Selling Your Designs

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups or Pages are a great choice for promoting your Merch designs. Facebook Groups are great because everyone in the group is already interested or involved in the niche in some way. Most groups also have daily discussions with each other through posts submitted by others. An active Facebook Group is essentially a targeted audience filled with thousands of passion-driven users who are looking for an excuse to spend on their niche interest, which is where you will come in.

You will begin by creating a Facebook account if you don’t already have one. Search for your niche in the Facebook search bar and select “Groups” on the top bar directly underneath the Facebook search bar. Look for groups that have at least 1,000 members or 1,000 likes. If there are lots of results, look for higher numbers. Click on each group which fits these criteria and check out the page. You should first check out whether the members are involved and whether there is a daily or frequent discussion. If this is the case, join the group, or in most cases, ask to join the group. After a few hours, you will likely be accepted into the group.

With Facebook Groups, you will have to befriend the Admins of the groups as they are the ones who spent the time and energy in creating an active, large, and niche community. Add the admins as friends or message them, offering them a decent percentage of every t-shirt sold. After agreeing upon a set percentage for the price of the t-shirt (which you should set at $19.99), choose the availability of your t-shirt to be “Sample – Direct link only” after the last step before uploading your Merch design. This way, organic traffic will not be a factor after splitting up the profits. You will then give the admins your sample direct link which they will then post into the group while also mentioning your name. Be genuine and answer comments or questions any of the group members have about the t-shirt.

This method requires a lot of trial and effort because many admins are not very willing to post a new members t-shirt design link just for a mere profit. Others will ignore you and some might rip you off on other POD sites. However, the more people you contact, the more success you will receive from admins. Another take on this method would be to be active in the niche group you join by posting, commenting, and liking frequently. This may allow for admins to open -up to your suggestion. Even if they do not, if rules allow it, you can post your own link to your Merch design in the group which should bring in a substantial amount of sales.

In-Person Selling

If online selling and advertising of your t-shirts are not getting you out of early tiers fast enough you can resort to selling your designs to people in your city. For example, clubs, organizations, sports teams, church groups, 5k runs, some school programs, and volunteer groups are all required to or encouraged to wear matching colors or identical t-shirts during their activities. Find one of these groups in your city, preferably one that you have attended or are a part of now and contact them. You should state that you can make them customized t-shirts for a cheap price and can even offer that you donate the profits to charity. The shirt design you create or outsource should be priced for less than $13.99 so that they are affordable for the group and should be uploaded as “Sample – Direct link only” after the last step before uploading your Merch design. If done correctly, you can sell a large bulk of t-shirt designs which may increase your low tier standing. It all depends on how large the group is, your ability to create or outsource an attractive design, and most importantly, your ability to communicate and persuade the decision makers of the group.

If you only need a few sales and cannot wait any longer for any sales, you can ask a good friend, family member, or close relative to buy one of your shirt designs for you. This is a rather obvious method, but it helps a lot in tier 1 and possibly even tier 2 when you are extremely inexperienced and limited on the number of daily Merch designs you can upload. If you are to do this, either make the design cheap or ask them to purchase a design which has sold in the past or has a lot of potential to sell, to boost its ranking on Amazon, which will obviously get more views from customers.