Selling Your Designs

Pinterest

Pinterest is great for making sales for certain niches because the demographics of Pinterest users are usually female and those who are willing to spend. Your first step will obviously be to create a Pinterest account. The trick to Pinterest, however, is that you should sign up under a female name and make it a personal account. This way, you will get more followers, clicks, views, and therefore, more sales. You will also have to select at least four topics that interest you. I would choose topics that relate closest to your niche, but it does not matter what you pick. Pinterest should be used as an image board, much like Instagram, in the sense that you can insert an appropriate image related to your niche such as your t-shirt design on a model and put relevant information beneath it such as you Amazon brand page or Amazon t-shirt link where people who are interested can purchase it.

Your next step should be to create a board. You can create multiple boards for multiple niches to earn more revenue. You should locate a red “create board” button in which you can create a board. Create a name and make up a short description for the niche you have chosen, select the appropriate category, and click create. You will then want to use Pinterest’s official “Pinterest Save Button” Google Chrome extension to pin relevant images to your niche on your board. To do this, simply go to Google Images and search for your chosen niche. You would then use the Pinterest Save Button extension to add it to the empty board that you have just created. You can also use Pinterest itself to pin or rather, re-pin images onto your board. Search for your niche on Pinterest and click on the save button with the little pin icon after clicking on an image, which is located on the top right of the image. You will then choose the board you just created to pin it to.

The hard part starts now. To ensure your credibility as someone who offers something to the Pinterest female-dominated community, you should have multiple images and boards. By this, I mean at least 10 boards on different niches and 25 images per board. After creating multiple t-shirt designs within the same niche and finding that they (or at least some) are selling on Amazon organically, you should immediately create a board for your niche designs. For every niche, you should create a board which has at least 25 designs, although more is always better. My rule is that for every design I share on my board on Pinterest, I have at least 8-10 other pins on my board which are not links to my Amazon t-shirt designs but are still relevant to my niche. For example, again, if I was in the fishing niche, I would have 20 re-pins and Google Image pins of fishing-related quotes, images, and designs on my fishing board. I would then upload 2 of my Amazon t-shirt designs, with models from Placeit and links to the t-shirt design(s) under the picture. Again, I would only do this after every 8-10 pins to my board on fishing. This is a marketing strategy that works because you are offering a quality and value-filled board to Pinterest members, while sometimes offering quality t-shirt designs with an Amazon link, which most people trust and may request after seeing the design.

After creating at least 10 different boards of different niches, with a minimum of 25 images on each board, you should slowly begin seeing sales and followers. Followers will begin seeing what you post within their feed, as most other social media platforms do. If you continually post quality images and t-shirt designs on your boards, your followers will begin to re-pin your images onto their own boards. This can, in turn, bring in hundreds, if not thousands of continuous traffic from curious, captivated, and willing buyers. I, however, do not suggest posting your Merch designs to Pinterest until you get a substantial following. I would suggest for a legitimate following of at least 5,000 before uploading any of your Merch designs to Pinterest.

So, how do you gain followers more quickly? The process is identical to Twitter and Instagram (and other social media platforms). All you have to do is follow people who are interested and engaged within your niche! To find these people, go back to your board and look through all the images that you have re-pinned from Pinterest. Look through these images and follow everyone who has liked or commented on them. You may receive a “follower limit” from Pinterest, in which you should just wait another hour or delete the ones who did not follow you back within 24 hours. Another trick I have found to growing my Pinterest boards and following quickly is to re-pin images relevant to my niche that have been shared or liked thousands of times onto my own board. Creating your own Pinterest images through Canva is also a great option, in which you should be looking towards creating motivational quotes which are shared a ridiculous amount of times. This, in turn, will allow for Pinterest users to view the original poster (you) which will then result in large amounts of followers and more continual traffic to your boards and eventually, t-shirt designs.

After some time and a substantial following, you may be invited to post in group boards. You can request to join them as well, but it is better if you are invited to them, as it shows your popularity within the Pinterest community. Group boards are what they sound like. They are essentially Pinterest boards where multiple select people can post in. You should first check whether they have a lot of followers (more than you) and whether their board is within your niche. If neither of these fit the category, I would just ignore the group board and not join it. If you do decide to join one, post some images related to your niche, although I would not post any Merch design links to avoid getting removed. Your posts to these groups should get a lot of views, in which Pinterest members will check out your board and will see the t-shirt designs that you sell. After joining a large and niche group, you should see a substantial increase in sales. In the end, Pinterest is probably the most difficult and time-consuming social media platform for advertising your Merch designs but will be the most profitable if done in the right way and with the correct female-oriented niche.