Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, my name is taken in this course, I'll be teaching you how to make a print on demand website called red bubble. I have been in this business for over two years and gained so much experience and knowledge that I am excited to share with you if you are new to print on demand, it is essentially when you upload a piece of artwork to a website, when a customer finds and likes your artwork, they will buy it. But instead of you having to print it out and shipping it to the customer, a red bubble factory does the whole manufacturing and shipping process for you, making your job much easier. But don't worry, you don't need to be extremely talented that making art online, anyone can do this. This website was made for anybody with the computer to be able to upload art and express their creativity. I like to use red bubble for print on demand because it is the easiest website to use, which is perfect for people starting out in this business. It also ranks very high in search results, which makes it very easy for people Googling something to find your product. There are several different places in the world who were red bubble can be sold to, including Australia, Canada, and even Europe, which makes it even easier for people to view and buy your artwork. In these upcoming videos, I'll teach you how to create, upload and market each design. I will also show you how to create a brand for yourself, which will be used to promote your art. I will use my years of experience to give you guys special advice to maximize the amount of sales you get and to maximize the amount of time your artwork is getting sales. Also, at the end of this course, I will have a project for you to do after learning all of these important skills.
2. Creating a Brand and Finding Your Niche: The first part of starting any online business is creating a brand for yourself. And for many, this is the hardest part. What do you rename it? What will it be about? There are many things do you need to think about when starting to keep things as simple as possible? I believe you should think of one of your biggest passions or hobbies, whether that be super cars, pets, or biking, that will be your niche. There is one elephant in the room though. You might be passionate about something, but how successful were the HB to find out? Let's go to Google Trends to start. And to your niche. I'll be using super cars as an example. Filtered out by the past five years or so. This will give you a long-term view of how consistent this niches. As you can see, the super carnage never had any massive debilitating drops and interest, but it only has spikes and interest. This could be great and exciting for your print on demand business because it can give you spikes and sales during certain times of the year. If your niche has massive ups and downs, you might want to reconsider the niche you're looking into. The next website we will use to do niche research is Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool. Start your account and there will be a new keyword section. So I will search my niche again. You're looking for results between 10 thousand to a 100 thousand searches per month. It is also good to see that your competition is low, meaning that you want to be competing with many other people for sales. Medium is also acceptable. But just be aware that you will have more competition in that interest. Now that you've found your ideal niche to use, it is time to find out while your name will be. This should take some thought because you don't want a long name with hard to remember words. Your brand names should be short. And to the point, some examples, our automotive prod, super car freak, et cetera. After coming up with their name, please write it down or save it somewhere. I have not shown you how to create the account yet that is coming up later. First, let's create a profile picture and cover photo for your red bubble account. To create the cover photo, there's a nice website called Canva that can create one for free. So let's head there now. Sign up with Google and it will ask you what kind of user you are. Just press small business. And it'll ask you about a membership. Just press maybe later, then start a new project at the top, put the custom dimensions at 2400 by 600. And this is the red bubble cover photo dimensions. It will then bring you to a page filled with a lot of different text options, backgrounds, and photos. But we don't need any of that. We just need to find a nice template. So press the top option and search for a F31 that looks like it should go nicely with your niche. I like to find one with both the title and a subtitle so you can put a bit of extra information into the cover image. I'll supply a sample on my screen on what I did for my new shop. Then download and save it. Next on Canva, we will create a profile picture. So go back to the first screen, pressed creative design and search for the logo option. This one will be completely up to you and how you want to design it, because there are so many different logos to customize and choose from. Once again, try to make it look good with your niche and have it form with the cover photo. This is what I did. Then download it. The good part of creating your own personal brand is that if you ever want to expand to more Print on Demand websites or any other new businesses, you can keep the same niche and name for yourself. So you can expand your brand into newer and bigger things. Now it's time to create the red bubble account.
3. Signing Up and Creating Your Shop: Head over to red bubble.com and press sign up at the top. Make an artist's sign up and put your email in the shop name that you came up with. And the password. They will prompt you to a new page where you can set up your shop. Press, Add an avatar first. Locate the photo that we made and put it into red bubble. And press upload. Under that is the option to upload the cover photo, put it into red bubble, and press upload. If you scroll down, you can see an option to create a bio as well. This is where you have an opportunity to talk about yourself, your niche, and perhaps where you are from and your age. I will throw an example on the screen now. Press Save Changes at the bottom and go back to the previous screen. There's an option to add a social link, which I will go back to later. I strongly recommend making an Instagram or Facebook account promoting your work, which can bring in extra customers resulting in more sales. Now let's go to the Get Paid section where you will put your information and to get paid to fill this information. And the first thing you have to do is confirm the email you supplied while signing up. Then you can also add your billing address and name. And in the payment details, you can select where you want to get paid and also on which currency I have mine on PayPal. As of 2020, you get paid monthly, usually on the 15th. Now that we've created our account, it is time to start making designs.
4. Creating Designs with GIMP: My editing software of choice for making red bubble designs are Gimp. And the reasons are simple. It is free and surprise me with all the tools necessary to create and export designs to be uploaded. To download it, we're gonna head to Gimp.org slash downloads. From here. You can download it onto any operating system you are running, which is another reason why it is so great. I will install it down here and download into Windows. Press download directly, run, select your language, and hit install. So now it is time to think about what you will want to be uploading. Have a cool car design idea to upload. So now I will start building it. I want a picture of a super car with a clever saying below it. For my text, I'm going to find a nice font on fonts dot google.com. Find something that is eye-catching, cool, and modern. I think this specific font would look great with my art because it is exciting. Something that the audience I'm targeting would like. Something to take note of is the usage of the font to make sure you can use it. Scroll down and make sure it says open font license, which means it is able to be used for commercial use. Donald the font and install it. Now that we have one part of the shirt design aspect done, it is time to get the next part, the super car photo. Since I'm not an artist, I'm not going to drought or make a photo of a super car in Photoshop or anything. So I'm going to go to a free photo website to find my super car. I love using these websites because they are all free to use and there is an extensive amount of stuff to choose from no matter what you are trying to make. My go to website is pixabay.com. But there are a handful of others that are able to be used at your disposal. I will put those on the screen now. So let's find my super car. I am looking for a vector slash graphic looking car for this design. So let's search now. Alright, I think I found the car that I want to use. It doesn't have any logos exposed, which could give me a risk of copyright. So I'm good to go. I will go ahead and download it. It is a good idea to download the largest image possible on these websites because we'll be scaling the images up and Gimp later. Now that I have all my tools and materials I need, it is time to finally make the designing Gump. Now that you're in GIMP, go to the top to file and make a new design. I like to have my dimension said 5 thousand by 5 thousand because I feel like this is the best dimension to fit all products on red bubble. Go to advanced options and have it set to transparent background. This is soil. You can make the background of Red Bull products any color you want without it having a white border. Next, we will start importing some of our materials. First I'll add the image. So I will press file open has layers and locate the car photo. Once n, you can adjust the size with the unified Transform Tool shown here. I'd like to have minimal space in my designs because empty space on shirts and other designs are a big turn-off for potential buyers. To have the photo perfectly centered. You can press this alignment tool button and press this button to bring it to the middle. For the text, I will press this T button and search for the text. The name of the text is starch leeches. So I will search for that and press Enter once again, finds the next, go to the project and make a window. Now I will type my text. And once you've done that, press Control a to select all of it and turn up the text with this button. Make it as large as possible without making it too big or too crammed. Again, if you want to center it, used the alignment tool. There. I've just made a simple shirt that can easily be replicated. All you need as a photo and a clever line of text. Once you're satisfied with your design, then you can go to File Export as make a name for your art and save it.
5. Uploading Designs onto Redbubble: Uploading can either make or break your success. So I consider this part to be the most important. You will want to take uploading seriously because this is how customers will find and click on your artwork. Header and bubble to get started. Go to the dropdown menu and press Add new work. Then press upload to all products. It will open a file explorer. This is when you need to locate your art and open it. For the title. This should be a pretty good representation on what the art is about. So I will put drew up a gear and disappear. You don't need to worry about putting a bunch of keywords in the title. We will put those in the tags. For the tags, I'll line it up, fill out as many tags as you can about your topic, the niche, the kind of interest within the niche, absolutely everything about it. But I beg you to not put irrelevant tags in there. You are targeting a certain audience. So you shouldn't be putting tags that don't apply to other niches. Once you find all the tags you can, you will do some tag research with the merch titans red bubble tool. This tool allows you to put certain niches and we'll give you a lot of relevant and popular tags. So your shirt is ranked higher up in the searches. This website is free to use and all you need to do is sign up with your email. I will put my niche in here and I will let it load. Now I will pick out some extra tags to put into red bubble. I try to add no more than 30 tags onto all of my artwork. Because some people claim if you spam your tags, you will actually be ranked lower. After that, you can fill in the description. I typically just use the title of my artwork and throw in some extra words such as funny car guy, manual transmission shift. Never leave it empty though, it is an extra opportunity to get higher up in the searches. Before we start customizing the products, let's enable all of them. So go down this grid of products and press enable and then edit on any of them that don't have all of them enabled. Then press the checks on any of the products that aren't enabled. More products that are enabled equals more exposure, which equal more sales. After we have gone through and did all of that time that had just the products. If I don't mention anything about a specific object, that means you don't need to put too much extra thought into it. Just adjusted and fill the space of the product as much as you can. Start with the shirts at the top and have it adjusted more towards the chest area, which seems to sell a bit more. Fill a decent area of the shirt without having anything cutoff. Make sure it is centered horizontally and continue with all the shirts on mugs. Try to have the design within these two pink lines. Scarves are pretty challenging when it comes to these kinds of designs. So I will just disable them. So I do not have a design that looks really bad showing up anywhere. On hardcover journals. I like to have the design set to both sides. As such, water bottles should have the designs on. They're small enough to be shown on one side. I will disable leggings because I think this design won't be able to be put on there nicely with socks. If you want a chance as selling them with this kind of design format, you should have it as a grid. If it doesn't look good, then just disable it. With backpacks. I like to put the design up on top above any poachers. Let's be honest, that was pretty tiring. Good thing. I have a special tip to show you later on how to make that process 90% faster. Now go down to the media and select two. They think you're our work falls under. I like to keep the default view in my shop, either a shirt, pollster or set as optimized. It depends on what you think looks best with the arbor queue put on the products. I will select No mature content. If you're our work contains any of the following, then you should select Yes. And press check on this box certifying that you have the right to sell this product and press Save work, and Congrats, you just uploaded your first artwork. Now to show you the trick to uploading faster. When you go to the Upload page, instead of pressing Add new artwork, go to copy an existing work. Select the gear icon of the first designer, uploaded and press Copy, hoping they are next designs still follows the 5 thousand by 5 thousand dimensions. It should be perfectly cropped and optimized for each design you upload. So that means all you need to do is change the title, tags and description, and maybe double-check that all the art is looking good on the new upload.
6. Marketing your Designs with Social Media: Now that you have a handful of art uploaded, it is time to think about other ways of getting her artwork sold besides having someone see it on the red bubble website. A free and effective way to get more traffic TO read bottle shop is through social media. For this, you can use any kind you want. I focus mainly on Instagram because it is a social media with the easiest to create an account for. When creating an Instagram account for your shop, it should be the same name as your red bubble shop. I also want you to pull your red bubble link into your bio. You can then upload some new designs you want to showcase to new or potential customers. I take screenshots of the product on the shirt and the caption. Talk about your interest in whatever your niche is about and why they should check out your shop. Then includes some hashtags and set our location. If you want another way of people finding out about your profile, you can go to similar niches, posts and leave a comment. This give me celebrities or even smaller pages. Although advertising through comments aren't always recommended, this could be a lucrative strategy to get some traffic to your shop. If you have your own blog or you do channel with a similar niche, you could also tie in your red bubble shop and to a post some other websites I see people use for free advertising is Pinterest, Twitter and also Facebook. The opportunities are endless. And the more people that discover your shop, the more likely you will be at a make more sales. When you finish creating your social media account, you can go back to the page and read bubble where it wants you to add your social. I'll paste in my Instagram and now I will be shown on my shop page.
7. Extra Information and Project : Some extra information to give you is that you should not wait to get started. This is a problem with a lot of people entering that print on-demand business. They wait to have the perfect idea for an artwork, a perfect Username, a perfect everything. I, myself had this problem when starting. If you wait too long, someone might come along and steal some ideas that could have been yours. And the later you start, the more competition your niche could have. Read bubble works as a snowball effect. Once you gain more traffic to your page, the more people that engage in her artwork by likes or purchases, the easier your artwork gets raised in the search results. This is why it is important to upload quality designs as often as you can, because you never know which one might just blow up and earn you a bunch of sales. And if you do end up having products that are doing well, then it might be time to change the profit margin. Censuses, print on demand, you are in a portion of the sale, the rest of the money goes to red bubble for manufacturing and shipping. If you are turning into a successful seller, it wouldn't hurt to increase this margin by even 5% to give yourself a slightly higher payout per sale. To do this, go to artists tools and product pricing. You will see that the normal percentage of profit is 20%. I would start by going up to 25%, but only if you see a good increase in sales prior to increasing. Alright, now for the project, I want you to make a video of some artwork you made. It can be still in GIMP or on the red bubble website itself. I then want you to explain some of the challenges that came across while designing the art piece and how you overcame them. I hope you enjoyed this skill share tutorial. I tried my hardest to put as much information about red bubble and print on demand as I could into this video. If you enjoyed it, then feel free to recommend it to other skill. Sure users have a good day and good luck on your new journey with red bubble.
Teagan Johnson, Young Entrepreneur & Productivity Guru
