Making Money With T-Shirt Designs

Everyone has a different tale to tell, and a different product to sell, on the internet. The truth is there are no ‘get rich quick’ schemes that work, because the basics of business do not change. You must have a product to sell and a buyer willing to pay you money for it.

But web surfers are a massive market and it is possible to tap into them if you cut through the waffle and understand some simple concepts. Traditional business models require a process which acts roughly like this: Manufacturer-Wholesaler-Retailer-Customer, meaning there are three levels looking for a profit margin. If you can amalgamate the manufacturer/wholsaler/retailer role into one you can increase profit levels by decreasing product price or by increasing customer numbers. The joy is that you don’t have to spend anything, unless you want to, thus reducing your expenditure and increasing your profits. This is where the internet really comes into its own, because it provides not only a source of customers, but also the means to identify customers and enormous amounts of help in producing digital product.

This article looks at a product you can successfully sell on the internet – t-shirt transfer designs, but don’t worry, you don’t have to be a brilliant artist to create this product.

First and foremost – use the internet. Search engines will tell you what people are buying, auction sites will tell you who the customers are, where they live and their buying patterns.

As I said earlier, you don’t have to Leonardo Da Vinci to get into this business. One of my best friends is a talented artist and graphic designers who runs a successful company and laughs at my efforts in the field. But t-shirt designs are rarely about great art. They are about impact and making a statement. and here’s the proof. Open a word processor and type FRANKIE SAYS RELAX in a bold, san serif type. Centre the text and increase the font size till it fills the page. That’s it, you’ve created a t-shirt design, ready to be printed onto transfer paper and ironed onto a t-shirt.

Don’t believe me? Frankie Says Relax is one of the biggest selling t-shirt transfer designs on eBay (at least in the UK) and that’s a design from the 80s, so you don’t even have to be original or creative. I know this for a fact because I’ve sold this design on that site.

With selling transfer designs you have three options – sell the design digitally, sell the design printed on transfer paper, or sell the design ironed onto a shirt. I chose the second option as my main focus because I want the least amount of hassle and eBay doesn’t allow the selling of digital products. When I started I printed and sold physical shirts at a local market but this involved me in capital expenditure to buy the blank shirts, transfer paper and printer ink, and in time expenditure in printing the shirts, ironing them and standing at a market stall. Not my best business decision.

But ebay aren’t the only game in town. Punch ‘auction websites’ into a search engine and you’ll find many more. Not as popular maybe, but they’re there and many of them allow you to sell digital products. Some even specialise in it.

When you go beyond simple text-based designs there are many freeware programs available to download for free which, with a little imagination, allow you to create perfectly acceptable designs. Even a simple one-liner joke done in an an attractive colour and font (freely downloadable, use search engine) is perfectly acceptable as a design. As you gain experience you can experiment with backgrounds and design elements, but don’t go overboard, the best designs are remarkably simple. Free graphics software is available to download. Use that search engine! Check what other people are doing, and what’s selling, but don’t copy others’ content, just take inspiration from it. Try to create designs for the whole market – old/young, male/female etc. even if it concerns things you aren’t really interested in. Again, let the search engines tell you what’s popular.

But to maximise the profit from your design you should make it available in as many forms as possible. Here’s how I do it-

(a) Digitally. As part of a designs collection in pdf format. To do this insert several designs into one document and convert to pdf via one of the many free pdf conversion programs available. Sell through tradebit.com Joining is free and you get a royalty of 75% of retail. You could also use lulu.com

(b) Printed transfer. Through eBay and my own website. This costs to set up obviously, especially the website. On a daily basis you’ll be paying for transfer paper, printer ink, envelopes, postage and eBay fees. But it makes a profit and I regard it more as a method of advertising than anything else.

(c) Printed shirt. Through zazzle. Again, free to join, and the designer can define what royalty they want from designs they have submitted.

This business method is never going to make you fabulously rich, but it can give you a long term cash feed. Especially with digital product, which is likely to be there till hell freezes over and give you a passive income when you’re old and grey, which in my case is next week. The more designs you create, the more you can make. This is a simple numbers game. Matching your brilliant design to the discerning customer who wants to buy it isn’t easy, so the more designs you have out there the better chance you have. It doesn’t take long to create a design (I can easily manage 5 a day) so aim for hundreds if not thousands.

The trick of this business is to minimise expenditure and maximise exposure and the internet, God bless its digital soul, allows you to do that. Use it.

For examples of Gurmeet Mattu’s t-shirt designs please visit his website at http://www.scriptschool.co.uk

From the site you can also access a service which allows you to sell digital content such as t-shirt transfer designs. It is free to join and gives you a 75% royalty on your sales. Please have a project ready to upload (text or graphics, usually as a pdf) when you register. I would suggest this is an alternative or addition to selling printed designs on auction sites.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gurmeet_Mattu