Print on Demand - The comprehensive guide to making a profit from Print on Demand in 2024

Created on 4 April, 2024 • 0 views • 24 minutes read

Profiting from printing on demand is considered one of the easiest ways to profit from the Internet, which requires very little capital, almost zero.

I will not waste your time with long introductions, as this guide is full of information, because you will learn a lot of information in it that you will not find in other places.

Because in this guide you will find everything you need to start step by step in this field:

How does Print on Demand work?

Why is the POD domain the easiest to do Upselling? 

How to choose profitable niches and what is the Cross – Niche that can double your profits

How to search for the best designs in any niche

How to get started on Redbubble

How to sign up for Merch By Amazon

Teespring secrets

How to get started on Etsy

The best tool that makes you outperform competitors and achieve excellent profits

How to market your designs on social media intelligently

When do you create your own store and use Facebook ads?

So bring your delicious hot drink, and read every word in this guide with extreme concentration so that you do not miss any information. Did you bring it? ...Good, let's go then!

1- How does the field of print on demand (POD) work?

Print on demand is one of the areas that customers prefer when purchasing online, because they feel that they are buying something unique that not many people have.

Profit from Print on Demand - The complete guide to profit from Print on Demand in 2020

When a buyer enters an online store that relies on print on demand, such as the one in the picture above, the following happens:

The customer chooses the design he wants

The customer makes the payment

The site prints the T-shirt for the customer 

The T-shirt is shipped to the customer

This is not all, many sites allow the customer to upload the designs he wants and then print them for him according to the previous steps.

You may now be asking how you can profit from printing on demand, as you do not have the various printing tools and you do not even have an online store to market and collect money from customers.

There are many companies that allow you to register an account on their website as a designer, so that you upload your designs, then start promoting them, and the company takes care of the rest, including printing and shipping, in exchange for a portion of the profits.

You can also create your own online store, and link it to one or more of these companies, so the company prints and ships, and you use advertisements for promotion.

Do not worry, it is simpler than you think, and this is what I will show you step by step in this guide, starting with the best companies, how to register with them, and how you can promote your designs for free without any capital.

All the way to how to search for designs and choose profitable niches in this field, then you will learn when to build your own store to double your profits.

Advantages of working in the field of printing on demand

Profiting from printing on demand is one of the best ways to profit from the Internet , especially if you are interested in the field of e-commerce in general, and this is for several reasons, the most important of which are:

You do not need capital because you can start for free or with a very small amount 

The risk is almost non-existent in this field because the printing process does not take place until the customer pays

The percentage of profits in this field is generally higher than others

You can Upsell your customers very easily and increase the number of orders per customer, which doubles your profits

The most important thing is that you do not need to be a professional designer in order to profit from this field. All you need is to have basic marketing skills, and this is what you will learn when you finish reading this guide to the end.

2- Printing on demand is not just for T-shirts

One of the most common misconceptions among many people is that printing on demand is only for T-shirts, and this is completely wrong, as there are many products that fall into this field, see the image below.

Examples of different print on demand products

The previous picture shows simple examples of the different products that are printed on. There are many of these products, such as:

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T-shirts of all kinds (hoodies - regular T-shirts - sleeveless T-shirts) and others

The mugs

Hats

Pillows

Shopping bags

Small carpets

Blankets

Tassels

Governor

Mobile phone covers

Tires

Posters hung on the wall

Posters that are pasted 

Water bottles

And many more. Imagine that you have an online print-on-demand store, and you promote one of the wonderful T-shirts that you own, and when the customer arrives at your site to buy this T-shirt, he also finds that he can buy the same design he likes on a mug, pillow, or drink.

Don't you think he'll buy one of these too?

This is upselling, and for this reason this field is very profitable, as I mentioned previously. Even if you promote through Facebook ads or others, you will achieve large profits because the customer will buy more than one product at a time, which means that the cost of advertising will be lower.

3- Choose a profitable niche

This is the most important step in this guide to making money from print on demand. Before you think about how to design, you must think about the people you are targeting.

You probably know what niche is - if you are new, then niche is the field that you will focus on, such as love of dogs, fitness, football, and others.

That's why you have to choose a profitable niche. A niche where customers love to spend money because they have a great passion for it. Let me give you some examples of profitable niches that I personally tried:

Niche pets, especially dogs

Series and movies niche (it has made decent profits from the Vikings series and the accessories and drawings that its followers love)

Niche of satirical political sayings (You will not believe the volume of sales on T-shirts with some of the sayings of Donald Trump, the President of America) on them.

Niche music 

Gaming niche, especially Fortnite (I have a friend who made $10,000 in profits from a T-shirt with the design of one of the most famous weapons in the game)

You can discover this niche easily when you search a little, especially about things and events that appear new every day, such as games, series, political events, and others.

Did you know, for example, that:

The Witcher series, whose first season was released on Netflix about a month ago, has many followers and those interested in purchasing many products.

The famous Apex Legends game has launched a new update that many people are talking about on the Internet now

Donald Trump's last conference, in which he spoke with a lot of sarcasm about the American elections, which trended on Twitter recently

All these events and information will not take you any time to learn, and this is one of the most important secrets of profit in the field of printing on demand, to provide new ideas.

However, this is not the only way in which you can discover profitable niches or designs, there is more than one way, such as:

Follow famous Facebook groups in any field, especially series

Follow Reddit groups, as it is one of the most popular platforms where you can discover new designs and memes that people love.

The famous Pinterest platform where you can search for the latest designs about dogs, cats, etc

There are many methods and tools that I will show you later that will make you discover the most famous and best designs on the best different print on demand platforms.

The secret to choosing profitable niches

Do you know what is the best way, which many people do not know, to profit in the field of printing on demand, which will enable you to achieve excellent sales and profits?

The method is Cross-Niche. What is meant by this term is to combine more than one niche in one design. See the image below.

Examples of great t-shirts for making money from print on demand

The first design combines the love of dogs with the love of drinking wine, the second combines the love of dogs and the love of coffee, and the third combines the love of dogs with the love of books and reading.

As you can see, these are just examples of combining a pet love niche, such as a dog, with other niches. This is the profitable idea in this field, to combine more than one niche in one design, thus greatly ensuring people’s interest in it and their interaction with it.

This is because you collected what they love in one design, so try to follow this principle constantly in your different designs, and you will find yourself achieving exceptional results.

Search on Etsy

I previously told you about more than one way to search for designs, and this is one of them. The giant Etsy platform is a large online store like Ebay, but it features unique products and handmade crafts.

You will find many wonderful designs on it, and you can click on any seller’s profile to see all their designs, and you will also see the total number of sales for each product.

This way you will know which designs achieve the best results and from which you can draw inspiration for your own ideas and designs.

How to make your own designs

Some people may think that this step is difficult, even though it is easy and simple. At first, you may imitate some of the successful designs that you will find on various platforms.

For example, if you find a wonderful saying, you can create a design with the same saying, but with a change in the font, and so on, and with time you will become better at this matter.

You can then seek the help of a professional designer if you want to implement some complex designs. Platforms such as Fiverr or Fiverr have many who will help you for only $5 per design.

The best professional design tools, in my opinion, are Photoshop and the free Canva tool, which I have used for a long time. It is a simple tool and I recommend it to any beginner.

4- Start on the Redbubble platform

After you searched for the best niche and some designs, what next? How will you profit from print on demand and how will you promote your designs?

All of this will be resolved when you create an account on the giant Redbubble platform , which is a leading print-on-demand platform that is accessed by millions of people every month.

After you register an account, choose the product on which you want to put your design, then modify the design and place it on the product in a way that suits you, adjusting the appropriate size, then put the product name and its description.

The process of choosing a name and description is very important on any platform, so look carefully at similar designs and how they are named and try to emulate them, and remember that people use search to find products.

That's all you need, Redbubble will automatically promote your designs to new visitors and also when anyone searches for designs similar to yours.

When anyone buys one of your designs, Redbubble will get its share of the price of the T-shirt or product itself, printing, and shipping, and you get the rest.

Redbubble website features:

Ease of registration and use

Promote new designs for free

There are a large number of products that can be printed, unlike many other platforms

You can place more than 50 designs at one time

This is one of the features of this site. You can create many designs and products at the same time for free without any complexity. Imagine designing 50 different products.

Then you just set the name and description so that people will find it easily when searching for similar products, and you leave the rest on the site. The more one of your designs sells, the more the site will promote it more and more.

This is how many people began to profit from print on demand, testing as many designs as possible for free until they found the most profitable designs and then promoting them themselves to increase profits.

5- Start on the Merch by Amazon platform

After you make some designs and publish them on the Redbubble platform, I want you to move to the giant Amazon and subscribe to the Merch by Amazon service .

Of course, you know that the Amazon website is visited by millions of people on a daily basis to buy everything that comes to mind, which is why Amazon offers a T-shirt printing service on demand.

You create your own designs, then set the name and description of the T-shirt, then leave the rest to Amazon in terms of selling, printing, and shipping.

As Amazon notes, it only provides T-shirt printing services, and this is one of the biggest drawbacks. However, if your design is acceptable, you will make more profits due to the huge volume of sales on Amazon.

As you know, Amazon is a giant website, so there are many conditions that you must adhere to, and the application process itself requires some effort from you.

But do not worry, you will learn everything you need through the complete guide to profit from Merch by Amazon so that you can start making your first dollar on this platform.

You will also learn about the best tools to search and spy on the best-selling T-shirts on Amazon, which you can use in your own designs on other platforms.

After you finish this guide, go and check out the Amazon guide as it is absolutely essential.

6- Start on the Teespring platform

Teespring is one of the most popular platforms in the field of print on demand, which is visited by more than 20 million people every month to purchase T-shirts and various products.

The Teespring platform offers great features that many other platforms do not offer, and in return, there are a set of rules that you must adhere to in order to benefit from this platform.

The difference between Teespring and Redbubble or Merch By Amazon is that Teespring does not directly promote your designs.

Suppose, for example, that you created a new account and put some designs in the pets niche. These designs will not appear to anyone who searches for them on the platform.

This is because Teespring relies on Trust Score, and does not promote any new designs to any new account until they have gained the trust of the site.

In order to gain this trust, you must sell at least 3 to 5 products on your account. This is very simple, and later I will tell you how to do it very easily.

Teespring platform features:

You can create your own store on the platform called Store Front in which you collect some designs in one place, and thus you can do Upsell automatically.

You can create more than one Store Front

You can create a very large number of designs

The platform offers a large number of products other than T-shirts, but it is not as diverse as Redbubble

You can extract your customers' email list to promote them in the future

You can use Facebook Pixel from day one to collect customer data and create your own audience that you can use to promote ads on Facebook in the future.

After you achieve your first sales and your Trust Score increases, you can subscribe to the multiple marketing service 

The best feature Teespring offers is the multi-marketing service, where the platform places your designs on Amazon, eBay, and Etsy and promotes them on its own, in exchange for a percentage of the profits.

For this reason, I advise any beginner to put his designs on this platform, then start promoting them a little, then leave the rest on the platform and only care about publishing more designs.

7- Start on the Etsy platform

You can place your designs on the Etsy store, but what is different here is that you are obligated to do the printing process, and in order to do this you must link your account on the Etsy store to a service such as Prinful .

Print on demand on Etsy Store

Printful is similar to Redbubble and Teespring, but the difference is that you can link it to different stores and platforms such as the Shopify store or the Etsy store.

In this way, anyone who buys one of your designs on Etsy, Prinful, will print the design and ship it to the customer’s address automatically without any intervention from you.

But there are several things you need to keep in mind to get started on this platform.

In order to publish any product on this platform, you must pay 20 cents, which is of course a very small amount

You must have capital. When any customer buys one of your designs, you are the one who directly pays the Printful platform the cost of printing and shipping, and then you get your profits from Etsy.

It's like dropshipping , you buy printed products from a place, and sell them on your Etsy store.

That's why I made this the last platform you should start with. After you achieve some profits on the other platforms, you can put your best designs on Etsy in order to take advantage of the great traffic of this site.

The Etsy platform is also characterized by the elegance of its customers, which is why you can increase the cost of your designs compared to other sites without any problem.

8- The best tool that helps you profit from printing on demand

The main problem anyone faces in making a profit from print on demand is promotion, and I do not mean here where to market your designs, this is not a problem at all.

But what I mean is how to promote, let me ask you differently, how do you convince a specific person that your design is great and they should buy it?

The solution to this problem is to make this person see how your product will look in reality. He needs to see someone like him wearing a T-shirt or a necklace, or see a picture of a mug with the design on it.

If you put a picture of your T-shirt with the design on it, the person will not be convinced easily. It is better to put a picture of a real model wearing the T-shirt so that he can buy it.

That's why all major stores in the world photograph models wearing different products and place these pictures on all pages of the store in order to convince customers.

Of course, we don't have the budget to ask anyone to wear the designs and photograph them, nor even to do it ourselves because we would need to purchase the designs and ship them, which is an additional cost.

There is a much simpler solution, which is to exploit the genius PlaceIt platform that solves all these problems and more for you and helps you promote and profit.

When you register an account on this platform, all you need to do is upload a picture of your design, then choose the mockup or model you want (T-shirt - mug - pillow) and others.

Then you choose any image of the model displayed in front of you, and the tool will automatically modify the image and create your own design, after which you can download the new image and use it however you want.

Example of using Placeit Mockups for mugs

As you saw in the previous animated images, there are hundreds of pictures of different models in all positions and places for all types of products that may come to mind, even phone covers (covers), you will find there.

What is also unique about the Plcaeit service is that you can upload an unlimited number of images, so no matter how many designs you try, there is no problem at all.

The site also offers you the service of creating logos and videos completely free of charge and indefinitely when you register an account on the site.

You can use all of these images and videos to promote and achieve very large profits, for example:

You can place these pictures of the models on your Facebook account when you promote the designs in various famous groups in your niche.

You can place these images on your Pinterest and Instagram accounts to promote your designs for free

You can use these images and models when you use Facebook ads, in this way your conversion rate will increase dramatically

As I mentioned previously, these pictures will easily convince anyone to buy your products because they will see themselves in them. You will also enjoy an unlimited number of pictures that you can download from the site and thus you can test any model you want.

Not only that, if you like a picture of a particular model, you can use it in all your products. For example, you can get a picture of him wearing your T-shirt.

There is also a picture of him drinking from a mug that has the same design on it, while sitting next to a pillow that has the same design on it, and so on.

All of this will make customers trust you, and if you use these photos on the social media accounts that you use for promotion, some may think that these are your photos, and all of this increases trust between you and those interested, which makes converting them into customers simple and easy.

This is why I strongly advise you to use the PlaceIt service , as its cost is very simple, only $14 per month. You can purchase it only once for the first month in order to use it in all your designs on various platforms.

Then, after you make profits, you can open another account. You will benefit a lot in return for this simple investment.

9- Start promoting correctly on social media

Remember that most of the previous platforms do not require you to promote directly, but of course the more you market your products yourself, the faster you will get your profits and then you can expand your business and use advertisements.

I indicated how to promote your products in the previous step of the complete guide to making a profit from print on demand, but what I want to say here is that whatever means you rely on to promote in the beginning to increase your profits, whether it is Facebook groups, an Instagram account, or Pinterest, is... To be smart.

Do not publish your designs crudely in different groups and pages. Let me give you an example. Suppose, for example, that I have a design for one of Trump’s sayings. I will promote it on Facebook groups as follows.

I will place one of the model images from the Placeit platform as the cover image for my personal account 

I will use the same image for the profile

I will search for the most famous groups that talk about Trump

I will participate in the group and leave comments and questions naturally, and I will not mention my design at all

After time passes, I am confident that many members of these groups will ask me about the T-shirt design and how they can buy it, and then I will give them my link.

If I were to promote the same t-shirt on Instagram, I would do the following:

I will create a special account for the politics niche

I will post some memes and funny pictures in this niche that I can easily find on Reddit and on similar accounts on Instagram.

I will use a photo from Placeit as my profile picture

I will put the link to purchase the design in the profiles

I will be using hashtags and growing the account organically by posting twice a day

Over time, I will publish some sarcastic sayings, and at the same time I will put a picture of some models from Plceit in the same post, and mention that the purchase link is in the bio.

Thus, I will continue to promote these and other niches on various platforms. This is how marketing is done freely and intelligently.

10- Grow your business through your own online store.

The last step, which will bring you excellent profits, is to create your own store on the Shopify platform and connect it to the Prinful or Printfy service, etc.

Then you use ads for promotion. You will have tested a lot of niches and designs for free. When you find some profitable designs that are in fairly high demand, you can then invest your profits in creating a professional store so that you use Facebook ads to market your products and increase your profits.

I advise you to start creating your first store as soon as you achieve the first $300 from the previous platforms. This is what I did personally. Let me tell you my funny story with profit from printing on demand.

What did I do to earn from POD

When I started in this field, I did not know how to start. I did not know how to design any T-shirt, but I researched a little and started experimenting.

So I created an account on Teespring and waited for the profits to come in and put some designs on it on the fitness niche but nothing happened, then I knew I needed to make sales and promote my designs myself.

Then I found Redbubble, and I put some designs on it, but I didn't achieve any sales either, even though I started promoting on Pinterest and Instagram.

Then, after researching, I discovered that my designs are very simple and therefore no one accepts them, so I tried about 137 designs until I reached the yoga and music niche.

It is the profitable niche that made me achieve 7 sales on the Redbubble platform. I took advantage of the profits and searched for the owners of some pages interested in yoga on Instagram.

I wrote to the owners of these pages and offered to send them my T-shirts for free, provided that they put a post with a picture of them wearing the T-shirt for 24 hours on their accounts, with a link to purchase the T-shirts on Teespring, and I told them that this is just the beginning of the cooperation between us.

I got the addresses of 3 of those page owners, and bought t-shirts for them from Teespring – thus I promoted myself and started fulfilling some of the platform’s requirements.

The important thing is that one of these influencers scammed me and did not post the post, and the rest did, thank God, and on the same day I achieved 57 sales, and this was a wonderful thing because from each T-shirt I earned approximately 10 dollars.

So I created my own store and focused on the yoga niche. I started promoting my products and increased my profits when I learned about the PlaceIt service. If I had known about it in advance, I would have made more and more profits.

After a while, I sold the store and social media accounts for a large sum, thank God, and moved on to another project.

Conclusion

I told you the previous story to know that anything is possible and available when you try and get a little tired, it is very simple but it is not easy.

You know what you have to do and how to do it, and all that remains is the work. You now have in your hands everything you need to profit from printing T-shirts or printing on demand.

Start now. You will only invest your time and a very small amount to buy the tool I told you about, then try and try to create hundreds of designs, especially with the presence of services that are promoted automatically without effort.

Imagine if you put 50 designs on all the previous platforms after testing and experimenting with several designs. It might take you a month, two, or even six.

But after that, you will get profits automatically without much effort, and with time you can invest in your project, cooperate with a professional designer, create your own store, and promote your products using Facebook ads.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to leave them for us in the comments, and this series for making money from printing on demand continues, especially if you tell us that you want the third part in the comments.

We may share with you some strategies, designs, and spy tools that not many people know. There is also some information about design sizes, types of T-shirts, and the best companies that you should deal with, especially if you create your own store.

I will wait for you in the comments.

Written by: Muhammad Nour

#Marketer