From Design to Product: Sell Your Art Online Through Print on Demand

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Julie, an artist from Vancouver, Canada. I've been selling my art online through print on demand websites for the past 7 years. When I sold my first piece of artwork, I was like, "Wow, this is actually something that I could do." At that moment, it was just like a light bulb went off in my head as I realized the possibilities. I've sold my art on all sorts of products from t-shirts and coffee mugs, to yoga mats, and even fabric. My designs have been sold and shipped to people all over the world through print on demand websites like Redbubble and Society6. This generates passive income for me, which has allowed me to grow my business, travel, make important life purchases, build an emergency fund, and gives me a sense of financial security. Print on demand helps me afford my lifestyle and do the things that I want to do in life. In this class, I'll be taking you step-by-step through the process of setting up your own print on demand store, so you can create products from your art. We'll begin with the equipment and software you'll need, and I'll guide you through digitizing your first artwork. Next, I'll go over some of the different print on demand options for where you can sell your art. Then I'll guide you through opening your first store and uploading your first design. I'll also be giving you some tips on running a creative business online. The final lesson will contain some bonus pro tips, including some next steps you can take. I'll be giving you the tools to start building your own creative business online, using print on demand websites, while sharing my own personal insights and processes that I've learned over the past 7 years. What I love about selling through print on demand is that it gives me freedom and flexibility. I can basically work from anywhere as long as I have a computer. I can also set my own hours. I can work as much or as little as I want to. Also, the income potential is basically limitless. It just depends on how much work you want to put into it. I'm passionate about empowering artists to share their artwork with the world and create passive income streams for themselves. I want other artists to experience that wow, feeling that I felt the first time I sold an artwork to someone that from across the world. I hope you're as excited about this as I am. Let's get started. 2. Class Orientation & Project: For the class project today, you will be setting up your own print-on-demand store and submitting your first artwork for sale on products. I will be guiding you through this process step-by-step in this class. You can take a screenshot of either the store file you created or one of your artworks on a product and share it in the class projects section. You're free to also leave a link to your stores so that, myself and others can see your amazing artwork. I encourage you to look at each other's stores and support each other. I'll be guiding you through this process step-by-step in this course so it's the perfect way to get you started selling your art online. You can continue to build upon this store and add more designs to it in the future. For supplies, you will need to have a finished piece of artwork like this and either a scanner or a digital camera so that we can digitize your artwork. Of course, you can also use a completely digital piece of artwork that you've already created, in which case, you can skip this step. You will also need some PC or laptop and a photo editing software like Photoshop or a free version like GIMP. Before we start, you should have at least one piece of artwork that you want to digitize in this course but I recommend gathering a few different pieces of artwork so that you can continue to add some more pieces to your store once we've finished the class. In the next video, I'll be showing you how to prepare and digitize your artwork for sale on products through print-on-demand stores. I will see you there. 3. Preparing the Artwork: In this lesson, I will be going over how to digitize your artwork so that we can upload it to print-on-demand. I will show you the methods that I use with my own artwork and discuss some best practices. I have this illustration of mine here that I will be using for the demo. We will begin today by either scanning or photographing your artwork depending on what you have. Scanning is preferable if you have access to a scanner. It will just make it much easier to make sure the lines are really crisp and the colors come out as saturated as we want them to. However, you can still use a camera. Just make sure you have it on a tripod or have it stable in some way. It just makes it a lot easier to prevent any blurriness from holding the camera. Make sure you're scanning or photographing the artwork in the highest quality possible for the device that you have. If you're using a digital artwork, make sure it's around 9000 or 10000 pixels in size. This will just ensure that we can cover the most amount of print-on-demand products as possible. Some of them can be quite large, so we just want to make sure that we can enable as many of the products as possible. This just keeps the image from becoming too grainy or pixelated when it's printed on large products like a shower curtain or a comforter. If you can't make the image that large without it becoming blurry, that's okay. There's still a lot of products that you can add your artwork to you that are smaller. You just won't be able to enable everything. Jumping onto the computer. Now we're going to go ahead and scan our image into Photoshop. We're going to go to File, Import, WIA Support. Here you can choose the folder where you want to save the artwork and some options. I like to keep this one checked off and uncheck the create unique subfolder and hit "Start". Then we're going to select our device here. I have my scanner setup and hit ''Okay''. Here you have some scanning options. I like to often use black and white if I only have a black and white line drawing. However, this one, we're going to use color. Here you can go ahead and adjust the quality. You want to make sure that you have a minimum of 300 DPI for your resolution. As you can see, you can also go up to 600 or even 1200 with my device. For this purpose, I'm only going to do 300 just to keep the file size from not being too huge. I'm going to go ahead and click, ''Okay''. We have our scanned image now here in Photoshop, and we're just going to do a little bit of clean-up before we go into Illustrator. First of all, I'm just going to crop the image to get rid of some of those black lines around the outside. That looks good. We want to make the lines and the colors more crisp and saturated. I'm going to go ahead and make sure first of all that we're in RGB color mode. That is the color mode that most of the print-on-demand sites require, so just make sure you've got it in RGB color mode. I'm going to go to Adjustments, Brightness, Contrast, bump up the contrast a lot. From here I just recommend cleaning up any straight dots or cleaning up any mistakes that you've made. That's the beauty of digital art and digitizing your artwork is that you can fix any mistakes, you can make all sorts of adjustments, change the colors, whatever you want to do. I'm just going to go through this and clean it up a little bit and we'll see you in the next step. Now one thing I like to do is to use this Dodge and Burn tool. The Burn tool, we'll just make the dark lines darker. That just helps to make these parts that I want to be black just be a little bit darker before we go into Illustrator. That's looking pretty good to me. I'm going to go and save as a Photoshop file, so PSD. I've opened my PSD file here in Illustrator now. We're going to use the Image Trace tool, which is actually going to turn our artwork into a vector. Making it a vector just makes the lines way more crisp and smooth and makes it less pixelated looking. This just gives it a really more clean and professional look. That is what we want for our print-on-demand products is for them to look very nice and professional and as high-quality as we can get them. We're going to just start by selecting the image, I just clicked anywhere on the image here. You're going to go to Window, Image Trace. Make sure our image is selected. Here there's a few different options. You've got high color, low color, grayscale, black and white. Now for those black and white line drawing that I often do, I will choose black and white. That just makes it really simple and quick. You can also, under advanced, there's some different little settings here you can play with. You can also select, ignore white, so you just get the black lines only on a transparent background. Now for this purpose, I'm just going to choose low color because I really only have blue, yellow, and black and white in this image. I'm going to go and use low color. Well, that's looking pretty good. You can see a lot of the lines have been smoothed out. Now I'm not a 100 percent happy with it, so I'm just going to continue to play around with some of the settings until I get it looking how I want. Actually going to just reduce the number of colors since I really only have the four or five colors here. Actually, we're just going to choose four colors and see how that looks. That's looking really good now. You can go ahead and finish playing around with your artwork here in Illustrator. I'm going to actually go ahead and finish it off in Photoshop. From here I'm going to hit ''Save As'' and save it as an AI file this time hit, ''Okay''. Now I've gone ahead and opened my AI file in Photoshop. Remember we have two files. We have a Photoshop file and an Illustrator file. I'm opening the Illustrator file in Photoshop now. Now when you open the file, it's going to show you this dialogue box. From here I like to change the image size that we're going to select pixels here. Then I'm going to make it pretty large. I'm going to go 9000 pixels in height and the width will automatically update. The reason we want it that large is so that we can cover more of the print-on-demand product types that require these larger sizes. We've got our image here, it looks pretty good. The first thing I want to do is just make sure there are no stray dots around the outside that could be just from the scanning. There could be dust or just extra little marks that I made. I'm going to go and erase the background. This is a little trick I like to do just to make sure I don't have any stray dots around the outside, I go to Layer, Layer Style, Stroke. Now from here, I'm going to select a really bright red color and just increase the size. You can see it's outlining with this really bright red. Now we actually don't have any stray dots showing up because if we did, you would see this big red blob showing up in these areas that we don't want them to. If you do see those read blobs, just hit ''Okay''. Then come here and select your Erase tool and just erase any of those red blobs until all you have is your main image here. Now I just want to do a couple more edits of this image before I finalize it. One thing I noticed is that this black isn't quite black. It's more of a gray. I want it to be full black. I'm going to go to Select, Color Range, and click on this little gray color here. I don't want it to select the blue. I just want to make sure it's only selecting that outline. That looks pretty good. Now I'm going to make sure this foreground color is black because I'm going to go to Edit, Fill. Under contents I want to select use foreground color. There's some other options here as well that you can choose and hit, ''Okay''. Now we can see that black outline is actually black. Perfect. From here you could create some duplicate layers. You can adjust the colors, you can do all kinds of stuff in Photoshop here. You could fill in some of these white areas with different colors. That's looking pretty good to me. We're going to go ahead and save this file. We're going to hit, ''Save as''. I'm just going to actually save over this original Photoshop file here because we don't really need that anymore. Now I definitely recommend actually saving your file a bit earlier and making sure you're hitting, ''Control S'' on your keyboard a bunch of times while you're working on this. I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a file and my laptop crashes or something happens and I lose all my progress from the last hour or so. Learn from my mistake, don't do that. Make sure you're saving the file. Just make it a habit to click "Control S" every couple of minutes or something like that so you don't lose your hard work. From here, we can go ahead and save the file types that we need to upload to print-on-demand. I'm just going to create a new layer and fill the background layer with white. We're going to go ahead and save this as a JPEG file. This file is going to be used for most of our print-on-demand products, most print-on-demand sites, except both JPEG and PNG. We're going to do the JPEG first. Basically, the JPEG is the file that has the background. Now I'm going to hide the background and we're going to save it as a PNG. The PNG with the transparent background you can see here is the file that's best for products like t-shirts or stickers or anything that would have a background that you want to show through. We'll go ahead and save as PNG. Now that we have our two file types, we're pretty much ready to upload our artwork. In this lesson, I showed you how to digitize and prepare your artwork for sale on print-on-demand products. Mainly you should scan or photograph your artwork in the highest resolution possible. Then you should be able to clean up the image in Photoshop or another image editing software. Now that we have our finished artwork ready to go, we're ready to move on to the next step, which is opening up your store. 4. Where to Sell Your Art: Now that we have our artwork ready to upload, we'll discuss a few of the different options of print on demand sites where you can sell your artwork. First of all, what exactly is print on demand? Well, basically, it's the ability for someone to buy a product on demand. The product doesn't actually exist until the person has purchased the item. I mean, technically it does exist in a blank form, like a plain white t-shirt, for example, but the finished product with the artwork on it does not exist until someone has actually made a purchase. The print on-demand companies have access to these huge printers and the ability to print artwork on all of these different blank products. As an artist, you're able to add your artwork to all these different blank products that the companies have available. Then when somebody goes to buy your artwork, the print on demand company will print that product with your art on it and ship it out to the customer for you. When someone buys your product, you get paid in royalties. Royalties are a percentage of the total sale. It can range anywhere from five percent to 20 percent or more. This may sound low, but keep in mind there's no investment on your part other than your time and your artwork. You don't have to invest in the inventory, equipment, a website, and in most cases, you also don't have to deal with customer service. You also won't have to worry about creating physical products, packaging, shipping. It's all taken care of by the print on demand company. This allows you to spend more time doing what you want to do, which is creating artwork. Why choose print on demand to sell your artwork? I believe it's a great starting point for artists to sell their art online because it's low cost and low risk. You still own your artwork and have the copyrights to it. Before deciding where to upload your designs, you should give some thought to the following and your goals as an artist. Do you want to focus primarily on selling art prints? Do you want to sell physical artwork such as paintings? Are you interested in designing t-shirts, home decor, or fashion products? Would you like to sell stationary or greeting cards? What risk tolerance do you have and what is your budget? $0 is okay. Now let's discuss some of the different print on demand options that are available. I'm going to jump over to the laptop now and show you some of the options. Now, let's discuss a couple of the different options that you have for selling your art online through print on demand websites. The first one I want to show you is Redbubble and also Society6. These are both pretty easy and free and really good beginner options for print on demand. You can see all the different types of products that you can sell your artwork on, all the way from home decor to they've got like face masks, backpacks, all interesting products that you can put your designs on. Yeah, Redbubble is great, it's easy, it's free, so is Society6. Now we can move into some more advanced options. Another one I really like is Zazzle. The reason I like Zazzle is that not only do they have a huge catalog of products, but it's a little bit different than the other ones in that you can create customizable products. Those are the ones that actually sell the best on here. If you're into designing greeting cards and stationery, and especially like invitations and stuff, you can see invites and announcement are on the top here. If you go to this product here, you can see that there's this personalize this template option. Here, this person has set up these templates, like the person who designed this particular baby shower invitation has added all of these personalization options. That's something that a lot of people come to Zazzle for are these personalized invitations, even from t-shirts and other stuff. But I've also sold a lot of products that just have my designs on it. Don't think that if you want to create products that are not customizable, that they won't sell because they can and they will on Zazzle. Zazzle is going to be a little bit more complicated when you're using their design tools. Just keep that in mind that you might need to watch a few tutorials or something like that before you get started uploading with Zazzle. Another really great print on-demand site is Spoonflower. Now, Spoonflower is actually more known for their fabric, but they also have wallpaper and some home decor products as well. Now with Spoonflower, you're mostly going to be uploading patterns. Because they sell primarily fabric, obviously, seamless patterns are what is going to sell the best on here as well as wallpaper and stuff. It's going to be seamless patterns that you want to be creating. If you are really into patterns and you're already a pattern designers, Spoonflower will be a really great place for you. However, there is a sample requirement where you can upload all of your artwork to your storefront on Spoonflower. But in order to enable them for people to purchase, you have to purchase a sample. I think you can get 42 samples for around $20 US. There was a way that I figured out how to do that. If that is something that you're interested in, just look up how do you buy the cheater quilt from Spoonflower and that's the cheapest way to enable everything. But yeah, I do recommend that for a little bit more advanced artists if you are more serious about it and you have a lot of designs already created, then definitely look into Spoonflower. Now, the next one I want to talk about is Merch by Amazon. Merch by Amazon is basically Amazon's print on demand section. It's the same as any of the other ones in terms of they have blank products that are available to be printed with your artwork. They have t-shirts and some different shirts. They also have pop sockets, phone cases, pillows, and tote bags. It's a pretty small range of products on Amazon, but obviously it's also the largest marketplace. I mean, everybody shops on Amazon nowadays. It's actually pretty lucrative to get into the program, but you do have to apply. You have to apply to sell on Amazon and people get rejected and then they just keep trying again. Eventually you do get accepted if you just keep trying. But it can take a couple of months even just to get accepted. I actually recommend if you want to get into print on demand, apply now, get your stuff together, apply for Merch by Amazon. Then in the meantime, while you're waiting, you can start a Redbubble or Society6 shop. But definitely consider Amazon. I mean, Amazon is just probably one of my best print on demand stores at the moment. Don't dismiss it. Now, there is another way you can sell on Amazon, which is Amazon KDP. Kindle Direct Publishing, which is basically there. One thing that you can do is create books and journals and just even lined notebooks and stuff like that with your artwork on the cover and then sell it on Amazon through this KDP program, which is also print on demand because when somebody buys the book, that's when they actually create the book. There's no books like sitting on a shelf anywhere. These books are just printed when someone buys it. This is another way that you can actually sell on Amazon without going through their process of having to apply and all that stuff. Definitely look into Amazon KDP, especially if you're interested in designing journals and that thing. That actually does quite well, as well as like coloring books and activity books. Another place that you can sell your art online is Etsy. A lot of you have probably already heard of Etsy. A lot of people sell their handmade goods on Etsy. You can see here like jewelry, decorations and stuff like that. But you can also sell things like digital downloads on Etsy. You can also integrate print on demand with Etsy. There's a few print on demand suppliers, Printful and Printify are two ones that I know about, and they can integrate with Etsy. Basically, you can use Etsy as your store front to sell print on demand products. Now Etsy does have fees, so that's one of the reasons why I don't personally do this with Etsy, but it is something that people do and are successful and can be successful with. Don't totally dismiss that. Definitely do your research if you're interested in doing that. Now there are a few other print on demand store options that I'm not going to go so deeply into right now. But I'm just going to say Fine Art America, CafePress, TeePublic, Threadless, ArtsCase. There's always new ones popping up too so definitely just keep your eye out. Also do your research, make sure that they're legitimate company producing products that are good quality. There's so many different print on demand options out there and there's more coming all the time. There's never going to be like a lack of options for you. Now, one last option I just want to mention here is that if you want to actually sell your artwork through your own website, that is also possible with print on demand. You can set up a Shopify store and there's other platforms as well. Some of them are even free. You can set up a Shopify store on your own website and then integrate that with print on demand, like Printify for example, or Printful. They've got an even apparently Print Aura as well. There's these different print on demand suppliers like this that will actually integrate with Shopify or some of the different e-commerce store platforms. Then you can actually sell the t-shirts, the phone cases, art prints, all this stuff on your own website. Then the downside with that is that you have to be able to then market your website and drive traffic to your own website which is a lot more work than if you're just putting it onto Redbubble, and then people who are already coming to Redbubble are going to find your artwork and buy it. This is definitely a little bit more of an advanced option, but if you are like a marketing wiz and you already know how to do Facebook advertising or create a killer Instagram marketing campaign or something like that, then this would definitely be a great option for you. Give some thought to where else you might be able to apply your artistic skills online. There's always new opportunities becoming available. Keep an open mind, think outside the box and find new opportunities for yourself. In this lesson, we discussed a lot of different options for where you can sell your artwork online with print on demand and even some other ideas for you. In the next lesson, I'm going to guide you step-by-step through opening up a Redbubble store. I just think it's the easiest option to get started with. Let's do it. 5. Opening Your Store: In this lesson, I'm going to demonstrate how to open up a free Redbubble store. You could also do a Society6 store if you prefer. I just think it's a little bit easier to do Redbubble in this example. Now I'm just going to jump on the computer and show you how to open your Redbubble store. Let's go through the process to open up a Redbubble store. We're going to go to redbubble.com, and here I'm going to click on Sign-up. Now we're going to select Artist sign-up and then fill out this information here. For the shop name, I would suggest using either your real name or your studio or brand name if you already have an artist name that you go by. I would avoid using anything like Julie 1, 2, 3, or something like that. It just won't look as professional. I'm going to go ahead and fill this out and we'll see you when I am done with that. Now that we have our shop set up, we can go through the steps to finish filling everything out. You can see here under set up shop we've got; avatar, cover image, bio, links, and then all of this payment information. I do suggest filling all of this out fully. It will just look more professional. Now, normally I would create a custom avatar and banner for my different stores, but in this case, since we're just getting started, I would just use one of your artworks or even for the avatar image, you could just use your Facebook profile image for now. You can always go back and create a better banner and a logo and all that stuff later, but for now, we just want to have something there and fill it out. Here you can see avatar, cover image, and so on. I'm going to go ahead and upload here and we'll meet you at the next step. Now one thing for the cover image here, it has to be 2400 by 600 pixels. You can just go back into Photoshop and create an image with those dimensions, and then drag your artwork onto there and just crop it so it's the right size. Now the different Print-On-Demand websites will have different banner and avatar size requirements. Just keep that in mind and look that up before you go ahead and start setting up your shop. Now I've got my avatar and my cover image. If you keep scrolling down, there's a bunch of other info for you to fill out here. You could put your actual name and then have it display your real name instead of the username if you prefer. I could have it literally; "Julie Erin Creates" here and now there's a section for a bio so I'm just going to put, Artist from Vancouver, Canada. I would definitely suggest adding more here, but this is just what I'm going to do to start. I don't want to get any of these because I already get them from my other shop. Here you've got your name, your URLs, that is going to be your shop URL. There's just some other image settings and that stuff here. We're just going to save that. One thing I want to mention here is that you should use the same profile image and banner style across each one of your different stores if you have more than one, but also across your social media channels. If you're using the same avatar image for your Instagram and your Facebook, I would use the same one for your Redbubble. It's going to make your profiles look cohesive and make it so that people will recognize you if you're on social media and then they come to Redbubble and they will see you there. From here you can go ahead and fill out the payment details. You're going to need to have a PayPal account. If you don't already have one, you can pause this and go set up a PayPal account. Most Print-On-Demand websites will pay you through PayPal. Some of them do have the option of sending you a check in the mail but there's usually going to be a threshold of $100 or $50. The threshold is usually much lower or nonexistent for PayPal. Just keep that in mind as you're considering how you want to get paid your royalties. This whole section here, you can go ahead and fill out on your own and I'll meet you back here when that's all done. I just want to show a couple of examples of Redbubble stores that have been set up well. Now I'm going to toot my own horn here a little bit and show you guys my profile. You can see I've got a custom banner that I created and a profile logo avatar image that I created. I use the same similar banner across all my shops and all my social media and the same image, a couple of images that are very similar within the same branding I used for my different social media and everything like that. As you scroll down, you can see all my different products. Yeah, this one, I redid it recently and I feel it looks really good. I've got some other examples here. Belette Le Pink is another Print-On-Demand artist who creates these really adorable animal illustrations and you can see her banner. She's done a lot of work on the banner here and has social media and some other work on products and that thing, which just also looks really great. There's a couple of other random ones here that I clicked on. I really love this person's illustrations. She's showing some of her artwork and the banner and a really pretty unique avatar image, which is just another one of her artwork. Maybe this person doesn't feel comfortable showing their face on here and just wants to use their artwork which is totally fine. That is also something that you can do. Here's another one where this person has clearly created a custom banner and their avatar image is also just one of their artworks. I think it looks really good. She's got lots of cute artwork here. Last one, this person has just used one of their patterns and created banner from their patterns, which is also totally fine, and another one of their artworks, but it's a little cat face, which is pretty cute. Just some examples of completely filled-out profiles and just how to make it look super professional. In this lesson, we went through the process of opening your first store on Redbubble. Now your store should be ready to add your first artwork to it. If you need more time setting up your store, feel free to pause this lesson and just finish up everything that you need to do. Now that we have our store setup and all of the account information filled out, we're ready to move on to the next step, which is to upload our first design. 6. Uploading the Artwork: In this lesson, I will be guiding you through uploading your first artwork into your Redbubble store. I'll also be sharing with you some of my own processes and tips for best practices. Let's jump on the computer. Now we're going to go ahead and upload our first artwork to our shop using the artwork that we digitized earlier in this course, so back in this dashboard section, we're going to go to "Add new work" and then we're going to click on "Upload new work". This copy and existing work is actually really helpful if you want to upload, say, the same artwork in a different color or a pattern that's going to be the same size as a pattern that you've previously created. It just makes it a lot faster because everything is already set up. But for this, we're just going to use the new work because it's our first artwork. We're just going to click on "Upload new work" for this, so I'm actually going to select the PNG file for this. Now the first thing that we want to fill out are our title tags and description, so for the title, we really want to be more descriptive rather than artistic with the title. For example, instead of calling this artwork something like blowing in the wind or something artistic like that. You might find in an art gallery. We want to make it descriptive, so we want it to be something about a hot air balloon, zen hot air balloon, mandala hot air balloon in blue and yellow or something like that. We want to think about the keywords that people are going to use to search for your design. Let's go with mandala hot air balloon in blue and yellow. Now if you did have an artistic name for your artwork, you can totally put that here in the description instead if you think that it's important, so here we're going to add the tags, so tags are really important because this is how people who are searching on Redbubble are going to find your artwork, so on Redbubble, you can use a combination of single word and also long tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is going to be multiple words, so hot air balloon, for example, is the long-tail keyword and the short tail keyword might just be mandala or balloon, or blue, yellow, and so on. I'm going to go ahead and finish filling this out with my tags and I'm also going to fill in a description and usually my description will just be a couple of sentence says, this also helps with SEO, so you want to put a couple of your keywords in the description as well. SEO is the Search Engine Optimization, so that's where Google is going to go through and see what keywords are being used in your description, as well as your title and tags and then it'll be able to bring up this artwork as a search result if someone is looking for this type of artwork. There's a few different ways that you can find keywords. I like to actually search on Redbubble itself, so I might just search for a hot air balloon or something like that and just look for the other tags that people are using or tags that are coming up. You could also just go on Google and just type in your main keyword and then find synonyms. Descriptive is best. You don't want to use tag spam or use random unrelated keywords or phrases. It's just going to make it harder for you. Redbubble recommends around 15 tags. I also want to mention to be extremely careful about not using trademarks or copyrights. Don't use any brand names, celebrity names. You can also check for trademarks, so sometimes you might not know that something is trademarked, so you can actually just Google search for trademark search and there's a way to actually put in the specific word or phrase that you want to use and just double-check that it's not already trademarked because that can get your artwork taken down if it's using some copyright. Just be really mindful about that. Here I'm just going to show you one way to find keywords for your designs. I'm just going to type hot air balloon and just see what other types of keywords come up that I could use, so here we've already got hot air balloons, air balloon, some of these are totally unrelated, so I would not use cartoon frog unless there was a frog on your hot air balloon. Sure. Yellow and blue, you could use that. That one's totally on there. There are some of these I would use and some of them not so much, so you can also scroll down to the bottom and there's some other related searches here. Sky balloonist. I didn't even know a balloonist was a thing. Hot air, ballooning, air balloon. You get the point, so there's definitely some different ways that you can find keywords. You can also click on this one, for example, just take note of the keywords that they're using and just finding keywords that are relevant to your design and that people are also searching for. I've just typed in my description here, beautiful hand-drawn hot air balloon in yellow and blue filled in with mandala patterns, so I've hit hot air balloon, yellow, blue, mandala, and patterns as keywords in my description and I've got the same one in my title tags I'd probably add a few more tags here. But for this demonstration, I don't want to spend too much time on that, so now we're going to scroll down and you can see that we've already got some of our products and so you can adjust any of these. You can also change the background color of the clothing. You can also change the background color on the products by using this, so say you wanted to have everything, over the light blue colored background like the sky, the balloon is in the sky, so that's going to actually change all of the product backgrounds now to this light blue color. Now, as you can see, a lot of these are going to definitely need some adjusting, so I recommend going through each product, scaling the image. You can also pattern the image on Redbubble, so there is an offset pattern you could do. Maybe that looks pretty cute actually for this particular artwork. I'm actually digging the pattern. You can also do a regular grid pattern. It's totally up to you here, so I would just play around with all these settings and just see what looks good, so I've used the PNG file for Redbubble just so that we can change the background and I can show you all of that. But it's particularly good because the sticker is already cut out as you can see. I like to use the PNG file, especially for the stickers. The journal is often a little bit funny as you can see, this is the front of the journal and this is the back of the journal and then it's got this binding, so I often like to choose this front. 7. Marketing Your Products: In this lesson, I'll be going over some easy ways that you can market your products using Instagram and other websites like Pinterest and even email marketing. I know marketing can sound icky, but there are actually some easy and genuine ways that you can do it without coming off as like a sale. You want to simply show off your artwork and allow other people to connect with you. You just want to let people know that it exists and where to find it. I recommend creating at least one social media page for your artwork, Instagram is a really great one because it's highly visual. Ideally, choose the one that you use frequently, so it's not a burden to use it or to learn how to use it properly. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok are all great options. For Instagram especially, think about it like your online art portfolio. It's a great way to actually have a portfolio of your work if you don't have a website. You can dedicate just five to ten minutes a day to either posting or interacting with others on social media. You could do this during your lunch break or coffee break, or even on the way home from work on the bus or just anytime that you have a free moment. Some social media post ideas and examples are, your latest artwork, works in progress and behind the scenes, sketchbook shots, product mockups from your print-on-demand stores, keep this limited, photos of yourself holding your artwork or creating artwork, time-lapse videos. Pro-tip, keep a list of ideas on your phone so that you never run out of ideas for content. Inject some personality into your posts, people like to get to know the artist behind the artwork, but do keep it professional, consider it like a business page. You don't want to get too political or share too much personal information unless that is part of your brand. Keep it personal and not too salesy. A personal anecdote or the inspiration behind the art piece really adds to it. You could also ask your audience a question and get them involved. Be social on social media by interacting with your peers and followers. Don't leave comments unanswered. Make sure to use hashtags and occasionally tagging where appropriate. On Instagram, you can only have one link in your profile, so make it count. You can either add the store link for your Redbubble story that we just created or you could use something like Linktree where you could have multiple different links from that one page. Consider creating short video format, like from TikTok or Instagram Reels, these are becoming really popular nowadays. You don't even have to show your face, you could just show yourself creating artwork, something with your hands, or just show a time-lapse of your artwork being created, your tools. There's all sorts of ideas. Speaking of which, you may consider having your own website, which could be a hub if you have multiple different print-on-demand stores, it could also just be a place for your artwork online like a portfolio. This could be just a free WordPress blog if you want. If you think about it, social media could be gone any day and it changes all the time, a website is something that you own on the Internet. Another great reason to have your own website is that you can add an email sign-up. Don't underestimate the power of email, especially if you have your own website, it's really easy to just add a Mailchimp sign-up form to your website and start collecting emails. Even if you don't have anything to send your contacts right now, you never know when you might have something that your audience may be interested in. Again, it's something that you own outside of social media so if everything else goes away tomorrow, you have that email list and your website. Pinterest is another really great avenue for marketing as it's a visual search engine. I actually highly recommend setting up a Pinterest account for your products and your artwork. Create boards surrounding topics that you're interested in and your audience may be interested in. It could be related to your art style or even home decor products or anything that you just think that your audience might be interested in that is related to your artwork. Make sure to pin a variety of pins to your boards, don't just pin your own products or artwork, make sure you're pinning other people's as well. Also, don't underestimate in-person marketing, consider creating flyers or stickers that you could share with your friends or family or post up around your neighborhood, just get creative with them. I know this can be a lot of work, don't get too bogged down with the marketing side of things. I know it can be easy to get lost scrolling on Instagram or comparing yourself to others. It's great to follow other artists on Instagram and the other social media platforms, as they are often a very encouraging community. To dive deeper into marketing, there are lots of great classes here on Skillshare for Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and all those sorts of things, Pinterest also. In this lesson, I went over some ways that you can market your artwork without coming off too salesy, using social media and other websites, and even email. In the next lesson, I will give you some tips about running an online art business specific to artists in print-on-demand. 8. Running an Art Business: In this lesson, I'll be discussing a few things you should consider when running your art business online. Once you've started uploading your artwork online and getting paid via royalties, you're basically running a business and you should consider it as such. When I started thinking about my brand Julia and Designs as a business, it really helped me step away from it as a personal thing. I was able to sort from it and look at things more objectively. Any failures that I made were just a business failure rather than a personal failure. It really helped me to grow my business in the last couple of years just to take it more seriously. Now, quick disclaimer here. I'm not an accountant and I don't have a business degree, so any of the advice that I'm giving in this video is just for my own personal experience. I advise you to look up any of the laws for your own country and region. We don't want anyone to get in trouble. A few things that you should think about include quality control. How much money should you spend on your own products? I buy a few items for my shops here and there, but overall, most of the print-on-demand sites are really good quality, so there's really no need to spend a lot of your own money to prove products or make sure that it looks good. All the products that I've purchased have been really good quality. Buying your own products as gifts for friends or family, can be a really great way to see what the product looks like in real life and you're also filling the need of the gift. You're basically killing two birds with one stone. Most of the print-on-demand sites also have some really great Black Friday deals. Definitely keep a lookout for that. Now I can't stress this enough. Keep track of your income. This is especially important for tax time as you will have to claim your income on your taxes. Keeping a simple ledger or a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets can be a really easy way to see how much money you're spending and how much money you're making in your business. I'll provide a link to a template for a simple business ledger that you can use. Check the resources section for that. Protecting your brand. Art theft. It happens. Anytime you put something online, it has the potential to be stolen. It's just the risks that you. You can usually request to have these taken down, but it doesn't always work out and it's sometimes just isn't even worth the stress. Usually the thieves only have a low quality image. Also just make sure you're turning on watermarks on Redbubble. Sometimes art theft can be extremely frustrating. But it's a choice that you make whether or not you want to open yourself up to that or if you don't, then no one will ever see your artwork. Now these are my few organization tips for you as well. When you're juggling multiple different stores and social media platforms, it can be hard to stay organized and keep track of everything. I like to keep a Google Document with the links to all my stores and all of my social media profiles. This not only helps keep me organized, but I can visually see what stores are performing well. I also have a document with my goals, I have long and short-term goals. Professional development is important. Always keep learning and improving on your skills. This can be your art skills or your business skills. I recommend both. There are tons of classes here on Skillshare that can help you learn both your artistic and business skills. Over the past seven years, I've learned a lot about running a small business. I've shared some of the tips that I've learned here with you today. In the next lesson, I'll be sharing some more protests from what I've learned over the past seven years of selling my art online. 9. Bonus Tips: In this lesson, I'll be sharing some protests that I've gained from the last seven years of selling my art online. The biggest tip I can give you is that consistency is key. There's a snowball effect when you stay consistent. The long-term consistent creation and sharing of your artwork is what will lead to success. Making money online from your art through print on demand is not a get rich quick scheme. It can take a long time and a lot of effort, but it can also be extremely rewarding. It's something that you own and can generate an income from for yourself. It's also flexible enough that you can do it while you're working a full-time job or staying at home, taking care of the children, or traveling or whatever else you want to be doing as long as you have an internet connection and a way to digitize your artwork. Here are some of my do's and don'ts to keep in mind as you continue on your journey of selling your art through print on demand. I'm just going to share a few of my general do's and don'ts for running a print on demand business that I've learned over the past seven years. Do design artwork with print on demand products in mind. Think about what might look good on a specific product such as a comforter or leggings versus an art print. Upload as much high quality work as possible. The more designs you have out there, the more chances you have of making a sale and getting noticed. Test out different print on demand stores. I always recommend having multiple income streams so you're not relying on just one. Make more of what's selling. I highly recommend analyzing your sales data, seeing what artwork or what types of products are selling the most and do more of that. Research the latest trends in design and fashion and use them as inspiration to create new designs in your own style. You can use Pinterest or checkout the top-selling designs on your chosen print on demand platform for that time. This can be anything from design motifs to trending colors, patterns, and more. Make alternative versions of your most popular designs. Make sure to do different color variations of a popular design or rework and element of that piece so you can have more of a mass appeal. Make sure to have fun experiment and start your own trends. Make artwork that you personally like and want to see out there in the world. Now for the don'ts, don't compare yourself to others or start to think you're not good enough. It's easy to start comparing yourself to others especially on social media. Keep in mind, it takes time to develop your skills. Those people who you idolize were at the same place that you are now at some point. Don't get overwhelmed by trying to do too much. Creating and uploading art all on its own is a lot of work. You don't have to be in all the places, on all the social medias or on all the print on demand stories. Give yourself the time and space that you need. Focus on what works for you. Don't copy other people's work. Make sure to be unique. It's okay to be inspired but outright copying is just a no. Have your own style. Copying other people is not the way toward long-term success. Don't use trademarks, logos, or celebrity names. This is just a red flag and it's possible to get your entire store taken down or the artwork taken down and it's just a hassle that you don't want to have to deal with. Finally, don't give up. Running a print on-demand business is hard and sometimes it can just feel like you're not getting anywhere. But I promise you that if you just keep at it over time, it's going to work out for you. You're going to figure out your niche. You're going to figure out how to sell your art and what people like, and you just have to keep trying. In this lesson, I shared some personal lessons and tips that I've learned from running a business online. I hope they will be helpful for you. In the next lesson, we'll sum up what we've learned in this course, and I'll discuss some next steps that you can take. 10. Conclusion: Well, you made it. That was a lot of content to get through. You opened your first online store and submitted your first artwork for sale on products. You put your artwork out there into the world for others to enjoy. How does it feel? Scary? Good? The hardest part is just getting started and guess what? You did it, in this class, we went over how to digitize your artwork to make it suitable for sale on print on demand products. I showed you how to set up a store and add your artwork to it. Then I spoke about some ways that you can market your artwork and gave you some pro tips on running an art business. If there's one thing you took away from this course, I hope that has the confidence to put your artwork out there into the world, for others to enjoy. If there's a specific topic from this course, that you want me to dive deeper into, please leave me a note when you post your class project so I can incorporate it into my next Skillshare class. Don't forget to share your new store in the class projects section, so we can follow you and see your wonderful artwork I'd love to connect with you further. You can find me on Instagram, @JuleErinDesigns, and on other social media platforms as well under the same name. Thank you so much for taking this class with me today. Make sure to click on the "Follow" button next to my name, so you'll be notified when I post new courses. Now go ahead and add more artwork to your store. I wish you the best of luck, in your print on demand journey.