by Skullpilot
Aside by LeahG: Podsters I have a special treat for you today!
One of our members known to us as 'SkullPilot' has kindly accepted my invitation to share his insights and print-on-demand journey with us!
Without further ado ... Here's Skullpilot (Neil)!
Disclosure: Aside from LeahG Course link all products and links featured here are Skullpilot's own referral links. Please visit his site and hit the 'like button' and share some products by way of a thank you for this great contribution to our community.
How To Succeed With Print On Demand Tips And Tricks - 10 Personal Thoughts And Pitfalls (PART 1)
Hello dear reader!
I decided to take up Leah on her invitation to write an article on my print-on-demand journey, and use it to write about mistakes I have made over the years, and what I did to rectify them. Hopefully the tips here will mean you can learn from my gaffes instead of making them yourself!
Where it all began 2008 - Squidoo!
I started POD back in 2008, initially on a now-defunct platform called Squidoo. They had an arrangement with Zazzle so that 'Lensmasters' (the name given to Squidoo's article writers) could get a share of any Zazzle royalties from products sold via their 'lenses' (aka articles).
I started that in June, and by the end of 2008 I had signed up with Zazzle directly. I was never very focused on what I was doing, either with print-on-demand or Squidoo, always searching for the next money-making scheme. (This is one of my mistakes - See Tip 10.)
Fast Forward through a maze of Kindle, eBooks, KDP, Niche Websites ....
As the years rolled by, I occasionally stopped by at Zazzle again and did a few months before flitting off to some other project for a few years. Everything from niche websites, to larger blogs, to Kindle Ebooks on KDP, and then had a go on the low-content print books bandwagon. Lastly, before settling back into POD, I had a 'quick' go at domain name flipping.
I say quick because I did make a single solitary sale, and made approximately $1000 from a site that I spent $30 on - but it took three years (so domain renewals at $10 a year outlay).
For me, not really a business, unless I want to buy and sell in bulk for far lower profit margins - which is how most domainers operate. It's a job basically.
Instead, I prefer the POD (or blogging with affiliate income) model, where each product or blog post only has to be created once, and can make small amounts of earnings forever afterwards.
Where I went wrong and what I learned - my comedy of errors!
1. Customers - who are they, where are they?
Think Customer Base It is important to be mindful of the intended recipient of your designs, products, and other information. Easier said than done, when conflicting advice is available all over the internet.
You will probably be less familiar with the advice to discover your 'customer avatar' for example, compared to the common call to: 'do what YOU love'.
Doing your market research is so important, and Leah covers this in her Ninja Niche Course.
Knowing your customer makes sense before doing anything else, but you also need to know your chosen platform. In the past, before knowing any of this, and 'doing what I loved', I had a giant section of one of my Zazzle stores based around fairly brutalist styles of design.
Think industrial metal textures, geometric patterns, engineering-type designs, etc. All very nice, but Zazzle tends to be vastly more frequented by female users. And my oft-chosen way of promoting my products was - and still is - Pinterest.
Again, a very female user base. Stereotypes aside, women probably aren't remotely interested in a mouse pad that looks like a perforated steel floor grating. Who knew? I needed to think harder about who I was targeting.
Perhaps there are dads, husbands, brothers, etc who might like those kinds of designs. In which case pitching the product correctly becomes super important!
Note: Demographics on social media sites do change over time, so it pays to keep yourself up-to-date with these kinds of social trends. For example, conventional wisdom used to have it that YouTube was predominantly a male domain.
Stats!
Sprout Social, as of 2023, its base is now 51% female.
Pinterest is still 76% female users though, so it's worth bearing this in mind when you decide what designs you create, and where you promote them.
Youtube: For an easy 50:50 mix of male and female users (or close to it) consider 51% female).
Facebook (44% F, 56% M)
Instagram (48% F, 52% M)
Tiktok (54% F, 46% M).
The mainly male domains include X (formerly Twitter) at 61% male, and LinkedIn with 57% male users (still a decent percentage of females here though).
2. What Products?
There's a lot to consider here. Gone are the old days of Zazzle's Quick Create tool, where we could stick a design onto scores of products with one click. Usually, I end up with many products that look terrible because the design was the wrong shape for the product.
This tool was responsible for my patchy attendance on Zazzle over the years. I was clued in enough to use the Quick Create tool and go through each product optimizing things. But usually, after an hour or so, the tool froze the website and that was that. So frustrating I'd go away for a year or longer, doing something else instead. (This happened a few times!)
It is better to pick and choose products that match both your designs AND the sub-niche you are creating for.
There's always a few chances for sales if you publish your creation on a t-shirt, mug or any of the other mainstays. But if you are doing wedding invitations, perhaps choose to design for - well - wedding invitations! And Save The Date, RSVP and Thank You cards, for example.
A little research will show you what other people are doing in this mega-niche. It would seem a little odd, maybe, to make wedding-themed water bottles and hand towels! But these would be just the ticket if you are designing in the yoga niche, or any other sports niche for that matter.
The second thing to note is that this is Zazzle, remember. The home of customization. I can't begin to tell you the kind of mistakes I have historically made on the platform by avoiding the opportunity to make customizable designs.
I always used to set out with a plan to get 'a foundation' of a thousand or so products that were just basic fixed designs. And then plan to begin adding customizable stuff later on.
Don't do this!
It's daft on a platform that's set up for customers to make things their own! It was laziness on my part. Just getting products up and going in large volumes, was my thought process. But it's better to take a bit of time and effort; less is more as they say. Make your products customizable!
Finally, think about publishing your designs on unusual products - IF THEY FIT YOUR NICHE. Don't do this randomly, but if there is a type of product that is underserved, and it makes sense for your niche, think about producing creations for it. Zazzle often gives us a heads-up if there is a new product coming out.
The last one I took advantage of was the denim jackets. But it's not just new product offerings, even though they will begin by being underserved. Scour through the blank products and if you find one that might fit your niche, do a search on Zazzle's marketplace to see how many designs ON THAT PRODUCT appear under your main niche keywords. If there are only a low number of competitors, start adding your designs to these products and promoting them.
3. How much Money Do I want to make?
Think Royalty-Per-Order This one slots in with the last section (Think Product Offering). Another one of my big mistakes over the years was thinking people like low-priced items.
But ultimately people like what people like. And if you design a cool creation for a high-ticket product, and make it nicely customizable, so customers can add their personal touch, they're still going to buy it.
It makes sense then to have a really good mix of low, medium, and high-priced products. My mistake of picking low-priced stuff means I make loads of sales on postcards - and get 6 cents each time for my efforts!
But if any of those designs made sense to publish on a Pong Table Game for example, then commission per sale could be up to $20. Bit of a difference. In the medium price category, optimizing your designs for electronic products like phone cases might be a good idea. You can look for a commission of around $3-4 per case if you set your rate to 10%.
It all sounds a LOT better than my 6-cent efforts - despite making many such sales over the years. An example comparing two of my stores would be firstly, one which has made earnings of roughly $465 from 430 sales. And the second has so far made $315 from 95 sales.
It's much more pleasing to make higher earnings from fewer sales, especially early on to gain some confidence in print-on-demand. It was a very nice fluke earlier this year, on a third store, mostly selling postcards (again!), but which made $112 in a single sale of tote bags. That store is currently sitting at $172 from 79 sales (see! postcards and their 6 cents royalties).
Time for you to go hunting for higher-priced items for your stores if you're currently only offering a few postcards, magnets, or button badges.
4. Think Bulk Orders So that's an idea for Zazzle creators working on gift stores.
The more commonly trodden path for optimizing average order value, though, is to make products that might be bought in bulk. Yep. We're back to wedding invitations - and all manner of other parties, occasions, etc. Anything where a nice big batch of invitations might be required. And other cards. And party supplies, such as napkins, paper plates cups, etc. I've never been good at this, although I did once sell a wedding invitation set.
I should have opened a wedding invitations store and concentrated on it years ago. But I fear that boat has sailed, both in terms of my design abilities in that kind of niche; and also the saturated competition these days. I'll pick things a little more obscure, and that's my advice to you too.
Leah has written a blog post about Chinese New Year, so if you look hard enough there are plenty of opportunities for party invitations and related supplies.
As I mentioned in Section 3 above, my tote bag bulk order was a one-off. I have had repeat bulk orders (144 per order) on - guess what, go on; guess - yep! Postcards. If I could rely on all customers buying a gross of these at a time, I'd be fairly pleased. But alas, the norm is usually a single card. Which is fine, I'm happy with any sale.
Business is business though, so anything you can do to entice those bulk orders, whether it's for birthdays, baby showers; we've just had Halloween and Thanksgiving; school reunions, or whatever - get those brain cells going and find yourself a nice niche.
5. Think Return On Time Invested (ROTI)
One of the mistakes I made in my print-on-demand journey was trying to do everything myself from scratch. And a lack of planning in general didn't help either. It's far better to try and do things in bulk, and to use automation, AI tools, and schedulers.
For example, I would decide on a design, and sometimes spend a day or more working on it. Occasionally, this would also mean hand-drawing with pencils and paper, scanning the design in, and then messing about endlessly to produce a final product. I try to avoid this type of method these days.
Finding YouTube tutorials to help you create your designs using software is far better. I found Inkscape pretty opaque at the beginning - for designing vector graphics, but ended up creating templates for circular logo-style creations. This also helped with making multiple similar designs in bulk. I highly recommend this type of workflow.
As an example, if you decide some kind of dog-related product is what you'd like to create, think of getting graphics of several different dog breeds, so you can 'mass produce' a whole bunch of designs, where you simply substitute the various breeds. Essentially it's one design, branched out into many. Saves a bunch of time!
Something else that used to take ages to do was background removal on certain images that I needed. I have a whole array of methods for doing this in GIMP (a free raster graphics software, like Photoshop). They all take hours to do, to get the images looking as good as I need them. However, there are so many free AI tools available now, many of which can remove a complex background from an image in a minute or so.
I avoided these for ages, but we all have to consider how much time we wish to use doing the menial tasks. And time is the one thing we can never get back. So if you can find a tool to do something, use it! I also now use Pin Generator for my Pinterest promotion.
It can be used for generating loads of pins, simply and quickly from a single URL. You can tinker with the design, color schemes, fonts, etc to ensure all the pins conform to your branding requirements. And you can create your own templates too. For me, the scheduler built into it is also a huge benefit.
Easy to create a hundred pins a day and set them all to schedule over however long you want. What I would not advise is using automation tools to create or upload products, though. I use AI rewriters to create variations for my Pin titles and descriptions, but you can get into trouble with many of the print-on-demand platforms if you start using uploaders to spam their websites with hundreds of products.
My advice, keep the quality high, especially for your product offerings, but go as fast as you can! Volume does matter as well. I hope you are enjoying this article, and hopefully find some of it useful for your journey.
In Part 2, I'll tell you about promotional ideas to get people to your POD stores, sales optimization, and why adequate is better than perfect when it comes to creating your products. See you again soon.
References:
https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/men-vs-women-active-social-media/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/new-social-media-demographics
BIO: Skullpilot (aka Neil) is interested in topics that elevate people in body, mind and soul, by offering creative inspiration for them to pursue their higher self.
He has been doing print-on-demand and online publishing since 2008, working primarily on niche site content writing and affiliate marketing, but later expanded into Kindle ebook and print book publishing. He's been a Zazzle Creator since almost the beginning - signing up at the end of 2008. He gained Pro designer level across two separate accounts, despite concentrating more on the website and affiliate marketing side of his business interests.
Skullpilot was 'born' in 2017, in the form of the Zazzle Store, mainly for psychology, philosophy and other motivational topics. But it was designed to be expandable into other areas that help people become their best self, whether through mental or physical pursuits.
It has also spread to other print-on-demand platforms, including Skullpilot Publishing on Amazon, and its alter-ego Testamental on Teepublic and Fourthwall.
Skullpilot Stores: https://www.zazzle.com/mbr/238763952791386071/stores
Skullpilot Publishing: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B091W4FLYB
Testamental Teepublic Store (New): https://www.teepublic.com/user/testamental
Testamental Fourthwall Shop (New): https://testamental-shop.fourthwall.com
Thank you Neil for this great contribution, looking forward to Part 2!
Podsters please share your thanks to Neil, thoughts, comments and own journey in comments! Also please take a moment to pin his products and visit his links.
Have you got a story to tell? Tips or warnings to share?
If you are a site member and wish to share your journey for a chance for FREE promotion via bio and product links (your referral links) forward details (text in email) to me at creativeblogger@aol.com. This offer is only open to my site members at this time. I may collate posts if I feel this creates a more newsworthy piece but all contributers will be credited as noted here.
Content is shared across my wide social network to ensure you gain the highest visibility and readership. This is a great opportunity for FREE self-promotion, grab it! Please continue to share the love by thanking contributers, pinning their products and sharing their articles. I have a new 'tab' especially for featured writers (see the main menu).
Let's make this an amazing FREE resource for the POD community. Together we are stronger!
Wow, you really brought back some memories for me with Squidoo, niche website flipping and such...been there done that all too (since 2003)! lol. Thanks for the great article :)
Great advice(s) here! Written very well, and very helpful. I can relate to everything you wrote. I was surprised by the demographics and stats a bit. I didn't know that FB had more male users. 😶 The kick in the head for me was this pin generator. My oh my! Watched a YouTube tut on that, and still didn't get finished watching it. Having said that, I came back to re-read your post on it as well.
Thank you for this very useful post Neil. It is always nice to learn from the experience of others!
What a great article, SkullPilot! I liked how you described your journey and lessons learned. I also loved your "customer avatar" vs. "'do what YOU love" comparison. I look forward to Part 2! Over the last year or so, I was leaning heavily into mid-price products, like phones, and I've also tried customizable canvas shoes, pickleball paddles, and new product (like backpacks). The phones have performed pretty well for me. I haven't made sales for the paddles and backpacks, but I plan to keep adjusting tags and promoting to build "SEO juice"! I also started doing more wrapping and tissue paper, which are low-priced, but sell well for me. I have a ton of vintage images and ephemera that are easy to…
If you are a site member and wish to share your journey for a chance for FREE promotion via bio and product links (your referral links) forward details (text in email) to me at creativeblogger@aol.com. This offer is only open to my site members at this time. I may collate posts if I feel this creates a more newsworthy piece but all contributers will be credited as noted here.
Content is shared across my wide social network to ensure you gain the highest visibility and readership. This is a great opportunity for FREE self-promotion, grab it! Please continue to share the love by thanking contributers, pinning their products and sharing their articles. I have a new 'tab' especially for featured…