tell for me. Definitely try it out, see what happens maybe for a week or two weeks. They recommend testing out for 30 days, 30 days is quite a lot, especially if you have a budget of five or six or even $10, that's a lot of money. It's up to you, whether or not you want to do Etsy ads. But just to go through it, you can manage your budget over here, very simple. You can manage advertised listings over here. You can tick list things that are not done. Let me, for example, tick these two that for some reason aren't advertised. Click "Update." Really simple, and click "Turn off ads." I haven't yet turned off my ads just because I'm still trying. I'm still seeing what's happening. That's the advertising tab. That's how you connect Printful and Etsy, is not as straightforward as we'd like, but once it's all done, it will all be automatic in terms of getting sales, and it's just an amazing platform to be selling your designs on. Now, you can't connect it with other printing partners. You don't have to connect it with Printful. The reason why we're using Printful here is because I've just used Printful as an example for all the different connecting partners on this course. You can sign up for Printful anyway, the old links will be everywhere, and that's it. I would definitely recommend using Etsy. So far we've done Amazon, Etsy, and eBay. I would 100% say sign up for eBay and sign up for Etsy. They are too amazing places marketplaces, I should say, where you can sell your print-on demand products. 9. Finding The Perfect Niche: [MUSIC] A lots of the time, picking a niche is far too overthought, and way too much weight is put on that niche you've chosen. In reality, there are so many niches out there that you could turn into profitable niches. You could focus on food designs, job designs, holiday design, animal designs or all of the above. Think of it like a puzzle, the niche is only one piece of the puzzle. You need to make sure all the pieces are connected in order to have a successful business. A niche is generally known as a specialized sector or category. In the pre-on-demand business, the niche is a category that is aimed at a specific set of people that all share a similar interest. The reason there are so powerful is because you get repeat buyers. They are recommended more frequently and you are able to build a targeted audience that you can sell so much more to than just pre-on-demand products. If you happen to be an expert in your chosen niche, already been excellent, that's brilliant. However, if you are not, make sure to spend some time fully researching and becoming an expert in your niche. You're going to want to know what questions customers are asking, what they want to see, what designs they would wear, and the trends in that chosen niche. It's no good picking a niche you know nothing about and creating designs that no one wants to wear. Become an expert, spend a few hours really digging into that niche and learning everything you can about it. We're going to go through a few methods and places where you can come up with some cool ideas. Firstly, I want to talk about one method that is vital when it comes to conducting niche research. More specifically, knowing how to use the data you found, and that is through the copy and paste method. Don't get confused with copy and paste and stealing. I do not recommend that, please don't steal anyone else's ideas. What I suggest is finding other successful ideas and seeking inspiration from them, recreating them with your own twist, your own colors, your own fonts, maybe your own wording, the basis of the design, the niche and the message can be the same but you have to make sure the execution is different. For example, if you see a t-shirt like this, this grandpa is the best grandpa, That's great. You can use that niche, the grandparent niche. You can use that message about your grandpa being the best. Except you'd want to execute it slightly differently. You would want to say something like this grandpa rules, something slightly different that has the same message. It's in the same niche, the same idea but you've just done it slightly differently. Now let's talk about a couple of tools that you can use to actually conduct really good niche research. Starting with Pinterest, you want to utilize Pinterest. Let's head over to Pinterest, it's an incredibly simple method but don't let that put you off. What we would do is search for a topic then the product and then the theme. For example, math, would be the topic, t-shirts is the product, and funny is the theme. We search for funny maths, t-shirts and then start looking around for inspiration. Another example could be dogs is the topic, mugs is the product. Again, funny is the theme. You could do serious or something else but I believe funny always works best. This would make the search term funny dog Mugs. Then again, we can go from there to seek inspiration and come up with our own really cool ideas. Next, you want to utilize search engines like Amazon, eBay, and Google. You can use the same approach that we did for Pinterest, where you search for a topic, a product, and a theme, except now you're doing it on eBay or Amazon or Google, so you're going to get completely different results. They are all power-houses with hundreds of millions of searches every single month so there was a lot of data for you to actually find. The next tool is the Redbubble tag tool. This is a great way to see what's working on Redbubble, however, take this with a pinch of salt because Redbubble shouldn't be the staple of your niche research. I think it's valuable as an extra but not as a main focus. Let's take a look. You can see things are categorized into popularity and change and then what they are, they're category, their niche, or whatever. You can see, what's become popular over a period of time and then you can click the link and actually go into Redbubble. This is a great way of finding out what is popular, what is getting more popular, and what is getting less popular. What you'll find a lot of the time in Redbubble are things that you are not actually allowed to design. That's why I say, don't use red bubble as the staple of your niche research. Use it as just a helpful hand to kick start a few ideas in your brain and that's about it. Have a play-around with this tool. It's completely free and it can just be really interesting to see what's working for other people. The next tool is the Google Trends tool. This is a great tool and even though it doesn't relate directly to print on demand, it's a good indication of what's trending and where in the world it happens to be trending. You can also have a look at the relatable topics, which is really useful. One thing I would do with this tool is I would search for a specific term and then see on the trend line how popular that term is. If it's over 60 or 70, I consider that quite popular. If it's under, then I don't think of it as being that popular. However, one thing that is very important to note is I don't ever look at one of these tools and then go off the basis of just that. I'll look at all of the tools around one topic or one niche, whatever you want to call it and I'll base my results on that. That's because suddenly it could be really popular on the Google Trends tool but you might not be able to find anything on eBay or Amazon. That's okay, you don't need every single tool to say that this niche is a fantastic niche. You just need some of them to say that. And then you want to use all the other tools to see if they'll booster up that niche and give you even more ideas. Another great tool is called Trend Hunter. It also doesn't relate directly to pre-on-demand but it's an incredible resource to see what's trending in many different categories around the world. The idea tab is pretty cool as well as that. It's just a wealth of interesting information. One thing to note is all of these niche tools that I've just told you are absolutely free to use. That's what I wanted to make sure, I didn't want you to have the sign-up to anything. I wanted you to be able to conduct all of this research for free. As I said earlier, there is no golden ticket niche here, so many have the capability of being incredibly popular, and it's just one piece of the puzzle. In the next video, I'm going to give you a super long list of niche ideas that you could start basing your research around. Feel free to use any of them and hopefully they spark some new ideas in your mind that help you come up with even more ideas. 10. A Super Long List of Niches: In this very simple video, I want to give you a long list of niche ideas that you could use as the foundation for your research. I'm not saying these niches will guarantee success. There's a lot of work required, and remember, they are just one piece of a very, very large puzzle. I'll show all the niches on the screen as I say them but as well as that, you'll be able to download a PDF with all of them. The niches that we have here are the animal niche. You got dog, cats, pandas, sloths, monkeys, fish, cows, and llamas. You've got food, healthy food, yoga and meditation, guns, traveling, anime, and then jobs. You have nurses, technician, bartender, firefighter, lawyer, electrician, engineer, musician, and teacher. On the sports, you've got cycling, snow sports, football, tennis, and fishing. You've got awareness, politics, school, universities and colleges. You've got different ages, like 18, 25, turning 60. You've got entertainment like video games, books, and television. You've got family. A child, grandchild, grandparents, parents, and all the others. You've got hobbies like gardening, space, cause music, and computing. Now, as well as that, you have many, many more niches. But hopefully, these can spot something in your brain and allow you to use it as a foundation so that when you start doing your research on Pinterest, Google, eBay, Amazon, Trend Hunter, any of these places, you can use these niches as the base for that research. 11. Double Niche Game Plan: The double niche game plan. This is a really, really cool method and I think it works wonders. After analyzing some of the best designs across many niches, the biggest similarity that I could see between these designs, is that they all incorporated two niches per design. For example, moms and dogs, fishing and America, movie references and animals. What you can see here is you can see a niche plus another niche and it tends to equal a successful design. Now of course, I'm not saying if you go for that double niche game plan, you'll go on to create successful designs. But it is definitely a similarity between all the successful designs that I've seen out there. The reason this works so well is because you are niching down the audience so much to a very targeted set of people. Selling a broad design is great and it gives you that ability to scale if that's the case. But a lot of the time, people just don't want to buy a design and you have to get really targeted in order to find that individual that wants to spend money on a funny or wacky t-shirt. The idea here is if you find someone who likes a niche, you've picked their interests, but they still don't want to buy. However, if you find someone who likes a niche and then the next niche that's still on that t-shirt, there'll be like, this design is literary talking to me. I want to wear this, I want to own this. It doesn't have to be a t-shirt by the way. It can be a pillow, a mug, anything really. It can be a yoga mat and it doesn't really matter. But the point is if you're speaking to a person who likes two elements of the design, it means there is a higher chance of them actually wanting to own that design. This doesn't guarantee some of the bio-design. As well as that don't use this double niche game plan for every single one of your good designs. Sometimes it's nice just to have a focused single niche design, but definitely make sure to consider this double niche game plan when brainstorming for ideas. When it comes to brainstorming, make sure those two niches that you've picked actually go well together. Some niches go really well together like moms and cats, stats and cars, things like that and others, not so much. For example, food and cars that seems a bit random to me. But honestly, it is quite hard to find two niches that are so polar opposite that they won't go well together because a lot of the time, there are always elements of a niche that go with elements of another niche. When it comes to designing, think of this method. 12. Building Your Ideal Customer: It's one thing to have the perfect niche and even have the perfect design, but if you haven't planned out who your ideal customer is, it's like hitting a baseball with a blindfold on. Unless you know exactly who that design is targeted to, I wouldn't call it a perfect design. Having narrowed down your target audience to find out exactly who they are, it will make it much easier to design products for them and to figure out what products they would actually buy. We need to create a customer avatar or a customer profile. Here is what you need to consider: the age range, the location, the gender, the race, the household income, the education level, hobbies and interests, lifestyle, and personality. Coming up with all of this information seems very daunting. But let me give you an example and show you it's actually not that difficult. Let's say we've chosen a product around the geeky movie references, niche. It's quite specific, I know and it's also quite a difficult niche as you'll run into a lot of copyright and trademark issues, but let's just go with that for the time being. Our ideal customer might look something like this: the millennial generation 18-35, UK or USA-based, mostly male, any race, middle-class with college education interested in superheroes, fantasy, comic book, board games, and science. We can then go and use this information to find products that perfectly suit our ideal customer's profile. For example, t-shirts, gaming mats, and mugs seem like the ideal products. Likewise with the design, because we know this audience loves comics and fancy and science, creating designs that speak specifically to them shouldn't be very difficult. Finally, we can continue to use this information later on when it comes to keywords, or more importantly, mockups. Mockup being that picture where they're wearing design and as a person and it allows the customer to see what the design will look like on a real human. Now, we can use this information to create mockups that speak to the specific audience. For example, we're not going to use a 55-year-old woman who is wearing a geeky t-shirt as one of our mockups because that doesn't really speak to the audience that we are trying to target. All this information will always be really relevant throughout the process of designing and then selling that design. Once you know exactly who you are talking to, it becomes much easier to know how to sell to them. 13. How Many Niches Should You Do: The question on everyone's mind after seeing that super long list of niches that I gave is, "How many niches should I actually go for?" Honestly, there is no magic answer. I would say it like this, rather than picking a niche because there's money in it, because that is never guaranteed, pick a niche that you specifically find interest in yourself. This will make researching a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable, and you'll also have an edge because you'll know a lot about that niche and because you'll be the target customer, filling out the customer profile will be really easy. As well as that, if you find it hard to get sales with that niche you've chosen, it wouldn't phase you as much because you would have actually enjoyed the time designing and researching and creating products for that niche, rather than just chasing the money, which is always a bad thing to do. If you feel like you have no specific interest in any niche whatsoever, then all I'll say is pick one, any, it doesn't matter, and then start researching it, and start from scratch basically. Once you've created a bunch of designs and a bunch of products, then move on to another niche and add another one and another one and another one. If you're wondering, "Well, how do I display all of my different niches on my website? Should they be all jumbled up? Should they be categorized?" Well, once you have various different niches, I would say categorize them into those individual niches and keep your website or your storefront very, very clean. For example, if you have an Etsy shop, an eBay shop, or an Amazon shop, just plonk all of your designs on those stores. You can only add categories on certain websites. If, however, you are creating a niche-specific website, then try and keep that on point and if you want to delve into another niche then I would suggest creating another website and keeping it separate from that first niche website. This is why, as a beginner, you should just focus on one thing. Get really, really good at understanding how to research and how to create amazing designs, maybe even create a little character that can go across your niches on your t-shirts or pillows or whatever products you end up selling. Once you get really, really good at it on a specific niche, you'll find it much, much easier going into new niches. 14. Trends VS Evergreen: There are two types of designs that you can make. You can make trendy designs that have a very short shelf-life, or you could create Evergreen designs that don't really have a shelf-life. Here's a quick example, photography t-shirts or Halloween t-shirt, one's Evergreen and one's trendy. The questions are, which should you focus most of your attention on, which one is better and which one will allow you to make the most amount of sales? I think you should focus your attention on both, but within reason. Let me explain don't constantly chase that trend hoping to strike gold, this is not a good approach, and it's a one-way ticket to driving you absolutely insane. You want to build a long-term sustainable business here at the end of the day. If I had to split my time up, I would say spend 70% of your time focusing on Evergreen designs they'll actually help grow your business, and then spend 30% of your time on chasing those trends, hoping to get a couple of extra sales. Trends are good because they allow you to get those sales more easily and slightly quicker. An in-turn can help you rank only algorithm if you're using platforms like Amazon, eBay, Red Bubble, or Etsy or any of those platforms. It can also help boost your motivation, just seeing all those extra sales coming in. However, you have to remember, there's going to be a lot more competition with the trendy designs. Because everyone else is going to want to get those quick sales as well and that can actually lead you to getting no sales, which is why I would never spend too much time focusing on the trendy designs. As well as that, you also have a very short window where that trend lives and then dies and then you have to move on and find the next one and it can be very stressful constantly trying to find that next trend. Where it's much easier just to focus on Evergreen designs that will last for forever basically. When there is a really good trend and it's really popular, there was a huge fight to the top to see who can win that trend war and get the most sales and this can be incredibly frustrating. In my 30% time allocation for trends, I will research what will be trending, not what's currently trending, but what I can aim to create designs for in the future. This way I would have got there first and hopefully I'll have a leg up on the competition. There are obvious trends like Christmas, Valentine's Day and Halloween, and things like that, where you want to create designs for a few months in advance so that you are ready to go, ready to sell before anyone else, but that's obvious. I'm talking about trends that aren't big days big days, I'm talking about little things that become trends like the wordle app, at this point in time it's a huge trend. Foreseeing that would be based on a lot of research and it would've been really good if you caught onto that trend two months before anyone else did. When it comes to Evergreen designs, this will be the backbone of your business. This will be keeping your business alive and this is what you should spend most of your time focusing on. This is my go-to method. Thoroughly researching a niche until it's totally flooding my brain, then creating designs that are not associated with a specific date which allows it to be sold at any point throughout the year. This way, making them even more Evergreen. Finding designs that can be sold in 10 years or in a month is key here. Then, once solidifying a bunch of ideas and creating them and having them ready to go and uploading them, I'll then see potentially how that Evergreen design could be translated into a particular upcoming trend. For example, if my Evergreen design is around photography niche when it comes to Christmas or Valentine's Day or another trendy time of the year, I'll see how I can use all the information and all that research that I've done, and convert it into a trend in design as well as an Evergreen design. At this point, I'll have a handful of Evergreen designs with a couple of trendy designs, which in my opinion is the best position to be in. 15. Full Pretty Merch Research Tutorial: [MUSIC] I wanted to do a tutorial of my favorite paid option in this course so that if you wanted to take your research even further, you have that option available. The one I would recommend is Pretty Much. Before I do a little tutorial, showing you how I conduct design research using Pretty Much, let me just quickly tell you why I use them over anyone else. Number 1, their price is extremely competitive, it's actually one of the cheapest ones out there for what they offer. Number 2, I really like the UI and the UX, which is the user interface and user experience of this tool. I find it really easy to use, and it actually reminds me when I'm using an iPhone just because of how simple everything is, it looks clean and it's really easy to navigate round. Number 3, this is a really odd reason but truthfully, I really like the people behind the tool. I really like the company. I think it's a really good group of people and they really genuinely care about you. I've suggested ideas to them and I've spoken to them, and they've actually tried implementing new ideas and are planning on implementing some future ideas. It's really nice to see how much they actually care. They're not just some faceless corporations somewhere in the middle of nowhere, they're actual company and they really do care. For me, that's a big deal. This is the Pretty Much research tool. You can see over here, I can click "Research". I've also got Products, Analytics, and Dashboard. But the only thing we're discussing in the video, this tutorial is just for the research section. Now, at the moment, you do need an Amazon merch account in order to get access to this. But I have spoken to them and I have said to them, you have got to make this available to everyone, and they told me they are doing that. Hopefully, in the next six weeks, there will be a web-based platform that anyone can get access to, you will not need to have a merch by Amazon account. That's going to be really cool. First things first, let's just go through the bottom over here and discuss what everything means. You can see here, you've got this hashtag 746, this is the BSR. You then got this upwards arrow that says 324. Now, this says the BSR has decreased by 324. This is really good because the lower the BSR number, the better it's going to do, the better it's going to be ranking, and the more sales they're going to be getting. You then have this number which is their price, you then have this number which is their estimated sales per month. Finally, you have this over here which is just their reviews. Now, that is the card. Like I said, it's very simple, it's very user-friendly. What you can do is if you want to see a little bit more information, you can go over here and you can click "Analyze". Now, you can view the product on Amazon, if you wish, or you click "Analyze" and it will open this Product Analyzer. First, I just have to say, everything is really fast and really speedy. It just shoots around. That's another reason why I like this tool because the main reason I pay for a tool is because I didn't feel like I have time to do everything individually and not just have it all there for me ready to go in this format. I like the speed, I want it to be as fast and snappy as possible. You've got over here. You got Best Seller, Amazon Choice, Official Brand. This tells us what attributes it has. Is it an Amazon Choice? No. Is it a Best Seller? Yes. Is it an Official Brand? No. Then you've got, is it available? Yes. The BSR changed. The date uploaded, I think that's really cool because if you can see, it's been uploaded in 2016 and it's doing really well. That's cool to see that that would be an evergreen design, and we love evergreen designs, don't we? We then got the marketplace, the BSO, the price, the estimated sales, and the reviews. Now, a couple of other things you have here, which is really useful, is you have the product bullets right here so you don't have to go in to the actual Amazon page. You got it all. You basically got all information you need right there. Then of course, you've got keyword analysis. This is really cool because if you want to create your own St. Patrick's Day design, you might want to use shenanigans, squad, shenanigans squad, and maybe some other keywords, and you can see how many times that they've used it. Now, you can also click this where you can view it directly on Google Trends. Very smart. You've got the feature bullets here. Now, for me, I find this useful because I will see how they've done their bullets. I will try and create my bullet similar. Not exactly the same but similar because clearly, it's working for them. You can then just go ahead to the next part and just view all the products like this really quickly rather than going out and clicking the products. That's the designs that you've got down here and what all these numbers mean. Now, let me just quickly tell you, they update these numbers every single day, which is something I really liked because a lot of other tools update every week or every couple of days. Here, it's every single day, which means you're getting the most accurate numbers, which is really important when you're doing research. Now, let's discuss the different search options. You got sort by. Now, as you can see here, I've put nothing in the keyword, I've just clicked "Search", and it's sorted by BSR. Again, you've got the eye across everything so you can really get as much information as you need. But anyways, you can sort by BSR, which is what we've done. You can also sort by sales, and you can choose most to least or least to most. That way, you can see what's getting the most sales. There's a lot of Ukraine stuff there. I really hope this people are giving that profit to charity, but I don't know. Anyway, you've also got BSR change, which I think is a really cool one because BSR change allows you to see what's going to be up and coming. This might be a BSR, 324,000, but it's had a 10.9 million BSR change. Clearly, it's getting sales because the way a BSR can change is by going up the rank, and the way to go up the rank is to get more sales. If we can see designs have a huge BSR change, we can say that they are going to be getting sales and maybe they're going to take off in the next couple of weeks, which is something that's really useful for us. You also got the seven-day average BSR and the 30-day average BSR. I find this one really useful because it allows you to find more evergreen designs that are doing well over a longer period of time. Because if we just go by BSR, we can see, okay, great, let's search BSR. This might be really trendy and doing really well now, but if we go to a 30-day average BSR, that will show it has a more evergreen type of quality to it because clearly, it's done well over a period of 30 days like this one. I'm not old, I'm classic, this has been doing well for years. It's really cool to see. You then got, You can sort by number of reviews, you can sort by rating. Here, number of views, 4,p46. You can sort by rating, this will just be how good the reviews are. Then you've got, you can sort by date uploaded. Now, this is another really cool one because you can see what recently been uploaded. You got newest to oldest or oldest to newest. If we got oldest to newest, if we have a look at analyzers, when was this uploaded? In 2015. That's really cool. Somebody uploaded that long ago. Look at this trash truck. Anyways, this, I find really cool because you're able to see what people are currently uploading and maybe do research around that. Yes, of course, there's Ukraine, you've got St. Patrick's Day stuff, and you can do research around this stuff and see if there's a reason why it's doing well. The next thing you can see is you can select the Marketplace. You've got United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan. For example, if we click "Germany" and we click "Search", we're not going to sort by date uploaded, let's sort by BSR. You can see how fast it searches, it's crazy. But you can see what's most popular in Germany, and it's completely different to what's popular in the United States. This is really important. You've even got designs in German. I think that's really cool because if you have a really good design, you could try and translate it to German and put it on the German marketplace. You've got the same thing in the United Kingdom. It's going to be a completely different array of designs. Depending on what market you sell in, that's the market you're going to want to be doing research in. I find this area the tool pretty cool as well. Again, can you see how user-friendly this all is? You've got everything here, you've got the marketplace, type of product, the sort by, the BSR range, you can just reset all the filters. It's all very user-friendly, it's very clean, and it's very fast. That's just something I really like. Now, you also have more filters where you can show official brands, yes or no, and show deleted products, yes or no. Then you've also got the products. You can be searching for T-shirts, pullover hoodies, pop sockets, or phone cases. Now, these aren't available in all countries but if you go to United States, you'll see they're available. Germany, pullover hoodies, France, Italy, Spain. You can see, in United States, they're all available, and it wouldn't surprise me if they're trying to make as many products available across all the marketplaces. But if we give a pop sockets and we just click "Search", we can see what the most popular pop sockets are and how many sales they're getting in. Flipping heck, that's a lot of sales. Again, really useful information when it comes to doing research, when it comes to seeing what designs are working. Now, as well as all of that, as well as doing the blank keyword search where you don't put anything in here, you just click "Search". You can't also put keywords in. If you're wondering what keywords should you put in, well, I want to tell you about a really cool method that I like using. That involves using the Redbubble website. Now, this method, I call the random key letter search. That's a mouthful, but let me explain to you. That's when you click "Search Design" and you put it in just a random letter. I'm going to put in H. You can see, you've got hydro, hobbies, Harry Potter, happiness, hoyoverse, happy mother's day with love, hiking with my puppy good day. What this does is this shows me a whole bunch of really popular potential search terms with that letter. If I go and then put HE, you've got hentaii, hearing impaired, hearts, helluva boss. You could do this with any letters. The idea here is you put a random letter in, you get an idea. Shane Warne, shabba ranks, save the planet keep it green. What you would then do is go and search that in Amazon and see how well it's doing. If we put in save the planet, we can do searching, and we can also change from exact match to close match or to partial match. Let's go to partial match because we're happy for it to be just similar. You then also got, you can sort by list or grid. Now, you can see it was sorted by BSR, save the planet. This is telling us how that search term is doing. That random search term that we just found by just clicking the S on our keyboard has given us a whole bunch of ideas, so many different ideas. Now, there's not that many designs out there, which I think is pretty cool because you've got pretty low BSR, 240,000. I know it doesn't sound low, but that's pretty low. 14-30 sales a day is plenty when it comes to merge by Amazon because you can have 30, 40, 50 designs, depends on what tier you're on, and be getting 15 sales a day across all your different designs. That's very unlikely, but you could be getting 14 or 15 sales a day across a bunch of your different designs. The fact that there's not much competition here, I really like. That was just using my random keyword search thing. I really recommend doing that because I think it's just a really cool way to spark your mind with some new cool ideas. Research takes a really long time. I think my time is more valuable put in other areas like coming up with designs, trying to get sales, the marketing aspects, and also working on my other businesses. I don't want to focus so much of my time researching, researching, researching if I'm able to speed that up somehow using a tool that I will always go for that option. But of course, it depends on if you can afford that. If you can afford that and you want to save time, then it seems like a good option and it just gives you so much information. Because I really like this tool and I use the tool every single day, and I want to do a tutorial of this tool in my course, obviously, I would recommend getting it. But rather than just recommend getting it, I actually contacted pretty much to see if they would do an exclusive price for my students. I explained to them what I was doing, I explained to them I was making a course and I want to create a tutorial for pretty much in my course. They really loved that idea. I actually said to them, "Well, can you offer an exclusive price to my students?" They said, yes, 100 percent. They've been able to do that. Now, at the moment, the exclusive student only price is 20 percent off, which I think is pretty good. It could be very helpful for a lot of people. If you do want pretty much with that 20 percent off discount and you really want to do research like this, then go to this link and use the code shimmy20, and that will allow you to get that 20 percent off. Now, if you have any questions or you run into any troubles, then of course, message me. Again, like I said, of all the research tools, I was going to make a tutorial on lots of different ones, but I just thought you didn't need to pay for tons of different research tools. For that reason, I don't need to have tons of different paid research tools in my course. I'd rather just have my favorite most used one. That's what I've done. Like I said, it's my favorite for many different reasons. Definitely go to that link and check that out. 16. Make Sure to Check the Trademarks: [MUSIC] One thing that's very important when it comes to product demand is to make sure you're not stealing anyone's designs, you're not running into any copyright issues. The way to make sure you're not doing this is to search for the trademark of specific designs. Now, they don't always show up and sometimes you just have to use your own intuition of, don't ever use the Nike tick. What are people thinking? But what you want to do is once you've done your product research and you've got a whole list of ideas, you then want to make sure you're able to sell those ideas. Now, there are tree options when it comes to finding out different trademarks. You've got the USPTO website. That's for America. You have others for the UK, you've got others for Germany, France, all over the place. Now, previously I spoke about using pretty much for the Trend Finder. What they've recently added is a trademark search tool as well. Now, I find this really useful. For example, you've got Happy St. Patrick's Day. What we can do is we can go into the trademark search, and we can put in Happy St. Patrick's Day and I can click Search. Now, this is searching all marketplaces, all product classes, and all statuses and nothing is found. That makes a lot of sense because that would never be trademarked. But then you have other things. For example, I paused my game to be here. Now, the reason why I like this element of the tool is because yes, I can do the search. I can go and do the search on all the individual platforms to find out if I'm allowed to sell a product. But like I said earlier, I'm all about saving time and focusing my time on the most important task at hand. For me, going and doing all of this searching is not a good use of my time. Because I have pretty much Pro Plus plan anyways, it's just this is an added benefit that they have this trademark search tool. But if you don't want to have this tool, you don't want to have the trademark search tool, you can do all the individual searches and I'm go show you how to do that in a second. But if you do have the tool, then definitely use this trademark search element. As you can see, I paused my game to be here, this is filed in the United States. You can look on the USPTO website. By clicking this, you open a new tab and it'll take you to the USPTO website. You can see it's filed for t-shirts. It's also filed in the UK and this is the Intellectual Property Office. Again, I paused my game to be here for some reason is filed again by this person on this date. You just got two different dates there. Now, you've got also t-shirt, PopSockets, pillows, and this is just one search term. What I would recommend doing is once you've got your long list of ideas, put them all in here and make sure you are allowed to sell them. This is a very sweet, a very simple video. I just really wanted to drum it in that you do not want to be breaking any rules when it comes to copyright or any laws like that because it's not good. Firstly, you can get your account banned. You don't want that. Secondly, if it's serious, you could probably get sued, and you don't want that as well. If it's even more serious, well, I don't even want to think about it. But basically you just want to really be careful. That's why I like this tool. Again, like the Trend Finder section of this tool, you can have access to all of this and this is all comes under that same 20 discount that I was able to get from them for students only. If you do want it, that link is over there. The code is shimmy20. This is just a really powerful tool. Again, if you don't want to pay, then you can just go to the USPTO website, which is over here, USPTO trademark search and you can search that database. Let's have a look. If we click "Search the database", we go to Basic Word Mark Search. Then, I paused my game to be here. This is a bit of an ugly and clunky layout, but you can see all the different files. This one is dead, which is why it didn't show up over here, and then you've got these which showed up over here. Again, like I said, you can just do this for every single one of your designs. The reason I like this is because it shows throughout the different countries, so it saves me a bit of time there, and it's just a much prettier layer, as you can see the difference between these two layouts. I'm all about a user-friendly experience. If you already have this tool, then go for it. I wouldn't say you should get the PrettyMerch Pro Plus plan just for the trademark search because the Trend Finder is so much more powerful, it's so much better and that's what you should get it for. The trademark search is like an added benefit. It's really useful. It comes in handy, and it's just an extra thing. They are going to be adding more things as well. It's just cool they're going to be adding all these different tools, all under one umbrella. All I'll say is, to end this video, just make sure you are not breaking any terms and make sure that you have searched to find out if you are allowed to sell a specific design. 17. My Design Process: [MUSIC].This section of the course is going to be fully dedicated to designing. There is so much to cover. How to design, where to design, what to design, principles to follow, color and font theory. This is an absolutely awesome section. Before taking you through all of those steps, I wanted to go through my process of designing with you and hopefully find a process that works well for you. I will start with a bit of research. Now we went over this previously in the course, so I'm not going to dwell on it. After writing down some funny quotes, memes and puns and just general ideas, I'll get a pen and paper and start lightly sketching some ideas out. If it's just a design using words, I'll skip this step and go straight to the computer. But if I want to make a character, I'm going to go with the pencil and the paper. Now for me, I'm a very visual person. I love art, I love drawing, and that is my favorite part about the print on demand business, which is why I like having a piece of paper and a pencil and I can just sketch some ideas. But that isn't everyone's cup of tea. Some people like to go straight to the computer. Some people like to download already created images and that's absolutely fine. We're going to find your perfect process as well. Next, I'll take a photo of my design or scan it into the computer and open it up into the app, Procreate on the iPad, and then I'll use the pencil and create a more defined drawing of my design. Now, not everyone has an iPad and it's not vital, so that's totally okay if you want to skip this step. Again, this is just my process. Once I finish the drawing on Procreate, I'll save it and send it to the computer and then open it up in Photoshop for just a bit more tweaking. This is where I'll add text and potentially manipulate that text around the design and make sure it fits well with the design and the color and theme and all of that. Usually, this is me done with the design and the process can take 30 minutes, the process can take five hours. It totally depends on the complexity of that design. If it's a text-based design, I'll go straight to Photoshop or straight to Canva, I'll skip out the whole iPad step just because I don't think it's necessary. Usually, I'll go to Canva and that's because they have so many graphics, so many elements and so many fonts that are ready for you to use. I can quickly pop things in on the fly and see how it will look and then just as quickly, delete things and move on, and that's why I like using Canva for my designs. If I really like the design and I decide I don't want to use the Canva elements, I can use what I've created on Canva as a basis to create my own drawing, which is sometimes what I end up doing. That is my design process. Now for this course, I've decided rather than do a full Photoshop tutorial to begin with, rather I want to create a Figma tutorial. The reason for that is Figma is free and a very powerful tool and perfect for print on demand. Photoshop can cause quite a bit of money. What I'm going to do is over time, I'll add a Photoshop tutorial. I'll add an Affinity Designer tutorial. I'll add tutorials and all these other tools so that in time, you can just watch tutorials for a whole bunch of different tools and decide which one you want to do. Now, let's go over the core principles you have to consider when it comes to creating a print on demand design. 18. The Core Design Principles: There's quite a lot to consider when creating a new design. It's really easy to forget things when you're all excited about a new idea that you have. It's important to remember the core principles. Please come back and watch this video multiple times if you ever have a design and you just feel like it doesn't take all those boxes and you want to make sure it does. Here are seven things you need to consider when creating a design. Let's start with number 1. Number 1, the size of the design. Depending on what you're putting it on, T-shirt, yoga mat, hoodie, mug, they're all going to have a different size as well as that each individual design will look its best at a particular size. After designing something my advice would be to put it on a mock-up of various different products so you can see if the size of that design works on that particular product or if it just looks a bit silly. Now, I use Placeit for mockups and I have a video talking all about mockups where you can get free mockups and paid mock-ups and that'll be later on in the course. Number 2 is placement of the design. Another important thing to consider is the placement of a design. Should it be centered or should the words be to the left or to the right or should the words be centered? You have to factor all of these things in when creating a design. You can use the rule of thirds, which is typically used in art and photography but it does work well with print on demand. Now, as well as using the rule of thirds, you also want to make sure that you are creating your design based of a grid. That way you can make sure all the elements are evenly spaced and that it looks absolutely perfect because at the end of the day someone is going to buy your design and wear it and you don't want any discrepancies between the spacing of letters or graphics or anything. With the rule of thirds, you can use the lines and the key points to figure out where your wording should be, where your design should be, and what looks particularly good. Another thing to consider when creating a design is what that design is and who's going to wear it and make sure, unless intended, that design doesn't highlight specific body features. Now, a lot of the time with designs that are funny and sometimes rude and jokey, they're specifically trying to highlight areas of the body. But a lot of the time designers will create a design and unintentionally highlight specific areas of the body and it actually ends up looking really silly and that wasn't what they wanted. Make sure it doesn't look like that. The third category is color theory. Now, color theory is a long and complicated topic, one that I'm not qualified in and I don't want to pretend to be qualified in. What I like to use is a really cool and free tool that gives me everything I need to know about color. This tool helps me match up colors, helps me understand what colors mean, it helps me make sure that colors don't stand out when they shouldn't stand out, and it allows me to find the right colors to trigger the right emotions. This is the Canva color tool. It has four mini-tools all free to use. The palette generator, the palette ideas, color wheel, and color meanings. The palette generator allows you to upload your own image and see the hues that they've used. This is good if you've seen a design with coloring that you like or one that matches your vibe. There's also tons of palette ideas too. The color wheel is a quick tool to see which color goes with which colors, which works really well when deciding on the item color and then the graphic color. Then you have color meanings. Color meanings is incredibly important to find out what actual colors mean and what you should use for what specific time and for advertising and what emotions you're trying to trigger. It's just very cool. This place has it all and I've learned so much about color. It's just a fascinating topic especially when using it for design or for marketing. Number 4 is the color of the item, whether it's a pillow, a T-shirt, a hoodie, a mug, whatever it is. Knowing the color that you're trying to design on is very important. This is similar to the last one about color theory but you have to remember that a printed color will never look exactly the same as the actual item color. There'll always be some minor differences. A purple design and a purple T-shirt might look slightly different and this is where using mockups becomes very valuable because you'll be able to put your design on a specific color, let's say pillow, and you'll be able to see, does it look good with that color combination? If you want to go for the classic combination then you'd want to go for a black T-shirt with a white design or a color design with a white border. Number 5 is font. Choosing the right font is vital. When choosing the right font you want to make sure it's readable. Meaning it has to be big enough so that people can see it and not so swirly and grungy or whatever so that people can't properly see what it says. Try not to use too many fonts. One to two fonts is ideal. Also sticking to the same category typeface makes a design come together just a little bit better. You want to think about the color of the font, is nice to have a contrasting color from the background to the font so that it stands out even more. However you want to make sure that the colors don't clash with the background because not only can that be hard to read, it can be painful to look at. You want to mainly be using display typefaces for print on demand as they are the easiest to read and the easiest look at. They are the most popular with this art. Try not to distort the fonts too much and stretch it in weird ways because again, that just makes it very hard to read. Number 6, choosing the right graphic to match the design and to match the mood. A graphic isn't a standard object on a design. It has to match the other graphics, it has to match the fonts, it has to match the color, and it has to match the overall theme of that design. A lot of the time the font can match the associated niche. Let's say it's a school T-shirt or a Western T-shirt, you can find a font that matches really well with that. Likewise with the graphic. You want the graphic to match the overall niche. You don't want to use semi-realistic graphics with super cartoony graphics because that would look really odd. You also don't want to use real photos with cartoony graphics because again, that will look really odd and you'll be surprised. I've seen a lot of people do this very frequently and it's just a big no in print on demand. Number 7, making sure you put it on a mock-up so that you can see exactly what it looks like before deciding it's finished. This is without a doubt the most important step because without this step it's hard to visualize what it could look like on your chosen object. Let's say you're setting a T-shirt or a pillow, you need to see if the colors of the design, the size, and the placement, all go well with that item. Don't just put it on one mockup. Let's say you have a T-shirt, put it on men, women, children, senior people, everyone and people of different races and ethnicities just to see if it looks good across the board. The next thing to do would be to send that mock-up to family and friends and get their opinion on it. What do they think and you could ask them specific questions. Ask them, does the font look good? Does the graphic match the font? Do the colors all match? Does this match the overall theme of what I'm going for here? Let other people tell you what they think as well. I use Placeit for this but I do discuss in another video where you can get tons of free mockups as well because again, I don't want you to have to spend money if you don't want to spend money. Those are the core principles that you have got to consider when creating your designs. As I said earlier, please come back to this video when creating your design to make sure you're taking all of these boxes because they are really important. 19. 3 Awesome Types of Designs: [MUSIC] In my mind, there are three types of designs that someone could make. Picture-only-based designs, text-only-based designs, and a combination of both. Picture-only-based designs work amazingly if you have a huge audience or you're trying to get your designs into shops like H&M and Zara and River Island. Those suit picture designs perfectly. The difficulty with picture-based designs is it's hard to convey a specific message and it's hard to pinpoint a specific audience. A picture does speak a thousand words, but in this case, you don't want to do that. You want to be talking to a few people and making a very clear and obvious point with your design. Pictures can also work if it's a very obvious design targeting a very obvious audience. For example, the dinosaur niche. When people created dinosaurs around Christmas and they created a dinosaur wrapped around lights and a Christmas tree vibe, that was a picture that didn't need any words but it spoke to a specific audience and it worked perfectly. However, designs like this are very broad and it could go either way. If you are an amazing artist and the reason you're doing this is because you enjoy art, then go for it. Create those amazing pictures and try and sell them because, at the end of the day, I want you to fully enjoy yourself. Truth be told, I love picture designs. I find them so fascinating, so interesting. But the truth is, they are a lot harder to sell. Text-only designs, in my opinion, is great. It's an amazing way to share your specific message to a specific audience. If it's a joke upon a meme, the best way to share that is through text because you get your message across very easily, even if it's none of those and it's something like, "I'm a technician. What's your superpower?" Even with that, it speaks to a very specific audience. It has a very obvious message, and a lot of the time, that's what people like to wear. This type of design is also very popular because it means everyone in the print-on-demand business, whether you're amazing at art or not amazing in art, you're able to sell these types of designs because you don't need to be a graphic genius to come up with a good pun and put it on a t-shirt via some text. You could literally open Canva, plug some text in and come up with an amazing texts-only design. Finally, a combo. This is a sweet spot for most, a text-based design that has some integration of graphics, either cartoony or realistic, whatever it is. It could mainly be the picture with some small text or it could be the other way round, and the main central point is the text with just some graphics thrown in here and there to really help illustrate what the design is about. This is by far my favorite approach, and that's because I love creating a funny t-shirt with some text, but I also love drawing. I love creating designs and graphics, and this way, it allows me to create this funny t-shirt, which I think sell a lot better, and also incorporate some graphic elements that I've either drawn or found, and I just love bringing it all together. I think it speaks to the largest group of people, but also it keeps it nice and targeted, creating a joke or a funny t-shirt and being able to illustrate it further and make it even funnier with a graphic, it's a win-win situation. These types of designs are becoming so popular now, especially as the world of text-only designs is slowly shrinking because they're becoming way too saturated and everyone has done them, and as well as that people realizing they could just make them themselves if they really wanted. But when you incorporate graphics into that text, you're giving the edge back and making it look really cool, complicated, but also simple. That's what I think is cool because you're making a design that complicated, but it's not actually complicated. You just throw in a graphic there and someone's being like, "Oh, that looks really good, that's really funny, and it makes a lot of sense." But for you, it hasn't been particularly difficult to throw a very basic graphic into a text-only design. Those are the three types of designs. Which one should you do? Well, at the end of the day, you can try all three, but focus on the ones that you think you're going to enjoy in those. If it's picture-only, text-only or a combination, focus on that and just enjoy yourself. Don't forget, you can do different ones. You can do some picture one, some text ones, some combo ones. You can mix it up. There's no specific design that is going to be guaranteed to sell more than another design. At the end of the day, you never know, so just enjoy yourself with it. You don't want the process to be a burden because then you're not going to have fun and you're not going to want to continue. 20. Fonts: Fonts play a huge part in your print on-demand designs. You might just be a little bit surprised to find out that you can't use any font you want on your print on-demand designs. You might be thinking, who at earth is going to notice the font I'm using and then send me a cease and desist letter or try and sue me for one reason or another because of the font I'm using? Now most of the time that is the case. No one's going to notice. You're probably never going to get that big where someone takes notice, but you never know which design could go viral, could take off and end up getting thousands and thousands of sales. You do not want that design to have a font that wasn't allowed because you could get in a lot of trouble. It's just safer and also legal to play by the books and only use fonts that have commercial use. But it's okay because here's a list of websites where you can download the fonts and use them for your print on-demand t-shirts without any issues. There are also a paid options, but I'm not going to discuss paid options. I'm just going to go over the free options because obviously that's what everyone wants to hear. The first subset is Google Fonts. Now Google Fonts has so many different fonts. You can see here it's not just a font and missing a couple of things here and there, it's full fonts. It's really,really cool and you can download as many as you want. You can use as many as you want. You'll see over there it says commercial use. I recommend browsing Google Font Library and having a look and downloading some pretty cool fonts. The next is Canva. Canva have a paid option and a free option. Regardless of which option you go for, you can use the fonts for commercial use. If you use the paid option, you have a few more fonts available to you, but the free option still has a whole bunch of fonts that you could use. Definitely have a look at Canva if you want some cool fonts. The next is 10001 fonts. Now this is a website where you can get tons of different fonts but make sure you are on the commercial use part of their website where all the fonts you would be downloading would be allowed for print on demand because they do have lots of fonts which aren't allowed as well. Finally, Creative Fabrica. Now Creative Fabrica have a whole bunch of paid fonts, but they also have a whole bunch of free fonts. So, definitely check out the section of their website where you can download free fonts and see if you can use those in your designs because they are really cool, created by artists, they are so artistic and they can make anyone's design look really impressive. With these four websites you used to have an army of fonts at your disposal, not just for print on demand but for marketing, advertising, your social media posts, anything really. It's always useful having a huge catalog of fonts on your computer. 21. The Multiplying Design Method: This is an awesome method, one that has worked really well. The reason I like the multiplying method is because it's very low effort and it proven to work with previous designs. What do I mean? Taking a design that looks like this maybe and copying it across many different niches or many different categories in a particular niche. You could do this with jobs, you could do this with family members, and you could do this with animals sometimes. For example, I came across a really cute dabbing animal design. Rather than just leave it at that one animal dabbing, what they did was they created a whole series of animals, all dabbing, which is really funny. But also what they've done there is they've used a successful design that's worked well and rather than just moved on and started from scratch and try to think of another cool design, they just used that concept across the niche and they created a dabbing zebra, a dabbing llama, a dabbing lion, whatever it is. It's just a brilliant way to multiply a niche with a design that you know people already like. At the end of the day, this is a very simple concept, but a lot of people don't think about it. They think as soon as they have a successful design, they have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again, rather than look at their successful design, see why it was successful, and see how they can adapt it and just make a similar design that could also be successful. The same thing goes for a lot of things, a viral YouTube video, a viral Instagram post. You can see things that worked for it originally and then rather than have to reinvent the wheel, you can just adapt it and make it again slightly differently. People are like an algorithm. It's weird to say, but if an individual likes a design, there is a much higher chance they're going to like a similar design to that as well than them like a brand new, never seen before design. That makes sense when you're trying to cater to people on what they like. If someone has said, "I like that," don't go and create them something like that, create them that, but just slightly differently. For example, the job niche, you have, I'm a bartender. What's your superpower? Let's say that does really well. All you should do next is change the job title. I am a technician. What's your superpower. I'm a nurse. What's your superpower? I'm a carpenter. What's your superpower? This can be done hundreds of times and it works amazingly. Now, just because one design works, it doesn't guarantee the others will work, but it certainly gives you a better chance that it will work. If you've ever had a successful design before, go and analyze that design and see if it can be translated into another niche, or maybe even the same niche with a slight tweak or something, but at the end of the day with the overall same concept. 22. Programs You Could Design In: There are so many different programs you can design in, and in fact, some print-on-demand websites allow you to design directly on their websites. Some programs cost and some programs are free. In this course, I wanted to give you the option of both. Upcoming we have a full Figma tutorial that has been made by my wife who is a Figma genius and as well as that, we'll also do a tutorial using Canva. Now, specifically Canva Pro. You can use the free version of Canva, but for this tutorial, I'll be using Canva Pro. That's because I feel that Canva Pro is a cheap way of doing graphic design work. It's not like photoshop and it's not really expensive, but it's also not super cheap, a couple of dollars or pounds a month. It's just somewhere in the middle, but it has so much potential. That's why I wanted to include a Canva tutorial as the paid option and a Figma tutorial, as well as those two tools we're going to cover. There are a ton more tools that one could use. Hopefully, in time, I'll be able to make a tutorial or bring an expert in to make a tutorial for each and every one of those tools. For now, I'll just let you know what they are. You have Affinity Designer, Photoshop, Procreate, Photopea, GIMP, Pixel x, Photo Pos Pro, Krita, Lumina, Adobe Illustrator, and as well as that print-on-demand company's built-in designers like Printful and Gooten. They have their own little designer on their website, which I don't ever usually use because they usually quite bad. Those are all the programs I could think of. If there are any other programs that I've missed out that you would like to learn about at some point, let me know down below in the comments section and I'll add it to the list. Again, at some point, I'm planning on creating tutorials for every single one of these tools so that you could come to this course and learn everything you could possibly imagine when it comes to print-on-demand and graphic design. 23. CMYK VS RGB: What should you create your designs in? CMYK or RGB? This has been an ongoing question for quite a long time, and I've tested both to really see the difference. Here is everything you need to know about the two color modes and what you should be doing. RGB. Well, RGB stands for red, green, and blue, and this is the color space for digital imagery. Basically, it's used for displaying anything digital: photos, logos, videos, websites, anything that you're viewing on a screen. Usually, with RGB, the colors are far more vibrant and they pop, and they look a lot better. CMYK. Well, CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key, key being black. It's the color mode for tangible printed materials. Basically, CMYK are the colors you're going to have on your print-on-demand stuff once it's been printed. Business cards, posters, flyers, billboards, they are all going to be using the CMYK color profile. Designing in CMYK makes the most sense because it allows you to get the most accurate representation of what your design will look like once it's being printed. The main issue lies with file formats because most of the time with print-on-demand, we are creating something and then saving it in a PNG format. The reason we're doing this is so that the background is transparent, and when we upload it onto the website, we don't have any ugly borders or anything like that. Now, PNG doesn't actually support the CMYK color profile. What do we do? However, that's not such a big deal because you can design the CMYK color modes image to reflect the CMYK color gametes. This way you will have very little discrepancy from what you see on the screen to what actually gets printed. When a printing company says they accept RGB, what they mean is they accept RGB files, but before printing every image goes through the printer's native raster image process, which basically converts a PNG with an RGB color profile to a CMYK color profile, which makes it okay for printing. I mainly design in RGB just because I can't be bothered for all the faff, and sometimes I'll design in CMYK. Now, when it comes to actually printing, companies can take both file formats, so I just go for RGB if that's what's already set up, but I do understand the importance of going for CMYK. Now, if you realize the major differences, which is the fact that RGB colors are a lot brighter and CMYK they're a lot more dull, and when they get printed, they'll be a lot more dull, if you are able to visualize that whilst designing an RGB, then that's absolutely fine. But if you feel you really, really can't differentiate between the two when you're designing an RGB and you really just want to see what it's going to look like, then I would recommend designing in CMYK. Alternatively, what you could do is you could design in RGB and then convert it to CMYK, put it on a mock-up so that you can see exactly what it will look like with the right colors. That's probably the best option if you don't want to design in CMYK. That's it for color profiles. Now, I know it sounds confusing, and RGB, CMYK, it's a mess. But let me put it this way, when I use Photoshop or Canva, I'll just do RGB and if I really want to see what it's going to look like because I can't envision what it will look like, then I'll convert it to CMYK and I'll slap it on a mock-up so I can see what it will look like. But most of the time it comes out absolutely fine to me and I'm not bothered. I would say you choose what you want to do. That's everything you needed to know about CMYK and RGB. 24. Where to Get Free Images: Where should you get free images for your print-on-demand designs? Not everyone is graphically-inclined, and even if you are, you might not have time to just sit there with a pen and draw something out either on a piece of paper or an iPad. Having a list of websites where you can get free, commercially available designs that you can put on t-shirts, that's a goldmine. Here are some free places. You have Unsplash, Realistic Shots, Pixabay, which is great for graphics and vectors, Life of Pixs, and Gratisography. Those are great for photographs, but with print-on-demand, a lot of the time, we like to use graphics as well, so let's go over a couple of free places where you can get some graphics for your designs. You've got vectorcharacters.net, vectorportal.com. You've got Vecteezy. Now, with everything I've just mentioned here, you always want to tweak it just a bit, either by adding your own text, mixing it with another graphic or another design. You never want to just take a picture or a graphic from the website, plonk it on a t-shirt, and sell it just like that with no changes at all, because well, firstly, a lot of people don't know if that's okay, there's a bit of a line there and we just don't know if it's okay or not okay, but as well as that you want your design to be unique. For that reason, try and add other elements. Change the colors, add text, *** other graphics, do things to make it unique. These were just a couple of free resources where you could get graphics. Now in the next video, let's have a look at some paid resources where you can get really cool images and graphics. 25. Where to Get Paid Images: [MUSIC] There are of course an endless number of websites where you can get paid vectors, graphics, and PNG files. But I didn't want to go through every single one so I'm just going to list the most popular ones that I've used and the ones that I find all the best. The first is Shutterstock, you then got iStockPhoto, you've got Depositphotos, you've got Vexels, you've got Placeit, and you've got Creative Fabrica. I know it's not very many but the reason for that is I like to draw a lot of my elements when it comes to print-on-demand and I'll only use these websites if I don't have time, I'm seeking inspiration, or I want to take what someone else has drawn and edit it and change it and adapt it to what I'm thinking. It's just sometimes easier to start with a base drawing and edit it than have to draw from scratch. I definitely recommend checking out those sites if you do want to pay. Of all those sites, my favorite is probably Vexels and Creative Fabrica as their libraries are vast and they have some awesome, awesome print on-demand ready graphics to go. 26. Full Figma Tutorial : Welcome to the full Figma tutorial. Now, I didn't use Figma as much as I probably should. However, my wife not only did she study it in university, she's been using it for years and she is a total width using Figma. I really wanted to use Figma in this course rather than Photoshop or Illustrator or Affinity Designer. That's because Figma is just as powerful. Well, it's pretty much just as powerful, but it's free. I want you to be able to use a free tool. Now of course, it can be quite complicated to use so my wife, Lauren, has created a really in-depth tutorial for you for this course. I'm just really happy she was able to do this. Check it out and I hope you enjoy. Today I'm going to be showing you the software called Figma and how you can use it for your print on-demand design. Figma is usually used for digital design files, such as designing apps and websites. But there's no reason why you can't use it for your print on-demand designs too. It's a Cloud-based program and it's free for individual use. You can download the desktop app at figma.com/downloads to get started. They also have an online version, but I really recommend getting the desktop app just because it has a few more features and it's easier to use. For both versions though you do need an Internet connection. Once you've downloaded the app and opened it, this is the screen that you'll be greeted with. This entire space here as your workspace and it's pretty large. Let me show you, if I draw a rectangle, I can zoom out. You can see just how much workspace you have to work with. You can start designing straight onto the space just by adding shapes, designs, texts wherever you want. But if you do want to be a bit more organized, you can use Figma as well as journal art boards, which are called frames. You can find the frame's option in the panel here at the top, or you can press F to access it as a shortcut. To add a frame or you need to do is click and drag as if you're drawing any rectangle or any shape and release. If you draw over something that's already on your art board, it will be automatically added to that frame. But if you just add an art board onto a blank area, let's say you wanted to add your design onto the frame. Right now you can see in the layers panel that I have a rectangle and I have the frame. If I want to add this rectangle on, I can simply just drag it in and that will keep this within this frame, within this art board. Analyze panel, again, you can see the rectangle is now inside frame one. If I was to collapse it, you can see the rectangles inside. I recommend working in frames because it just keeps everything a bit more organized and helps keep track of your designs. To adjust the frame size, you can either drag from the bottom here holding down Shift to keep the constraints, or you can use the panel here at the side to adjust the width and the height. Let's say for this example, we're going to adjust it to 4,500 by 5,400 for merch by Amazon, for example. I now have a frame that I can work in for a merch by Amazon design. When it comes to exposing, it will be really simple to have the right size. I'm now going to take you around the toolbar at the top, I'll show you what everything is and how it works, starting with the Move button. This is the Move button, this little arrow, and the shortcut to access it is V. What this does, it allows you to click on shapes and move them around the workspace. Pretty simple. The next section is Scale, which is in the same area as the movie. Just have to click on the little arrow or use the shortcut K to access it. What scale does is, allows you to resize objects and shapes keeping the proportions exactly the same. This is basically the same function as if you were to hold down shift when when resizing an object, so if I go back to move, I just did the shortcut V. I can still resize the objects on move, but it won't automatically keep the constraints, but I find it much easier to just hold down shift and that will keep the constraints. I don't really use the scale option much. The next section we have is Frames, which we've already gone over, so I'm going to skip across to the next one which is our Shape tools. Within this, we have a few different options. I'm going to start with a Rectangle or the shortcut R. When you select any shape, if you just click on your workspace, it will automatically draw a square or whatever shape you're doing, a rectangle, with 100 by 100 pixels. A circle will have a diameter of 100 pixels. That's just the automatic default for clicking. However, if you also go on rectangle, you can also drag the size. You can hold down shift to keep the constraints or you could just drag a random size. If you know exactly the size of the rectangle you want, you can change it also using the width and height options in the panel here on the right. To rotate the shape that you've made, you just hold down at the corner for this arrow to come up and you can spin it using your mouse. You can also use the rotation section here. If you know the specific value. Or you can go up in increments of one, where if you hold down shift that will go up in increments of 10. To round off the corners of a shape. You can navigate to this little circle in the corner and just drag it in and out to change the corner radius. You can also use this value here to change it. I can change it to 40. Or if you want to edit each corner individually, you can click on this button here which will either allow you to edit each corner individually over here by itself or you can go in and change the values for each one using this panel here. The next shape that we have in our options is the line which you can either find here or use the shortcut L. To draw a line you simply choose a point and drag out to the side. If you hold down Shift, it will keep your line to increments of 45 degrees as you go around rather than having every option. You can change the angle of your line again in this panel and you can also change the width of your line over here. The next option we have the arrow. The shortcut for this is Shift and L. This basically has the same function as the line. You can edit it the same way. The only difference is you can choose the arrowheads that you want on your arrows. You've got one the left and one on the right, on the top and on the bottom. Then you can change these here. If I go in, I can change it to that or you can reverse it using this button. The next one we have is the ellipse of the circle, which is the shortcut L. If you click, you'll get a circle with 100. Or you can again drag free form shape or hold down Shift to keep the constraints. Again, you can use the width and the height options here to change your circle. This little button here will keep the constraints the same. Whenever I change here, it will automatically change it. If you have this button selected, it only affects what happens when you type in. I can have that button selected and drag and it will still change it. The second is the last shape that we have is the polygon. This one doesn't have a shortcut, so you have to select it from the menu. The default shape, if you click, will be a triangle that's like 100 by 100. The length of the side are 100. But you can change the amount of points that your polygon has by increasing this value here. This can go from anything from 3 to 60. If I go up in increments of one, you can see it basically ends up just looking like a circle by the time you get to 60. But it won't be a perfect circle, it will still have some edges. The last shape that we have is the star. Again, it doesn't have a shortcut, so you have to select it. If you click again, you'll get 100 by 100, or you can drag a star of your choice. The default will also be a star with five sides. But again, you can decrease this to three and go anywhere up to 60 for a star with loads of points. There's a few options for changing the star here. So we can change the number of points. We can also change the ratio of this angle here. So If you drag it in, it will make for thinner spikier points in the smaller center. You can drag it out for a larger center with slight fatter points. The other thing you can do again is change the radius of the points. So If you drag this in or use the section here, it will make your points less sharp and more rounded. The shape might be called a star, but you can see other have changed like all these other points, and given it so many spikes, and made all round. And It doesn't really look like a star anymore. It's more like a splurge, so it may seem like there's only a few shape options in Figma, but the amount you can do with them, you can create all sorts of shapes. The last option in the shapes thing is place image. That will just open up a file window that you can select an image to place into Figma, but you can also just drag and drop, or I think you can also do it from here, File, Place Image, as well. I always drag and drop because it's the easiest. Moving along in the toolbar, the next option we have is the Pen tool, which is a shortcut P. So what the Pen tool does, it allows you to draw straight lines like this just by clicking from point-to-point, and you can even make them meet up in the end, and you'll end up with a custom shape. If you wanted to make a curved line, as opposed to a straight line, all you do is you'd click to make your first point, and instead of just clicking to make another point, you'd click but hold down the mouse, and then you can drag that point from side to side until you get a curve that you'd like. You can go in and edit these curves afterwards, so it doesn't have to be perfect first time, and to finish the curve, you just release. The default is, as soon as you make one curved line for Figma tool, so you've complete the curve with another curved line. So I'm not holding down the mouse at all. I'm just moving the truck pad around. When I click it will make a second curve, and then it will go back to straight lines like we had before. You can continue making curved lines. If I let say make a curve here, and then I'm not holding down, but if I do hold down when I click, it will do another curved line, and so on. Just clicking, will give you straight lines, and holding down whilst you click will give you curved lines. If you only want one curved line, but as I said, the default is for it to make another one, I've clicked and I've held down and I've released, and it's giving me that automatic second curved line. If I click on that point, it will set it back to default of straight lines. You can do that for any point in the things. If I'm making a load of curved lines, it will always carry on making curved lines unless I click that point and it will go back to straight lines. Will show this in more detail soon, but to change the stroke weight of your line, you can do it in this section here. We're also going into more detail soon about how you can adjust these curves and move these points around. The next tool, which is under the Pen tool is the pencil tool. This is similar to the pencil. It's Shift P to access it as a shortcut or you can click on it from the Menu. All this is literally a pencil. You just hold down. You can draw whatever shapes you want and also it will smooth out a bit at the end. And if I use the move tool. You can see it's all one shape. I already use this tool too much, but I can imagine if I had a drawing tablet, like a Wacom or something that I'm using a pen to draw straight onto my computer, it could be really useful in the design phase by sketching out designs. But just using a tripod, I find it a bit difficult to use. The next one that we have in the menu is the Text button. We're going to go into Text a bit later on, but just so you know that's where it is. I've just drawn some quick rectangles just to demonstrate the Hand tool, which is next. If you click on the Hand tool, all it does is allows us to move the workspace around. I really don't use the Hand tool because when you're on the Move tool, I just use my track bud light, like use two fingers to swipe around, to navigate around my workspace. I really don't use that at all. And the last thing that we have in the menu bar is the Comment tool. So I can imagine this is a really good tool. Let's say you have a business partner, you're working collaboratively with someone on the same document. What it allows you to do is leave a comment and it'll keep it separately in this panel on the side. How I can imagine using this in a print-on-demand design situation is, let's say I remember I want to add an eighth square, but I don't have time to do it, then thereby just want to quickly note it down, so I remember. I can actually click anywhere and say add a square. It will leave me this notification here where I've left it or in the pane here. For me, as a reminder, to come back and do it. That's how I imagine using it in this scenario. When it's done, you can either add a comment or just mark it resolved and it will disappear. The next thing we're going to look at is how to edit these simple shapes. So we know how to make these simple shapes, but we might want to edit them, make them a bit more custom. So to enter the edit mode for each shape you want to double-click, and that will bring up these diagonal lines when you're hovering over the shape. It will also alter the menu here. You have a few different tools. So to add a point, you're going to want to click the Pen tool. Again, you can use the shortcut P. When you hover over the edge of your shape, you'll see a red line and these points that appear. So if you click, that will mean you can add a point. So the default that Figma does is when you add a point and want you to solve, it gives you a line as if you're going to add another point. It will actually draw that line to connect the two. So to get out of that, if we just wanted to say, add another point on the right-hand side here but we don't want this line to connect it, all we have to do is click V to end the Move tool. To navigate to the Move tool, click on your shape, Click P again, and that will give you the freedom to add another point. So let's just add a few more points. I'm going V, click P. So that has added an extra four points along all four sides. To actually edit the shape now that we have these new points, we want to stay on the Move tool and we can actually move these points. You can move the corners in that we had before as well to create whatever shape you want. As you can see, we have something that doesn't resemble the rectangle that we had earlier at all. And then just press "Enter" to exit the editing shape mode. The next option that we have in the editing shape mode is this Bend tool. When we click on the Bend tool, what that does, it will change these very pointy edges and corners into curves. All you do is click the Bend tool and select that button. It will also be quicker again, turn it back to a point. So we're just going to make a few of these curved like so, and then if we go to the Move tool, the V tool, the shortcut V, and we can edit these bends and curves that we've just made. So we can use the spiky angle things to edit them. The default of the bend tool is to give an angle to both sides of your point. But let's say we want this side here to still have a straight line. All we would do to do that is click on this side, the one that we want to remove the angle from, click on the Paddle to change the bend for that side and press the backspace and that will delete it to this motion where you can now edit one side of that point. To bring it back to hang both sides editable, you just click the bend tool and select that point again and that will enable you to move this side again. The last option we have on the editing shape menu is this paint bucket tool. This doesn't actually have anything to do with changing the color of a shape. But it's a way of deleting areas within a shape. If I use the pen tool, let's say I draw another shape also in the editor, so the square and then I go to the paint bucket tool. You can see if I hover over, I've got two different stripy zones that I've separated out. If I click on this one, it will remove the fill from that section to create like a window within this main shape. We're going to move on to the color and styling of a shape. I've just drawn a basic square. If I go to the right-hand side panel here, you've got the fill option here. The default is a gray whenever you make a shape but you can change this by using this color picker thing here. You can use the tool here if you want to choose a specific color somewhere else from your project. You can either use the color picker, use these select the tools or you can type in the hex code or RGB values. There's lots of different options for color modes over there. This value here will change the opacity which is linked to this second slider here. If you want to create a gradient as opposed to a solid fill, linear gradient, radial gradient and angle gradient or diamond gradient or you could fill the square with an image which will take you to a file selector button here. We're just going to keep it solid for now. The next thing you might want to do is add a stroke to your shape. To add a stroke, you click the plus next to the stroke button. By adding a black stroke, you can't really see it at the moment because it's one pixel thin. But if I increase that line, you can see that stroke starting to appear. Your stroke can either be central. That's when the strokes all spilled out and in the same amount into the shape or you can put it inside where it's all on the inside or outside where it's all on the outside of the shape. You can change the stroke from a solid line to a dashed line by clicking these three buttons and changing it to a dash and you can adjust the size of your dashes using this section here. I'm going to remove the stroke and you have this effect section which allows you to add things like drop shadows, layer blurs, inner shadows and black background blurs. I'll just add a drop shadow for illustration. Let's make it 10 pixels out. You can see I added there. It's going to make it a lot blurrier. Then you can see we've added a nice soft drop shadow behind the shape. I don't think that is used so much in print on demand it's probably more for web design. But it's nice to know that you have that feature. We're now going to look at texts. To access the text, see there's this button here or you can use the letter T as a shortcut. You can just drag to make a textbox. We're going to make the font quite a lot bigger so we can actually see it. I'm just going to type something regular, like hello. To change the font, it's the same as any other text editor really. Change it to Arial. Again, you can change the bold, change the size of the text, increase or decrease the letter spacing, and if you had more than one line of text, that will be the line-height, central, etc. On the line and make board is the same shortcuts as anywhere else control, you control B, strike through and you can also change it all to uppercase if you wanted to or lowercase or title case, sentence case, title case using these options here. For now, I'm just going to keep it as I typed it, which is that little line. To change the color of the font, you can use the fill sections, make it a red. Again, you can add a stroke like on your shapes. Footprint on-demand often we want to be able to edit our texts more than a simple text editor can do. For example, we might want to change this o into a heart or extend these latter l's up high. In order to do that, we have to convert text into a vector. The way to do that is you want to right-click over your text or you can also do this from the layers panel. Right-click and you want to click outline stroke, that will create vector versions of your text. I've got two layers here because it's done the stroke as a layer and also just the basic texts as layer. If now I can drag the stroke away from the text, which is cool because you could create some effects like this of putting it a bit off-center, that thing. But as I said before, I'm just going to delete the stroke for now. This also allows you to edit your text the same way you would edit shapes. I can double-click and it will bring up all these extra points. Like I said, if I wanted to make these l's extra long, I can hold down shift to keep it straight and go in and edit these l's or I could make it fatter this one, like so. Or I might want to change this o into a heart like we said. This is going to be really rough. A very quick version of a basic hot. Obviously it was a bit more time. You could finish that a little more, you get the idea, pretend that's a heart, looks more like a flame. That's how you edit your text options. What this does is when you know, let's say you want to resize your text, hold down shift to keep the constraints because then our vectors it will edit the size as if they were like shapes or anything else. Whereas if we, let's just put hello again as text. If we go to edit the size, it won't actually edit the size, it will just edit the text box that the text is in. If I make it really small, that will go on top of each other like that or big it will just get way and flood the space. I have a basic understanding of how all the elements on Figma work and the texts and the shapes. I'm going to take you through my six step process to creating a design on Figma from stock to a piece of paper that's having a finished design ready to export and upload. When I'm designing, the first thing I'd like to do is draw on actual paper. I've drawn this little picture of a reindeer here on a piece of paper. I just find it easier to design on paper. Some people felt to go straight to computer or use an iPad. I've taken a photo of this reindeer and I have it here. I'm just going to drag it into Figma like I said before I mentioned that and here you can see our basic reindeer for this little project. I'm going to put everything on a frame just to keep organized and I will keep out 4,500 by 5,400. It's ready for Amazon March. I've got my reindeer within my frame now. The next thing that I would do, I would use a mixture of the pen tool or shapes, to solve outline this pencil drawing into a digital drawing. I'll show you how I would do that. For the bottom of the nose, I would use an ellipse, and I would solve, drag it to the type of size and shape I want and I remove the fill and just always use a stroke, let's just go 15. That's that first shape done. I'm not going to edit it too much. Here, I'm just going to get my basic shapes and then I'll be able to go in and edit it. The next thing I want is this top of the head area. I've got another ellipse. I'm just going to draw here then place it about there, remove the fill out a stroke again over about 15. Now I've got two ellipses they're going to make up the head. But as you can see, I have a bit of an overlap. I want this second ellipse, the bottom part here not to be here. I'm going to go into the shape by double-clicking and edit it so I remove this bottom section. The way I'm going to do that, is I'm going to go to P for pen and at the point where they cross I'll zoom in here. I'm going to add a point and I'm going to do the same on the other side. P again for pen and add a point in there. Now if I click on this point in the middle of those two points and press backspace, it will delete everything up until those two points. Now I have a much better head shape without that extra bit there. I'm going to go and use some more ellipses to finish off the nose and the ears, and then we'll do the [inaudible] and the mouth together. Now I've done the ears, the eyes, the nose, and the head. I'm going to go up to the antlers, and I did all of that using the ellipse tool, but for the antlers, because they are really random shape, I'm going to use the pen tool. I'm going to select the point on the head where they start. I'm using the curves that we learned about before. By holding down, I'm just going to create nice curves on the top of the antlers, all the way around, like this. Each point I click, I'm just holding down until I get a curve that I like. We can go in and edit them afterwards too. I'm going to bring that around a bit here. Enter to finish it off, so I'm going to increase that to 15 as well. Now there are some areas like here that I'm not quite happy with. I'm going to double-click, and just use the curve tools and the points to change this. I do want this to be behind the ear. There we go, I did it. You might have seen me do it really fast before, but when it came to copying symmetrical items, what I did was command D which duplicates it. I want to flip a horizontal because it's going to be the other way which is "Shift H." Or you can also right-click and access flip horizontal. I'm just going to drag this to the other side, and put it there like that. Now we have the same antler on both sides. The last bit is the mouth. Again, I'm just going to use the pen tool, select the first point, and then hold down on the second point to create a curve. There we have our basic outline of our reindeer. If I remove the image on the background just by using the toggle view button, you can see an outline of a very cute looking reindeer. The next step for our reindeer would be to color him in. We want to add some color, so I'm going to show you how I do that. Again just by doing a few elements, and then I'll go and finish it off. I'll show you the finished product. Let's start with the nose, because we all know reindeers need a bright red nose. To create the color, the first thing I'm actually going to do is I'm going to select everything, and do command G to group that outline together. I'm going to label this outline just to keep everything organized. Now all my outline vectors and shapes are in this folder here. Now I'm going to select the Pen tool, so to do the color what I'm going to do is basically re-draw around every shape again, but just using the pen tool, and then we'll fill it and place it behind the outline so that the outline is what covers any wavy lines that we have, you'll see. I'm going to select the pen tool, and go all the way around the nose. I'm going to remove the stroke just so I have a line. You just want to click from point to point making sure it always stays within the outline that you have. Like so. Finish off by joining the points. Then I'm going to click the "Plus by the fill" to add a fill, and it will add the default gray. We want this to be a nice red color for Rudolph like that. As you can see, our fill is above our outline in our layer panel. The way we want our outline to cover that jaggedy edge that we have. We want to drag our vector for the fill underneath outline. Which when we press "Enter" we'll now have that smooth line, and we have a colored nose. I'm going to finish off the coloring in, and you'll see what it looks like when it's all colored. Now we've got our reindeer all colored in using that same method I showed you. The next thing I would normally do is bring the design to life a bit. That might be by adding some shadows, highlights. For example, on this guy, like if you think about where the highlights and shadows might be, so his nose is sticking out of his face, so that part would be a bit of a shadow her. He's like this part of his face is in front of this box there might be a bit of a shadow here. Those ears are a bit behind his head, there might be a shadow here, and a bit behind his ears, so there might be a shadow here. I'm just going to go in and add a few of those shadows, so starting with under his nose. What I do to add shadow is literally the same technique, so I'll go to the pen tool, I'll create the curves, and the lines of where I think the shadow should be like this. Then bring the back ground over the stroke line. To complete the shape, press "Enter," and then I'll fill. What I normally do is select the same color, and then I will need to remove the stroke line. I would select the same color and then puddle around with this until I find a color that I like. Again, we need to put this under all these outlines, so like that. That gives his nose a bit of a lift of the bottom of the face area. Let's do the same thing over here. I'll use the pen tool again. I'm just going to click straight here and hold down to create a nice curve. Select again to get off the curve setting, and draw it back down. To remove the stroke out of fill, and use the same color here. I want it to just go a little bit darker overly about there, and place it under all the outlines. It's very subtle, but it just brings the design to life a bit. I'm going to go and finish adding all of those stroke shadows. I've added in that one unto the nose, this over on the cheek area into the ears and of the shadow of what the antler would be, and the last thing that I want to do is just bring the nose and the eyes to life of it, it's going to draw a little ellipse, put it on the side, and make it white. Just for a bit of a highlight. Shiny red nose, and the same for the eyes, so I'm just going to draw a bit in the eye, a bit of a twist, and we'll go white, and command D to duplicate it into the other eye. There we have our reindeer. He is ready to be put on a T-shirt and finish off with some text just to complete the design. Let's do that next step now. First thing that I'm going to do to complete the design is put this guy on a black background because most part of the t-shirt is a black color. I want to make sure he works on black. I've selected the frame, click on Fill and change it from white to black. Like that. A few things I've noticed, we've lost the effect of the outline of the reindeer around the antlers on the bottom here, because obviously we're using a black outline and now we're on a black t-shirt. We're going to want to fix that. The way we can fix that is by adding a white border all the way around this reindeer. I'm going to duplicate the outline folder here within the frame, and I'm going to drag one under fill, so it's at the very bottom of our image. I'm going to change all of the fills from inside to outside. That will mean that the fill will spill on the outside of the line that we've drawn, and I'm going up the stroke width. It's probably around about, let's go for 60. What that's done is it's added a white border all the way around our reindeer, and now this guy is popping out on the black background. The last thing we're going to do is add some text. Let's just go for a simple Merry Christmas. I've added a text box. It's very small, but let's make it bigger. Always highlight into it, there we go. All the way big. We're just going to have Merry Christmas across the bottom here. I think it would look cool if the Merry Christmas is in a different font and also curved around the bottom of his face. We're going to change the font to, l have a font that I like called Fancoy, which came from Creative Fabrica, so here's Merry Christmas. I'll still make it a bit bigger. There we go. This font is missing the middles of letters. It doesn't have them. We're going to add that as well because I like it better with them. But first we're going to want to curve it around. Figma has some plugins that you can get. They have cool ones like removing backgrounds, you can make custom frame presets that will show up in the preset frame section when you make a frame, but the one we're going to use is called arc. What arc does is it will take your text and you can arc it either that way or that way. We're going to arc it about minus 26 percent, let's say, and apply. It actually creates a group of letters separate to the ones that you added, so you need to find it on your document. We're going to make it white, drag it in and there it is. Let's just get rid of this, drag it out our frame, so here's our Merry Christmas text. I think it will look cute in red, the same as the nose, so let's change it to a red color. I think about also written out so it has the same matching white background and red border. The way we're going to do that is we're going to duplicate this. Let's call this text, I'm going to duplicate this text group, so duplicate. Now we have the one that's behind it that were going to change to a white-color. You wouldn't see it yet because it's exactly the same as this and it's directly behind it. We're going to also add a stroke which is white. If you zoom in, you'll see we have a one pixel stroke showing because it's on the outside. If we up this to, I think 60 will be a bit much for this, probably about 25, and now shows up with that nice whiteboard behind it. The last thing we want to do is add the black border. So we're going do the same method, this time duplicate the top one again, so we've got the red ones, and this time it's going to be on top of the red. This top section here, we don't want to fill, we just want a stroke on this one, so add a stray which is black. We can put it in the center and increase that, there we go. We have a nice bubbly font for Merry Christmas. Last, last lap but not least is we want to add the centers to the e and the a, so nice and easy way of doing that, we're just going to use the pen tool again. Create an random shape for the middle of this e. It doesn't really have to be anything perfect, it's quite a random design, a random font, add a fill to that, make it white and get rid of that and we want to keep that stroke. But we want to make it the same as the black one was, which is 11. Like so. We have the inside of the e, and we're going to do the same for the a, so pen tool. We're going to go in and edit that. I've got these points there, like so, add a fill of white. Now we have a inside of the a. There we have our final design, the last thing to do, so we'll just position it properly on our frame, so we can do that by pretty much just selecting all of our layers and moving them around the arc board, because everything is a vector, we can resize like this as well. It won't alter to any of the dimensions, so I'd say that is pretty good then, nice and central, and now we have our final design using Figma. The last thing that we'd want to do is export it. To export the whole frame, if I manage by Amazon, you'd actually want to export it without the background, so we just want obviously the image. Because the teacher is the black thing, so we'd click on Frame and remove the fill, which will remove the fill, and then while we're still clicked on frame with everything selected, we could get rid of this. That was just the original image. We can remove that now. Click on Frame and we want to export, and you can export PNG, JPEG, SVG, and PDF. Just click Export and PNG, "Save". It's now in our downloads, and here is our reindeer, ready to upload to whatever print on demand company we want to use. And that was the Figma tutorial. Pretty crazy. It's a fantastic tool. Just watching that tutorial myself, I'm learning how to use it way better than I used to be able to use it. I just think it's an awesome, awesome tool. Definitely download Figma and start using it to create your designs, and if you ever need to come back to tutorial than for sure, and if you have more questions, Lauren will be able to answer anyone's questions around the Figma program. That's awesome. Now let's do a Canvas tutorial. 27. The Full Canva Tutorial: [MUSIC] Canva is an awesome program, and there was just so much you can do with it. I have the paid version. However, there is also a free version that you could use just to see if you like it. Let's go over a tutorial on how you would use Canva specifically for print on demand. Because as you can see here, you can use Canva for so many different things. You've got presentation, social media, video, print products, marketing, office, and more stuff. It's actually a crazy, crazy graphic design tool. First things first, we have the size. What we want to do is click "Create Design" and then we want to put in a custom size. Now, the size that I use is 4,500 by 5,400 pixels. Typically, this is the size for Amazon Merch, but it works for pretty much everyone. After putting that in 4,500 by 5,400, we click ''Create New Design'', and then this is what we have. We have a whole bunch of templates over here. We have elements, uploads, text, backgrounds, logos, and more. Let's just go over some basic rules. Fonts are okay for commercial use, meaning you could use fonts and do, hello world, and you could sell that on a T-shirt, no problem. Templates are not okay for commercial use. I would never use a CV for commercial use. But let's say I search t-shirt template. You cannot use template for commercial use. You have got to change them and make them your own. Graphics are sometimes okay, and by graphics, I mean elements. You have so many different types. Now, sometimes it's okay, but you want to make sure that you do not use graphics as the center focus of the design, only to add to the design. If it's on the side or it's just a small element of a much bigger design, then it's okay. When you do use a graphic, let's say you use this graphic, you want to tweak the colors and everything to really make it your own. You can see here I can go in and actually tweak all the different colors and make it totally unique, and that's how you know, there is a very small chance that anyone is going to have the exact same color combination as you. Now that we understand the basic rules of Canva, let me show you how to use Canva on quite a basic level because, again, it doesn't have to be confusing. First things first, we're going to add a box. You see, here's the box, and you've got a couple of things up here. You can change the color of the box. You can animate the box, but that's irrelevant to creating a print-on-demand design. You also got the positioning of the box. You can center it, all of these different things. As well as that, you can also move it forward or backwards if you have multiple different designs. One thing to note, which is quite cool, is you can see these purple lines that show up, and these are great center points. Here you can see that's the center of your design to keep it in there. You've also got your horizontal and your vertical lines so you can really make sure everything is centered perfectly. You can also change the opacity or the transparency. You can then link it to something else. You can lock it, or you can duplicate it or delete it. Now, this top bar over here will change depending on what's on your Canvas. If we add text, let's move this text up to the top and let's say, hello. Now, you can see the top here has actually changed. We now have the font, we have the size, the color, if it's bold or not, if it's italic, centered if it's going to have dots like a list, we can do a letter spacing, we can have effects. There's so much we can do, and we got all these extra stuff here, and we've got positioning. Let's say we want to add some effects. We can go for a glow effect, and then we can change the color. We can go for a yellow color, a purple color. There's a lot that you can do here, but a lot of this is very straightforward, very basic. What I recommend is playing around with it. Now you can see I've got the text here. We can also change the positioning. If we go to position, we can move it back, we can move it forward. We couldn't do that before because we only had one element, but now we have two elements on here, we can actually change the positioning. You can see it's very, very straightforward. It's very simple. One thing I like to do is change the background color. Let's say I haven't selected anything. You can see the toolbar. There's nothing really there. If I select the background, I can change the background color to whatever I want. What I would do is I will change the background color to the color of the t-shirt I'm designing. Let's say I'll duplicate this and say I want to create this on a gray background. I also want to create a yellow t-shirt, so I make a yellow background, and then I also want to create a red t-shirt, so I'll create a red background. What I can do is I can go through and think, does this design work on the yellow?What needs changing? Does it work on the red? What needs changing? Sometimes things will need changing. Maybe the border color will need to go from red to white or whatever it may be. This is obviously a very bad example of a design. Let's put something in there which actually looks good. We're going to go with the classic. I'm a bartender, what's your superpower? We'll go I'm a, and then make a new line. Very simple, you can just ''Control C'', ''Control V'', a bartender. Let's make it slightly bigger. Then we've got what's your superpower? Again, ''Control C'', ''Control V'' to copy that. We're going to make it a lot smaller. What's your, and then one more, superpower. What you can see here is you can see the purple lines are showing up everywhere, and you can see I can center it all over the place. What else you can do is you can select all of this. You can go to these three dots here. You can click "Position," and now you can actually space evenly as well. We can vertically space, and you can see how they all pop now that the space in-between each word is perfect. It's very cool what you can do here. Again, I didn't really like the effect here, so I'm just going to go for the ''No Effect'', and then I'm just going to change the color and do whatever I want. I don't know how to make it gray, but I'm going to make it black. For this one, I can make it this effect or this effect. There's so many different effects you can do, and then you can change the colors as well. You can actually go into the effect and change the color of the effect as well. There's a lot you can do just using Canvas' owned things. Now let's add a graphic and remember what I said. You don't want to make the graphic the main thing, but you can add it as a compliment. For example, we're going to elements, and we'll search for beer. Because a bartender, that seems to match. You could do this if you're making a St Patrick's day design, you can square off your design here. Another cool trick here is if you have a Mac, you can hold down on ''Option'', and you can just drag this, and it copies it. You can rotate it and snap it to 180 and then square of the design. This is an absolutely atrocious design. Let's change the whole size of it. Center in the middle. You can do so many different things. You can add some beer here. Let's add some beer, and we'll change the size of this beer, and we'll put that at the top there. There's a lot you can do here. But as you can see, I'm not using these elements as the main, main thing for this design. It's just complementing the overall design, and that's absolutely fine. As well as that we can also change the elements to make them even more unique. Here I can change the colors of the beer to be whatever I want it to be. I can make it green, I can make it red. It doesn't really look a beer anymore, but you get my point. You can really do whatever you want to these designs. Once you've done that, like I said before, you want to duplicate this, you want to change the background. Let's say I want to sell us on a yellow t-shirt. You can see, does this work? Actually, no, these colors don't work very well. What I'm going to do is change these colors to black as well. I'm going to change the effect back to normal. You can see what I'm doing here is I'm tweaking each individual design and making sure they work with the background of the potential t-shirt, or pillow, or sticker. Whatever that product background color is, I'm making sure it works. I don't like these things, and this color is all off. Let me change this color back to what it was. I think it was that color. I can't remember. But what you can see here is now that doesn't actually go. What I will do is maybe I will change that to a different color, maybe a gray or something, and this would be the yellow for the beer. Whatever it may be, maybe it needs a border or something. But what you can see here is you can use Canvas to create so many different designs, and that's what you have now. With the pro version, the only difference is you have more things available. You can use the images and the text for commercial use with pro or with free. But like I said, the difference is if I go to ''Bartender'' here and I go for ''Fonts'', you can see all of these that have a little crown as for pro, and there's a lot of different pro fonts, and this just goes on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. There are so many fonts, it's absolutely crazy. It will still go on, a tiny this is gone. It's actually crazy how many fonts are. Likewise with elements. There's a lot of pro elements you can see. It's got a little pro logo next to it, and that's how you know, it's a pro element, and you can only use it if you pay for Canva. If you don't want to pay, that's fine. It's just you get a lot more. That's basically how you would use Canva. It's not very complicated and just make sure that everything matches, the fonts, the graphics, the colors. Like we spoke about in the core principles, use that video alongside this one, and just has some fun with Canva because there's a lot you can do with it. 28. Outsourcing Designs: [MUSIC] Not everyone wants to design their own t-shirts, and that's totally okay. If you have a budget to outsource your designs, that is an amazing thing to do. It will save you a lot of time and it's a great way to get really, really high-quality professional designs. Here are a few places that you could look at. Number one, 99designs. This is quite a cool and unique way of getting designs made. You create a project and a whole bunch of designers will create what they think you would want based on your project requirements. You then pick the winner and they get paid and that's the design you end with. It can be expensive and time-consuming, but it's a great way to get a variety of styles when envisioning a design. The next place is Fiverr. This is a great platform to get cheaper designs. Usually you'll have to pay extra for commercial rights, but that's quite normal. You have hundreds and sometimes thousands of people to choose from with varying price ranges and varying skill ability. Once you have picked someone, you can message them with your idea or maybe even send them examples and they'll have absolutely no problem making something for you. Sometimes the prices you see on the page aren't always the final prices. Sometimes you can get a custom quote from the seller. Finally, the third place is Upwork. Upwork is similar to Fiverr, except I feel it's a bit more professional and also a lot more expensive or so it seems. Usually you pay people based on an hourly rate. However, you can create a project rate and pay people per project. You can either create a new job and leave it, or you can create a new job and invite people to that job, people that you think are quantified to create a design for you. It's a lot more official. It's like hiring a freelancer. You can always go back to that person over and over again and have them pretty much work for you on an hourly basis. You can hire someone, for example, $15 per hour, $20 per hour for three hours a day. They could create designs for you for those three hours every single day, if of course you have the budget for that. I would always recommend designing yourself because you end up saving a lot of money. But if you can't design yourself because you feel like you can't do any designs or you have a budget going into it and you want to save some time, then it's a brilliant idea to get someone else to design for you. Now after watching this course, hopefully, you'll be able to ask to create some basic designs yourself, even if you thought previously you were unable to. But of course that's up to you. I would always suggest at the same time as paying someone else to do your designs, try and practice it yourself and see if it is something you will eventually be able to do yourself because it does save a fortune. 29. Design affirmation: [MUSIC] This is not a step to be skipped. It's really, really important, and it just so happens to be one of the easiest and most valuable steps in this entire course. Brilliant. After finishing the design, you want to put that design on a mock-up and send it to three family members and three friends. If you don't have either of those two, you can just send it to some acquaintances and if you don't have a mock-up, you can just send the basic design to them. The reason you want to do this is you want another pair of eyes on your design to give you some constructive criticism and some genuinely honest feedback. You don't want to send every single design that you make because that could get really annoying for the people around you so maybe send every fifth or every 10th design. What you'll find is the things that people are saying, you'll be able to incorporate that into your other designs that you haven't sent them as well. Make sure to tell them to be ruthless and brutally honest. You don't want praise here. You want someone to dissect your design and point out all the things that is wrong with it and all the things that they like about it. This will in turn help you design future designs but as well as that it will help you understand what people like and what people don't like. It's just like having your book proofread if you are a writer. Your design needs to be proofread in a way. It needs to be checked by other people to make sure it's good. If you get a lot of things to work on, well, that's a good thing because it means your future designs will be a lot better, and if you've got a lot of people saying the same thing, it's something to look out for. If a lot of people are saying, "I didn't get this design, it's just not very funny," maybe you shouldn't sell that design, maybe it won't catch on. Some of the feedback can be very hard to hear, but just remember no one is being malicious. People are genuinely trying to help you. They are your friends and they want the best for you. 30. What Should You Charge: Deciding what to charge, this is a tough one because it's not a one-price-fits-all kind of situation. Each niche, each design, each product type might have a different price that fits with it. When it comes to pricing, you want to make sure you're making a profit, but you also don't want to be overcharging or undercharging. Now, I know this sounds really obvious, but unfortunately with print-on-demand, a lot of the time you'll find that products are quite expensive as a base price, so you have to end up charging quite a lot of money to make any money. Now, you don't want to charge too much because you'll end up pressing yourself out of the market and you won't end up getting any sales unless you have a very passionate audience base to begin with. Because every niche will be different, the best way to come up with accurate pricing is to look at the top 20 or 30 selling designs either on Amazon or Etsy of your chosen niche and seeing what everyone else is charging, working out an average of everyone's prices, and then you can get your price. You can then make it slightly lower, slightly higher, whatever you want to do. I would recommend starting with making it slightly lower and then increasing it as you start getting more of use. For example, if we want to sell a dog t-shirt, we can search Amazon for funny dog t-shirt and then we can sort by the top 20 or the top 30 designs. Then we can see what the top 20 or top 30 designs are priced at. What we want to do is sort by reviews so we can see what's actually selling because we don't care about the prices of designs that aren't selling, we care about designs that are selling. Once we sort by reviews, we'll be able to get an accurate idea of what's selling and what it's selling for. Now, bear in mind, when you do start sorting by reviews, the designs that will pop up with your search term, "Funny dog t-shirt," might not be related to dogs so much. In fact, the results looked like this. They can be really random. The average selling price here was $18.46, which is actually really good because that will be our aim, and as well as that $18.46 is well over the mark to get some profits. We know we're going to be making quite a good amount of money, selling it at that price point, which means we can lower the price and be cheaper than everyone else and sell it for $16.50 or $16.99, and we know we're still going to be okay. As I said, to start with, you want to sell below average and then you want to slowly increase it as reviews come in. That is probably the best and most accurate way to come up with pricing your design without pricing it too high or too low. Now, when it comes to pricing research, I wouldn't recommend going to Redbubble and basing it off of their prices, and that's because Redbubble's t-shirt base prices are a lot higher than other platforms. Because the basic t-Shirt price is around $17-$18, the actual t-shirt selling price is going to be over $20. That's not an accurate representation of what print-on-demand t-shirts should cost. Avoid using Redbubble. The best places to come up with these accurate prices is Amazon, Etsy, and eBay. That will give you a really good understanding of what customers are paying for when they're paying for print-on-demand t-shirts. 31. Finding The Best Keywords: [MUSIC] Making sure you have relevant and searchable keywords is vital for the success of any design. You may have that on occasion when you don't have keywords and just by luck, you end up getting sales. But nine times out of 10, you need to have relevant searchable keywords. You need to make sure that the design you're trying to sell is categorized properly on the Internet. You do that by carefully picking amazing keywords. Now you have two types of keywords. You have long tail keywords and short tail keywords. Long tail keywords is when the phrase is generally made up of 3-5 words. As these words are more specific, it allows you to get more targeted. Usually, the traffic is higher-quality and convert more often because you've used more words to define that target audience. For example, targeting the word dogs may seem like a good idea, but it's very broad and it won't get a high conversion rate because of how broad it is. But targeting funny dog t-shirt for moms will be a lot more targeted and we'll get a much higher conversion rates. This is because it's talked in a much more specific group of people and in doing so, you're going to get a high conversion rate, a high click-through rate, and more sales. You then have short tail keywords. These are phrases with only 1-2 words. These are a lot more broad and it's smart to have a couple of these types of keywords dotted around your description and bullets. But by no means should these keywords be your main focus. It's great to have some short tail keywords on hand, ready to go in case your design blows up. Because if your design does blow up, you're going to want to broaden the search, allow more people to see your design, so you'll end up replacing some of your long tail keywords with short tail keywords, and that way you'll be able to reach a much broader audience. Now, I know it sounds counterintuitive because you're probably thinking, well, wouldn't I want to just reach a broader audience to begin with, so that more people can see my design. Yes, that might be true, but that's not what you want to do because you want to create a high converting sales page. You want to create a product that when someone lands on it, they're more likely to buy. if someone is searching for funny dog mom's t-shirt and they stumble across your t-shirt that literally says that, chances are they're going to buy it. But if someone just searches for the word dog, they might not be looking for a t-shirt, they might not be looking for any product. That's why it's very important at the beginning to focus on long tail keywords. Now, let's talk about some tools because there's quite a few tools out there that allow you to get all of this keyword data. Here are some of my favorite ones. Starting with the Google Keyword Planner tool. This is by far my favorite tool. It's brilliant and it's free. You might need to create an ad just to get access to it, but you can cancel that ad straight away and not pay any money and then you have access to the Google Keyword Planner tool. This is data taken directly from Google. You can see literally how many searches, specific keywords, specific phrases actually end up getting, as well as that it gives you data on how much it would cost if you wanted to advertise those specific keywords and it's just incredible. I use the Google Keyword Planner tool for pretty much everything; on-demand, Amazon, YouTube. If I'm feeling nosy and I want to find out how popular a specific term is, is just fascinating that all of this information is right there at the tips of your fingers. The next one is, Ahrefs. Usually, this is a paid thing, but they have a free searching tool and that's what I want you to use. This allows you to search a few different things. You can say Google, Bing, YouTube, or Amazon. I know it sounds pretty crazy, but you can literally select which one you want, put the search term in and it will give you data around that website and how many times that specific keyword has been searched for. Definitely use that tool as well. The next is called Keyword Surfer. Now, this is a Chrome plugin and it gives you data right then and there when you're searching on Google. Now, I don't think it's as accurate as the Google Keyword Planner tool, but it's still a great indication of how well individual keywords and phrases are doing. When you search Google, you'll see all the data is already there for you and it's just a really useful tool to have in Google Chrome. With those three tools, you should find it easy coming up with long tail and short tail keywords for your titles, descriptions, and your bullets. The next thing you need to do is figure out how to actually implement them. You could use them directly in your designs, like on the actual t-shirt or pillow or whatever you're selling if it's a particular popular phrase and everyone knows it and you're allowed to use it like it's not trademarked or copyrighted, then yes, you could use it in your design. But more commonly, these keywords are used in the title, description, and the bullets. A very important thing to note is don't just stuff these keywords in randomly where it doesn't make any sense. I've seen so many people do that where on their Amazon listings they just have keyword all over the place and it just looks silly. You want to try and form actual sentences with your keywords. For example, you have this one. Friends and family will love this funny men's birthday slogan tee with a quote. Classic car graphic makes this the perfect gift for vehicle addicts and piston heads. Now, I know it doesn't make amazing sense. It's not going to win any awards for writing, but it still makes sense and it still looks okay. Let's compare that to something which doesn't look okay. We've got this one. Gift t-shirt, gift t-shirts, gift for men's t-shirts, gifts for men t-shirts, gift men t-shirts, gifts for her t-shirt, gift for girls, gift for t-shirt. It's madness, it's absolute chaos. It's just the word gift. It's ridiculous. That's what you don't want to do because it doesn't make any sense. It's impossible to read and it's probably not doing the best job when it comes through actually ranking that design anyway. The first one used full stops, it used commas and it tried to make articulated tendencies. Even though sometimes **** there they did try and stuff in that extra keyword, overall it made sense compared to the second one, which was literally just the definition of keyword stuffing, which is what you do not want to do. Once you put your keywords on your listing, you can also start to use them in your marketing, so on your Instagram posts, your Facebook posts, your YouTube description, wherever you are planning on sharing it, your Twitter posts. Wherever you are sharing it, it doesn't matter but you'll have all keywords that you can use throughout your marketing. They work well for free marketing, like I just said, Facebook, Instagram, and whatnot, but they work even better when you end up doing paid advertising. If you're paying for Google ads and you're paying for every single time someone searches for funny dog t-shirt for mum, you show a bang right there at the top. That's going to be really valuable. Now, I can't imagine that keyword gets many searches. However, if you have 50 or 60 different keywords like that, and you're paying for all of them, you're going to be getting quite a bit of traffic to your page. The first thing for you to do after watching this video is to find a design that you're trying to sell and go and find 23 long tail keywords and seven short tail keywords. That way you would have built a list of 30 keywords that you could target. You could use the tools that I listed earlier and once you have all those keywords, you can try and form sentences with those keywords. Obviously, use other words in the sentences that might not be your keywords, but you can form sentences with those keywords, update your listings on Amazon or wherever you're selling your product with these new sentences, and see how it goes. Now let's move on to the next video. 32. Spying on Competitions Keywords: I've already spoken about keywords, places you can find them, and best practices on how to use them. There's one way I didn't mention, and that's because I wanted to give it its own dedicated video. That way is spying on your competitor's keywords to see what they are doing and what's working for them. Rather than just picking any competitor you want to obviously pick competitors that you know, are getting sales because clearly, you know they're doing something right. The issue is finding competitors that are getting sales without using any tools. Now on Amazon, you can use a whole bunch of different tools and in this course I mainly speak about pretty much where you can actually see who's getting sales, how many reviews they have, all the information you possibly need, their keywords, all of that. But if you're not using any tool, what should you do? Well, if you're not using any tools, you want to base your research on reviews. You would search Amazon for a specific design idea that you had in mind and then you would organize by number of reviews, the person with the most reviews are sharp at the top and then it will work their way down. Now, this doesn't guarantee sales. It doesn't mean the person with the most reviews is getting the most sales, but it does mean that they have gotten sales previously and they're probably doing quite well now. You can also go into an individual Amazon listing and see that BSR, and if their BSR is good under 20,000, they're probably getting a couple of sales as well. Now, once you have this information in front of you, yes, it's time-consuming, which is why I like using a tool pretty much. But if you don't want to do that, that was the way to do it. Now, once you have all of these people in front of you, you'll be able to look at that title, that bullets and if they have descriptions, you'll be able to look at that as well. This will be a great indication of view when it comes to picking out the keywords that you want on your listing. Another great place is Etsy, because on Etsy you can actually click on a product and see how many reviews a specific product has got. You can see how many cells an entire shop has got, you can see how many reviews an entire shop has got, but like I said, you can also see how many reviews and individual product has got, which means, you know that product is getting sales because generally, the view also has a date to it. You can see how old that sale was and how relevant this product actually is now. Once you're on the Etsy sales page, you'll be able to see their title, their description, and any other keywords that they've used on their listening. This is just a brilliant way to build up a long list of keywords that have proven to work for other people. Now, this doesn't mean it's going to a 100 percent work for you, but it's a better indication that it will. You've also got Redbubble for keyword research. However, with Redbubble, it's much harder to actually see what's selling. We don't really know how many sales things are getting. The best thing you can do is search for a specific term and then organize by best-selling. Now, even though we don't have any data with the reviews, because everyone has the same reviews on Redbubble and we don't have any data on the sales because we've organized by best-selling, we can just assume that the ones at the top or getting sales. Again, this is an assumption. We can't be sure of it, but once we've made that assumption, we can then get a title that they've used and if we want, we can scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Redbubble sales page for that t-shirt or that item and see exactly what keywords they've actually used. I wouldn't focus your attention on Redbubble. In fact, I can't even use it as a last resort just to get a bit more data but really Amazon and Etsy alone are absolutely perfect for spine on your competitor's keywords. That's it. I really recommend that you do this. You are a long list of keywords, you put it next to the long list of keywords that you created for yourself and you see what's missing, what you already found out. When it comes to creating your listing, your description, your title, at the end of this course, you'll have all of these keywords ready to go. 33. How To Curate The Perfect Titles, Bullets and Descriptions: [MUSIC] A lot of people don't utilize descriptions or bullets enough, and there can be a great way to get a couple more keywords in, as well as that it's an amazing opportunity for you to convince buyers just a little bit more to buy your products. I absolutely love it when a store gets really creative with their descriptions and they create these funny, wacky descriptions. It really gives a store that edge and a reason to come back and a reason to share with your friends. It makes it funny and it gives it a personal touch, it just really good. Everyone can think of that one store that has this funny descriptions as well as that try and tell a story and try to be relatable when you're selling a product. For example, if you're selling a hoody, use words like warm and cozy and outdoors and maybe even watching TV, because that is where someone might want to wear a hoodie. They're going to want to be warm and cozy in it. They're going to want to snuggle up on the couch watching TV, or maybe they're going to want to go outside for a long walk. Use these words, use these sentences and now paint a really vivid picture in your potential customers mind. For example, this sentence. Imagine cozying up by the TV with this super warm soft hoodie with a unique design on the front, it's so cozy, you might just fall asleep. Something like that where it paints a really vivid picture in your customer's mind. It gets them in the mood that I want to feel that and they buy. That's an amazing way to convert traffic into sales. Now, I'm not saying you should say that specifically my point is just coming up with a story where you are creating really good imagery in your customer's mind so that they really end up wanting this product. You also want to make sure you end with a good call to action. The last bullet or the end of your description whatever it is you want to say, if you want to wear this limited decent t-shirt, then add it to your basket and buy now. Now again I'm not saying you have to say those exact words, but you do want to have some form of a call to action at the end of your bullet or description. The same rules apply for both bullets and description. Now a lot of companies don't have that bullet feature, Amazon merch and Amazon FBA does, but a lot of places don't. But everything I'm saying here, the way you use your keywords, the forming normal sentences with the keywords that you found and creating this imagery for your customer that goes the same for the description and for the bullets. Give this a go, find a product you're selling and put yourself in your customer's mind, what will they be thinking and feeling and what will they want to see and what will they want to purchase. This might seem like a difficult task. If you're struggling to do with one of your designs, instead find something you actually want to buy maybe you want to buy a new camera or an iPhone or something and then think about your thought process. What have you thought when you've gone to that sales page what has been your thought process, your journey from wanting to actually buying. Once you've done that, you can relate it back to your design and put yourself into a customer's mind that would want to buy your design. Earlier on, I said it's good to do a niche that you know a lot about and you passionate about and this is one of those reasons why. Because if you create design that you're genuinely passionate about, it will be very easy to put yourself in your customer's mind and create really good descriptions and really good bullets. Once doing this and combining it with a long list of keywords you have found, you should find it easy to create beautiful descriptions and beautiful bullets that customers will want to read and will convert much higher. 34. Submitting Your Design for Review: [MUSIC] This is probably one of the best elements of this course, and that is submitting your design for feedback. Now, just down below, you're able to add your designs into the project area, and in doing so, I will be able to get feedback on your individual designs. What I ask is that you peace only upload one per month so that it's manageable, and so that I can review every single person's design because I want to help you with coloring, with placement, with the actual overall design, with the graphics that you've used. You don't necessarily have to sell this particular design if you're nervous about other people stealing it or whatever it is, but this is a great way for you to use what you've learned through these classes, and implement them into a design and then get direct feedback from me about that design. So definitely take advantage of it, and put your designs in the project down below, so I can give you my constructive feedback. 35. Setting Goals For Moving Forward: [MUSIC] Setting goals is incredibly important and it will give you great direction in terms of moving forward rather than just staying still and not really realizing where you're going or what you're doing. Everyone might be at different stages so you might need to start at a different goal. I'm going to list a whole bunch of goals in order that you could focus on and you can see where you're up to and where you should start from. Number 1, sign up for Merch by Amazon. Number 2, sign up and connect Etsy with Printful and any other partner. Number 3, sign-up for eBay. Number 4, create a Shopify store and connect with Printful or another partner. Number 5, create a list of five different niches. Number 6, match those five niches with another five niches so you can create that double niche system. Number 7, create your ideal customer's avatar or profile. Number 8, right down 10 t-shirts that will be trendy in the next three months. Number 9, write down 20 evergreen t-shirt ideas. Number 10, create four designs. Number 11, multiply those designs onto three different products, e.g, a t-shirt, a hoodie, or a cushion. Number 12, find 30 keywords for every single design you make. Designs in the same niche can have similar keywords. Number 13, upload those four designs. Number 14, create titles, descriptions, and bullets for those four designs. Number 15, create a marketing plan. Number 16, execute your marketing plan, and number 17, submit a design for a review so that I could give you my opinion. Now, these goals that I just told you is from nothing to having a print on demand company and having designs out there in the open for people to actually buy. This is everything you need to follow to create your own print on demand company. 36. Recap What We've Learnt: [MUSIC] We've now reached the last section so let's go over everything we've learned. We've covered quite a few topics so far. We started with understanding the different types of market places for Print on Demand. We then created an Amazon Merge account, some of us created an Amazon Seller Central account, an eBay account, and some of us created an Etsy account and a Shopify account. There were plenty of accounts we created in order to sell our designs. I will be adding many more tutorials for other platforms down the line. I wanted to start with a few basic ones and then as time goes on I'll add more and more. We then went over everything you need to know regarding research. Coming up with ideas, multiplying ideas, figuring out if trends or evergreen is the way to go, and figuring out how to find niches and what to do with those niches once you've found them. We also spoke about core principles when it came to designing. We went over different designs and we covered a few different programs to create designs in. Again, more tutorials on different designing platforms like Photoshop and Affinity Designer will be coming out in the near future. Finally we discussed what to charge, how to find keywords, and then how to implement those keywords into your title description and bullets. Of course, as well as that how to actually market your design. Again, the marketing aspect of this course, more videos will be added as time goes on. As I test new things and as new things come out, I will continuously add new awesome videos. By the end of this course, hopefully you've set up an account, you've been able to pick a niche, then create designs for this niche, then upload it to various different stores, and finally drive traffic to those different stores. This is super awesome so well done for getting this far and watching the whole course. Now let's go over some goals for you so you can move forward with your Print on Demand Business.