How I Make $1.2M in Print on Demand Sales Selling T-Shirts transcript

over the last year I sold 41,600 t-shirts generating over $1.2 million in sales in this video I'm going to go through the blueprint that I followed this past year to show you exactly how you can do the same hi my name is me Heckman and I have made over $6.5 million in Shopify print on demand t-shirt sales over the last 4 and 1/2 years before we get into the blueprint you want to stick around until the end because the last section or step seven of the blueprint is the most important part my goal is to get you to your first sale as quickly as possible and I guarantee that if you skip step seven you are going to make it a lot harder to get that first sale and waste a lot of money trying to get there so let's get into it the first step of this blueprint is simply going to be picking a product and what I mean by product is whether that's t-shirts hoodies mugs blankets whatever it may be you're just going to select one product we don't want to be diversifying trying to have every single product we could possibly offer somebody guess what that ends up leading to decision fatigue we want to keep it simple we want to focus on one product once we've selected that one single product for example t-shirts we're then going to move into step two which is picking one Niche I know step one and two just don't sound too exciting when you're just picking one product and you're just picking one Niche I think when we're out there doing research we're seeing all these different designs that we could possibly put onto our site and we want to add it all but this is something that we want to avoid we want to pick one Niche we want to really get to know this audience and this customer and tailor all of our designs to that customer now this isn't Etsy we are focusing on Shopify and building a brand we're not just going to throw stuff at the wall and see what happens instead we're going to be smarter than that and use a strategy and that is the one product and one Niche because when somebody comes to our store and they're ready to purchase we don't want them to be overwhelmed we want to make the decision as easy as possible for them we want them to Simply find the two shirts that they enjoyed the most add them to their cart check out and be on their way so once we've done that we've picked our product that we're going to sell we've picked the niche that we're going to learn about dive into better yet if you're a part of that Niche this whole process is going to be a lot easier and smoother because guess what you're one of the customers which then leads us to step three which is probably the second most important step besides step seven and that is designing you want to spend the majority of your time here because the designs are really what sells I think a lot of times especially when it comes to print on demand we get confused with truly what we're selling we think we're just selling a t-shirt which yes we are and yes that's a product but what makes our product different from any other t-shirt brand is our design and our designs are unique because you can't find them anywhere else so this step is extremely important and will probably be the biggest driving Factor in getting you that first sale how many designs should I have in order to launch that's a great question you should have at least 100 designs prior to launching your store I know that sounds crazy I think a lot of people think they only have to do 15 or 20 kind of build a collection almost and then launch we would suggest doing at least 100 designs and it's not because you can't launch with 20 you absolutely can but we're not giving ourselves enough of a chance to be successful the first time around and what do I mean by this when we go and we advertise we want to give Facebook plenty of data to choose from and to test through and at the same time we want to be doing the same thing with our customers we want to give them different areas of the niche we want to try different design Styles we got to kind of find what our customers like and what they're looking for by doing 100 designs not only are we practicing probably one of the most important steps to running a print on demand store but we are also then giving ourselves the best chance of being successful and finding at least a few designs that do well right off the bat so sit down take your time go through the process and put up 100 designs now luckily for us there's so many products out there that we can use and utilize to get these 100 designs completed faster than ever before and that's because we have the help of AI and Mystic pod.com is a great place to start because they make designing easy their focus for their designs is specific specifically for print on demand looking at some of the best t-shirt designs some of the best mugs stickers you name it they have been tailoring their platform to give designs that will work best on those products so that is a great place to start and a great place to speed up this design process so now that you know what step three is before we go to step four remember you want to stick around and hear step seven because this step gets skipped the most and is the reason why most people end up quitting print on demand before they ever give their store a chance so stick around until step seven but let's talk about step four after you've done your 100 designs the next step is going to be uploading those designs into printify now why am I saying printify and not talking about any other print provider that's because I think printify is Simply the Best when it comes to starting out in print on demand personally I've been fulfilling my products with printify since I first got started in print on demand back in 2020 offer a ton of benefits that make them I think the ultimate choice for your print on demand needs now printify has a vast highquality network of print providers worldwide so that we can fulfill anywhere we absolutely want to printify also gives us the flexibility of selecting a printer and choosing which one gives us the best quality and the best shipping times compared to other print on demand companies where you get stuck with one printer one shipping speed there's absolutely no flexibility there now on top of this printy platform is incredibly easy and userfriendly specifically for people who are just getting started in print on demand and has seamless Integrations with all of the e-commerce platforms like Shopify Etsy and Amazon so no matter where you're trying to sell you can sell on those platforms so simply create your custom products sell on your terms and PR IFI will handle the Fulfillment for you now printify also offers the most competitive pricing beating out both printful and gelato I have been doing research on other print on demand providers for years trying to find the best deal because at the end of the day really comes down to my profit margin and the money that I am making after I make a sale and just nobody is absolutely able to compete with the prices that PRI gives it is actually insane with their extensive range of products from t-shirts hoodies and Home Decor you can then diversify your product line but remember if you're first starting out just pick one product but when you're ready to diversify your line you absolutely can printify then handles the production the Fulfillment and the shipping for us so that we can be completely hands off from this part of our business and we can focus on what matters most like growing our brand engaging with our customers and knowing that our products are actually being handled the right way this is why I suggest using printify as your print on demand provider over any other print on demand company that is out there so now that we know where we are going to be fulfilling our products through that leads us us to step five which is setting up a very simple Shopify store now when I say simple I mean simple it does not need to be intricate we don't need to be paying for a theme we are going to be using a very simple format on one of shopify's free themes now two of the themes that I have loved to work with is ride and Dawn both of these themes are really easy to use and do everything that we need our shop to do right from the beginning both of these themes are extremely fast the last thing that we want is a slow site and people leaving because the site just isn't loading we have become a society that needs to see instant results and if our site is not loading people will not wait around you know four 5 8 seconds for our sore to load and it's to load between 1 and 3 seconds and three is even a little long so if it's not loading in that time frame people are leaving and we are missing out on sales now we also need a site that is optimized for purchases and this means making it as simple as possible for people to reach checkout we can think of this almost like a brick and mortar store or really any store that you would go and purchase something in store imagine you walk into a store you find a product that you really like and you're ready to check out but in order to check out you have to go through all these different hurdles and basically a maze to get to the register nobody wants that and that is something that we need to think about as we are setting up our Shopify store we need all of our call to action buttons to be the same color we need to make it a seamless process and not going through too many hurdles for somebody to actually put in their credit card and actually put in their information and actually leave the site this step is extremely important and one that I think it's overlooked because we think our store needs to be really fancy and have a lot of really different features that are in your face and customers just don't like that we need to be building a site as if we were shopping on that site when you go places do you see a bunch of flashing colors in your face on sites no typically we don't so we want to emulate some of the best performing sites that other people use to shop on and we want to be putting them into our very simple Shopify store we definitely don't want to be overthinking it now remember step seven is the most important step in this entire process so all we need to do is get through step six and you will have the secret sauce to being successful imprint on demand so step six is running a very simple Advantage Plus campaign to test our 100 designs remember before when I was talking about needing so many designs it's to give us the best chance of getting results and the way that we do this is basically connecting our Shopify store to Facebook so that Facebook is able to pull in all of our designs all of our prices pretty much everything from Shopify into the ad account and from there it's going to test every single design that we have put on our site in the past running Facebook ads was very complicated and a very manual process now is the easiest time than ever to actually run ads so we're going to set up this simple Advantage Plus catalog campaign test those 100 designs and then look at the breakdown of the data when we're looking at the data we're specifically looking at the number of clicks and also the cost per click so we want to see how many times did somebody click on the ad as well as how expensive were each of those clicks we're looking for cost per click anywhere between 55 and 75 cents with at least three or four clicks from there we can basically say those are good enough designs to reiterate on which leads us to step seven the most important step we are going to look at those designs that got the best cost per click the most clicks we are going to iterate on these designs now what do I mean by iterate this simply means we need to look at why these designs got clicks was it because of the saying that was on the shirt was it because the design we need to kind of break it down and reverse engineer why people liked this product or this design specifically and from there we are going to the expand that type of design or that idea across our Niche so let's say we're in the pickle ball Niche and customers were really liking a funny pickle ball slogan we can break down that design and basically say our best thought is that people really liked the saying or maybe somebody commented about it and said oh my gosh this saying is so funny I send it to my friends we say this all the time we are going to then look within the niche and figure out what are some other sayings that we can pull in to designs to potentially retest and from there after we've made you know 10 15 more designs we can then go back to our ad campaign test these new products that we've now added and rinse and repeat this process over and over until we have built out a high quality collection once we have gone through this process and we've built out that successful catalog we can then start focusing on other areas of driving traffic and this would be marketing again and again to our customers by collecting emails doing email marketing increasing our ad spend building out the ad account the possibilities are endless once you get to this point but if we don't get to a point where we have successful designs our store is never going to stand a chance print on demand really is a numbers game it only takes a few designs taking off to take your store from a 100 sales up to multiple thousands of sales so if you follow these seven steps of this blueprint you were going to be more likely to get thousands of sales and make $1.2 million per year selling T-shirts like I have now if you're interested in learning this process in depth and learning the ins and outs of the blueprint click the link below and join my free school Community where I host a free 21-hour print on demand Shopify course going through every single step of this blueprint and if you're interested in learning how I prepare my print on aand store for Black Friday sales you're going to want to check out this video here [Music]