I'm making enough money to pay my bills on Teespring, and it's constantly growing. I started out from nothing, there's no reason why you can't start today.

[Link to Teespring!]

Around a month ago, someone told me about a website called Teespring, where you could create your own T-Shirts, and run campaigns selling them. After conducting some research, in which I found people who were quite literally making a living off this site, earning tens of thousands of dollars, I decided to take a stab at it.

I jumped straight into making my first "test" shirt, and found the UI was intuitive, easy to use, and allowed me to quickly mock up a shirt, create a simple campaign, and launch. My first shirt was terribly designed, I just used the Teespring symbols and text. However, you can import pictures and designs and put them on the shirt, which is what you should be doing if you want a unique T-Shirt that will sell.

You don't need to be an artist

If you have experience with graphical design, and know how to make an eye-catching creation, this is very easy for you, and you don't have to spend money on this. However, if you're not experienced in design then don't worry. You can use tools like Fiverr and search for T-Shirt designs, there are people who will design anything to your specification for only £5! You then have 100% commercial use of these designs, and can proceed to use them on your shirts without worry of them being taken down by Teespring. Give the designer a good specification (easy to read, simple, eye catching), with the wording and style, and the top rated artists will give you a good product to sell.

You can then add text, customize the colour, add different products (hoodies, vests, etc) then create your campaign, it hardly takes any time at all. They take care of customer service, complaints and all that stuff, removing all the risk for you. After you create your campaign(s), you can use various marketing techniques to get your product out there. When you're starting out, I personally recommend Facebook adverts, customized for your target audience. I ran a couple of these for $5 each and saw a few sales, and I could definitely have optimized them better.

Build your audience through social media

However, if you want to build your business for the longterm, and create steady income, creating social media accounts to gain a captive audience is incredibly beneficial, and gives you free marketing opportunities. Twitter and Instagram are the best for this, as Facebook is becoming less and less powerful in marketing. If you slowly (or quickly) build up a loyal fanbase, you can start to slowly include some of your T-Shirts in your posts and slyly market your shirts. If you're willing to put in the time, this can turn your shirt-selling into less of a "beer money" plan and more "I can actually survive on my earnings?!" plan. There have been some nice success stories you can find on google where people are earning enough to live on just on Teespring, and off other marketing deals on their now successful social media pages. Make sure to find a niche/unique shirt that you can successfully market to a particular audience. If you find your niche, you have the potential to make a lot of money.

I am personally working on building up my social media now, and have just started occasionally putting my T-Shirts into posts. What have I learnt from this? Social media pays off big time. I've started slipping the occasional link on there, and seen fantastic results. It's a requirement if you want to see large amounts of sales. These should increase as I build up my audience, which I'm very happy with.

Hints and Tips

• The most lucrative T-Shirts on Teespring are ones that support causes like the military or police. People love to show that they support their countries military, and you can capitalise on that for enormous profit. At the time that I'm writing this update, 3/4 of the top sellers today are military/police supporting tee's, with a combined total of over 1300 T-Shirts sold. All the by the same person. They can charge more than a normal shirt, and have easily made a profit of well over $4000 today alone.
• I feel like I need to reiterate this. If you want to make good money off this, build up a social media following!
• Don't give up. Most successful sellers on Teespring saw little to no sales while they were starting out. It's completely expected. Don't come in to this expecting to become rich overnight with your first shirt. You're going to need to build up a captive audience in the niche that your shirts are aimed at, and that takes time. Personally, I made 0 sales for a couple of weeks. When my first shirt got orders filled and sent out, I was ridiculously happy. Stick at it.
• You should be aiming for a good profit margin. Don't sell for $1 profit on every shirt, you're most likely not going to be selling hundreds of them (straight away, anyway). Generally you want to be aiming to sell around $20 at the minimum. Some people swear by selling at $21.50, but experiment a little and find out what works best for you and your niche.
• Start today. Seriously, I regret not starting earlier. Do it.

The most important thing is to not give up. Everyone fails on their first few shirts. Get used to it. After a while, you're going to learn, and start earning. No one that makes a living on Teespring was an instant earner. They kept going until they achieved what they set out to.