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Easiest Way To Start Print-on-Demand in 2025 (From Scratch) | Alek | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Easiest Way To Start Print-on-Demand in 2025 (From Scratch)
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trying to start a print on aand business
can be overwhelming with all the
different steps and strategies it can be
hard to know where to even start so
today I'm going to share my exact
strategy for how to start a print on
demand shop completely from scratch I've
used this exact strategy to grow my own
six and seven figure print on demand
businesses so if I had to start over
today from absolute zero this is the
exact strategy that I would use I've
been sharing strategies that get results
on my YouTube channel for the last year
and it's helped you generate over $1.7
million so if that sounds interesting
make sure to get subscribed and let's
get into it PR On Demand is a business
model that allows you to sell various
products like t-shirts mugs and posters
with unique artwork on them but the
items are only printed and shipped when
a customer orders that way you don't
have to buy any inventory up front and
you can run the entire business from a
laptop the only time that you have to
buy a product or spend any money is
after you've already made a sale this
also means that if done correctly this
business can be mostly passive allowing
you to scale it when you have the time
and keep earning income while you're
traveling sleeping or watching more Alec
videos there are four components that
you need to get started the product the
design to go on the product a website to
sell it on and customers to buy it
component number one picking a product
this is the easy part but if you get it
wrong it can ruin your business so how
do you pick there's three things that I
look for in a winning product number one
make sure that the product I'm selling
has and will continue to be an evergreen
product I don't want to put a ton of
work into or make a bunch of designs for
a product that's going to become
irrelevant to find Evergreen products we
have to look at what's already been
working at the end of the day nobody
wants to buy a blank product so we're
primarily selling the design that goes
on the product if there's competition it
means there's demand I've only ever sold
longtime bestselling products like
t-shirts mugs and posters because
they've been proven to work for years my
first successful product was the
standard white mug and while it might
scare a lot of people away because of
the huge amount of competition I saw it
as a huge opportunity with a ton of
demand picking something that's
Evergreen just means that it'll sell
today and it'll continue to sell into
the future number two the product has to
make a good profit there's no point in
doing this if you're not going to make
good money I always aim for around a 30%
profit margin so when I sell posters
they'll cost me about 11 bucks to get
printed and shipped to the customer
depending on the size so since they'll
easily sell for around $20 or even up to
50 in some cases that means that even
after all of the transaction fees I can
still easily make a 30% profit margin I
always analyze successful shops like
this to see how they're actually doing
when I look at their monthly stats we
can can see that they're not doing too
bad at all and then if they're making a
30% profit margin or so they're easily
doing $110,000 a month and this was
literally just some random shop that I
just found 30% is just a rule of thumb
though because if you're able to sell a
lot more units with a cheaper product
like a mug you'll be able to take a
smaller profit margin since you'll
usually be able to sell more items
number three the product has to be
Universal now I sell Evergreen products
but I use the design that are on the
products to Target different Trends and
niches we'll only get good sales if our
designs are good but our product has to
be versatile enough to upload all
different kinds of designs to it if I'm
going to sell a mug I need to be able to
sell it to all different kinds of
professions interests hobbies and Trends
if it's an evergreen product that can
make a good profit and allows you to
upload Universal designs you'll be set
now you can have a great product but
without a great design you won't get very
very
far the reason that most sellers fail is
because they don't understand customer
psychology customers don't care about
your products but they do care about
things that they're already passionate
about this could literally be anything
their career their Hobbies their pets
their Hometown and with print on demand
we can make products for all of those
interests so to make Banger designs we
have to start with one of these ideas
which could be literally anything thing
so how do we know where to start who do
we make designs for first this can be
the most difficult part of the business
and if you don't do it correctly you're
almost certain to fail I'm speaking from
experience because my first products
were terrible we want to start by doing
some research to see what customers are
buying and to do research my favorite
platform is to use Etsy because all of
the sales data is public now from a
glance we can quickly see what shops are
doing well based on their total review
views and then when viewing a listing we
can see if that particular item has
gotten any reviews on its own you could
also use different marketplaces like
Amazon but not all of the data is public
which is why I like Etsy on Etsy when
I'm doing research I just need to search
for the product category that I'm
selling in so perhaps I'm selling a
candle Now by looking at these results I
can quickly spot the top performing
shops that have gotten thousands of
reviews usually shops will get about one
review for every 8 to 10 sales that they
get so looking at the reviews is a great
metric to track success I'll click
through one of these shops that has a
high review count and make sure that
they're selling the product that I want
to sell their shops should kind of be
themed around it then I can come down to
the bottom of the page to this reviews
section and this will show me what
people are actually buying and then
liking enough to leave a review on a few
of the ideas here are teacher candles
divorce candles and even retirement
candles so if you wanted to sell candles
but you were worried about the huge
amount of competition if we target a
specific idea like divorce candles the
competition is significantly reduced by
doing this process enough you should
come up with a huge list of design ideas
and with that list there's four methods
that we can use to turn those ideas into
actual designs the important thing to
keep in mind is we're not here to
reinvent the wheel simple things work
best just take what's working and add a
little bit of zest method number one is
the traditional good old-fashioned
handcrafted design from this candle
example most of the top candle shops
sell basic text designs just with
creative fonts now if you don't know
what saying to put we could come over to
chat GPT and write a prompt like this to
generate a list of sayings that we can
put on our candles so maybe we'd use
this one scent of Freedom retirement
Edition then we just have to put it
together so it looks nice and this is
pretty easy to do as well see we could
look at other popular designs to get
inspiration we could use the arched
two-line style from this bestseller with
this modern Sleek looking font from this
bestseller then if I just took this and
put those two elements together we don't
get a design that looks half bad we
could use this strategy to make several
different variations of the same saying
to increase our chances of getting sales
with that saying these are super easy to
make in just a few minutes using a free
program like figma and I've got a full
design tutorial so if you need more
detail you can check that out but the
text designs are so simple because we're
literally just typing them out and don't
underestimate simple designs even the
simplest single font designs can become
bests sellers this design right here has
over 100 reviews which means it's likely
sold around a thousand times my
best-selling handcraft raed designs are
always stupidly simple even though
handcrafting designs actually isn't too
difficult a lot of people still find
this the hardest method so if you're
looking for something a little bit
easier to do you could try method number
two buying pre-made designs this seller
has made thousands of dollars from this
item and they don't have any complex
design skills because they just bought
this exact design pre-made for
$5 you can use this exact strategy
whenever I find a winning product like
this Halloween shirt for example I can
just rightclick on the image since I'm
in Google Chrome the Google Chrome
browser and I can hit search with Google
Lens this will search for the exact
design across all other areas of the web
where I might be able to find the
original source file which I could then
buy for a few bucks and then use it in
my own shop if it's already being sold
on a t-shirt I could also sell it on a
t-shirt just using a different mockup or
I could sell it on a different product
entirely Reinventing the wheel and
trying to get too creative will leave
you without any sales you have to take
what's working and just make it a little
bit different even with dozens of other
shops selling this exact same design it
can still work for new shops and there
are entire shops dedicated to selling
pre-made designs just like this now for
those of you who don't have the money to
spend on buying a ton of pre-made
designs you could try method number three
three
AI generated designs I personally use
mid Journey but now there's a lot of
different AI generators that you could
use and this is by far the easiest
method for generating art all I have to
do is learn how to craft a great prompt
and the image generator will take care
of the rest using the same product
research method as before I found this
pumpkin shirt that's probably sold at
least a few thousand times considering
it has hundreds of reviews Now using
that mid Journey AI I talked about I
simply wrote out a prompt describing the
type of graphic that I wanted and it
generates me several variations from
here inside mid journey I can just
upscale the image and all that's left is
to remove the background using a free
background remover and I'll be able to
sell products using this graphic but now
with the power of AI we're also able to
create designs that can cover entire
products maybe you're considering
running a mug shop and in your product
research you found this floral mug
that's selling pretty
well inside mid journey I could ask for
the same style of image and indicate the
aspect ratio that I'd like it to be in
so it'll cover the entire mug this will
spit out a version of the image that can
be perfectly sized to fit specific
products like this white mug now all
three of these methods for making
designs work but by far the best method
to ensure success is to create hybrid
designs going with this method allows
you to take advantage of handmade AI and
pre-made designs all in one shop giving
you the best chance of success with pron
demand we want to make the most amount
of designs possible to widen our chances
of actually getting sales so by using
all three methods in a hybrid strategy
we'll have the best chances for Success
this will allow us to build out a big
catalog of products that can sell for
years even the products that I made way
back in 2020 which was 4 years ago now
still continue to sell and make me
passive income to this day by using
these four strategies you should
hopefully see that making artwork isn't
too difficult after all and you'll be
left with a ton of designs however even
with the best product and the best
designs if your print provider sucks
you're almost guaranteed to fail the
print provider you choose will dictate
how quickly your customers get their
products the level of customer service
you get as the seller for orders with
defects and shipments lost in the mail
and ultimately how much profit you get
to keep from all of your sales print of
gelato and printful are the kind of top
three print OnDemand providers and I've
used all three of them for my own print
on demand businesses over the past years
now they all do have their own pros and
cons But ultimately to this day I've
stuck with printify I could go over
several reasons why they're my favorite
but just on cost alone you can see that
printify always outperforms their
competitors that means that with every
order I get I'm keeping more of that
sale as profit I've used PR for years
now and they've genuinely been the best
to work with they've enabled me to keep
hundreds of thousands of dollars in
extra profit since I'm selling tens of
thousands of products but we're still
left with another issue which is getting
all of those designs that we've made
onto the product that we're selling in
printify if you have 20 mug designs that
you created in bulk it could take you
quite some time to get them onto the
mugs that's why I invested over $20,000
to build the printify product uploader
program this program allows you to
upload as many designs as you want at a
time and bulk upload them to whatever
product you're selling on autopilot so
there's no user input required you could
start your uploads go make a cup of
coffee and when you come back all of
those designs will be uploaded to the
product you selected pream and ready to
go this is a massive timesaver so when
you're done watching this video I'll
have a link where you can get my
automated printify product uploader
program completely for free now with all
of our products ready to go on printify
we need a place to sell them online and
there's several options
here as a beginner you've probably heard
about a lot of different options that
you could go with but hands down the
most beginner friendly and easiest way
to get started is to open a completely
free shop on Etsy we want to sell where
the customers already are Etsy has over
95 million active buyers and they drive
more than enough organic traffic to
their website than you'd need to grow a
six or seven figure business Etsy is the
best place as a beginner when you're
just first getting things figured out
and once you're in a comfortable
position and have some cash coming in we
can talk about scaling to Shopify Etsy
drives so much organic traffic to my
businesses that I wouldn't even have to
use Shopify if I didn't want to plus
printify is an Etsy approved integration
which means that we can connect it to
our shop and publish all of our products
ready to sell setting up an Etsy Shop is
super easy to do and I've created a
quick start guide which will walk you
through everything that you need to get
your shop open and started from coming
up with the business name to creating a
branded email getting your shop open and
ready to sell this guide will walk you
through it by following this guide and
using the links in it it'll get your
shop set up completely for free in under
10 minutes again at the end of the video
I'll give you all of these resources
including this free guide now you might
be wondering why we aren't using
Redbubble Teespring or Society 6 or any
of these other free to use print on
demand marketplaces and the short answer
is because they don't work that well
I've posted over 2,000 products for sale
and over the past few years I've made a
grand total of
$232 so not a very worthwhile process if
you ask me the issue is that these
websites just don't drive enough traffic
to be profitable and if you do end up
making sales you'll lose most of your
money to the fees now once your Etsy
Shop is open there's a few things that
we can do to the design of the shop to
help it feel more trustworthy and
generate sales what exactly should a
trustworthy shop look like well here's a
good example of one first just notice
the logo that I've got in the corner
it's a super clean logo that really
isn't anything too special again this
could be made using AI or just using one
of the templates that you get from canva
I made this particular logo using canva
next look at the banner on the top of
the shop this just displays basic
information about the shop it makes it
look really clean and more than anything
it just conveys the vibe of the brand
right it's premium modern custom and
that's what the banner is for to convey
the idea of quality and trust this is a
great example of what a lot of beginner
Shops look like it's all over the place
they're selling products that don't make
any sense and nothing about this shop
really conveys trust the mockups look
bad and lazy and the designs look really
sloppy this shop is the same story or
they've got a little bit better idea
because they're only selling mugs but
they're infringing on copyright and none
of their mock-ups look good again and
nothing about this shop feels real or
communicates trust both of these shops
kind of feel like those junky gift shops
that you find around a tourist trap we
want to go for something that feels more
Boutique where it feels like we
specialize in our items compare this mug
shop with one like this this and
hopefully you can see the difference
everything you do from the logo to the
banner to the mockup images it all needs
to build up this image of a premium
brand when you do this and you really
focus on making your shop look
professional and premium it really helps
with component number four getting
customers getting random people online
to see pick and buy our products out of
everyone's seems like a hard task and it
sort of is if don't know what you're
doing we have to get into the potential
customers head and have them imagine
that they've already bought the product
we're selling out of everything that
we've covered by far the most underrated
aspect of the business is the mockups
these are the images that display the
fictional item as if it were real since
we're not ordering every product that we
make to take a photo of it the mockups
basically have to sell the product for
us the mockup images are the marketing
for our pron demand and products
whenever you go through and look at the
top shops in any category selling any
product they've all figured out what
mockups to use to get the most amount of
sales these mockups or similar ones to
the best sellers are how we build trust
and the first step to actually
converting these random Shoppers online
into paying customers now it's really
common for these bestselling mockups to
be available for purchase right on Etsy
or similar website for just a few
dollars or if your product permits it
you can try generating similar looking
mockups using AI to actually get your
designs onto your product mockups you
can either do it manually by hand which
admittedly can take quite a while or you
can use free bonus number three the
Photoshop mockup script this allows you
to generate hundreds of mockups on
autopilot without any user input with
this program not only can you use your
bestselling mock-ups but it's also way
faster to use than anything else like
place it which those mockups don't work
anyway once again this will be available
at the end of the video free of charge
now here's where everything finally all
starts to come together we've picked and
made designs for our product we've
gotten them uploaded and ready to sell
in our Etsy shop we have mockups chosen
and made and now we have one more
important task which is getting our
products to show up when someone
searches for them all we have to do is
put good SEO keywords or search engine optimization
optimization
in our listings this will help get them
to rank in the Etsy search engine we'll
simply search for the type of product
that we're selling with the design idea
that we want to rank for so maybe this
floral mug then we just look at the top
listings here because they have the best
SEO keywords we can simply open up one
of these listings and then look at the
keywords that they've put in their title
section and all the way down at the
bottom of the page in this tag section
it's these little bubbles are each a tag
we can reuse these keywords from Top
listings in our own listings these
keywords are already proven to work
which means using them will give us the
best chances of ranking on the first
page of search results organically now
we could decide to pay for Etsy ads but
the ads will only perform as good as the
product is and they'll still only show
the ads depending on the SEO that you
put in the product just relying on
organic unpaid traffic you can get
almost the same exact results as if you
were paying for Etsy ads the only
downside is that you have to wait a
little bit longer for all of your
products to rank organically in search
you might have noticed that I ran zero
Etsy ads well basically zero I only use
the free traffic on Etsy I'll pay for my
own traffic on a Shopify website but I
don't need to do that on Etsy as
promised you can find a link down below
to get access to the Discord Community
the quick start guide the printify
product uploader and the Photoshop
mockup script all completely for free
because you finished the video leave
your questions down below I hope you
found this video helpful and please hit subscribe
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