How to Make $100/DAY with FREE Traffic (TUTORIAL) – Print-On-Demand Tutorial with Etsy

HOW TO MAKE $100 PER DAY WITH FREE TRAFFIC

PRINT-ON-DEMAND TUTORIAL WITH ETSY

Hey, everybody!

Today, I’m going to give you a tutorial on how to earn over $100 a day online with a digital business. And the best part?

One, to do this, you need minimal technical skills.

Two, anybody can do this. It doesn’t matter if you’re a teenager, 13, 14, 15, or on the other side of the age scale. You can do this, too.

Third, this business can be semi-automated to passively make $100 a day.

Fourth, to get started, you need very little start-up money. My article will show you how

But how much money is very little, you ask. What if I said that you didn’t need $500, and if you didn’t need $200, and that you didn’t even need $50? No, what if I said, start this business; you will only need $20. That’s right, just $20. With that, anyone can start this business.

Now, full disclosure: I will include an extra step at the end of this tutorial that you can use to supercharge the amount of money you make in the beginning. That will take your start-up budget to $100. However, doing this is optional.

What is this mystery business?

Well, let me show you. So, I’m here on Etsy. If you’ve never heard of Etsy, it’s an online selling platform for unique items. It works a lot like eBay but without that bidding aspect. You list your items for sale, and people buy them.

Selling on Etsy is super lucrative because over 35 million people buy items from stores on Etsy each year. Etsy started as a marketplace for handcrafted items.

However, over time, Etsy has massively grown and evolved, and now people open all sorts of different stores, selling different types of items in many different niches.

For example, some stores focus on creating and selling costumes and cosplay items. As you can imagine, creating those types of items is very difficult, so let’s not do that. And here is another type of store people open: stores that focus on sourcing and selling vintage items, like books and jewelry.

Going to garage sales sounds extremely time-consuming, so that’s a no. And here is another type of store that people open: stores that focus on taking cute, funny, and popular sayings, memes, and jokes and placing them onto items like mugs and T-shirts.

Wait a minute, that sounds easy. 

Now, you might not think that this sounds easy, but trust me, it is actually really easy. In this video tutorial, I’ll show you how you can replicate their business and sell those types of items yourself. Of course, it may be easy, but is it lucrative?

Can you make $100 a day selling these types of items?

Well, let’s check out one of these stores for ourselves. We’ve come to an example of a store that specializes in these items.

WitticismsRus has lots of different items featuring jokes and cute sayings. Admittedly, some of these are not family-friendly, and as this is a family-friendly channel, I won’t be showing them, even though they do sell very well.

Luckily, they do have family-friendly items that are selling very well, like this mug.

This is a very simple mug. It features the text, nope, and that’s just it. But look, it’s been favored by over 400 people. That’s a lot of people.

This alone means I know this is a very popular item for them. But we don’t even need to guess, honestly, because if we check it out, five people have this item in their cart today. And if we assume that they are buying the cheaper $14 mug instead of the bigger, more expensive $19 mug, that would make them $70 from these five sales alone.

Check this out. They have a T-shirt version of this mug, and look, seven people have added it to their cart. That is $126 worth of sales. So, so far, we’re up to $196. And if we check it out, 13 people have added this simple T-shirt that features text, not images, just text, to their cart. That is $234 from this one T-shirt alone. Now, we’re up to $430 from these three items.

Not all these items that have been added to people’s carts will be bought, but given the sheer volume, it’s very clear that this store is doing over $100 a day. Despite how truly basic these items are, they are selling super well.

But why?

One, they make funny, fun gifts for friends and family.

These phrases and jokes are already popular and have a pre-existing demand.

As a bonus for us, despite meeting these criteria, these jokes and phrases are not copyrighted or trademarked.

Yes! Now, you might think, this looks like a super basic T-shirt. I’ll give you that, but I don’t have a stack of Nope T-shirts in my garage to resell. They might be super basic T-shirts, but I don’t have any to list on Etsy.

Well, you would be right. You don’t have many of them sitting at home for you to resell, but as I’m about to show you, these meme stores selling them don’t have them sitting in the garage either.

Let me show you

So, back here on our example store, WitticismsRus, if we check it out, you’ll see that in their store profile, they state how they make their items, and lo and behold, they are using what is called a print-on-demand service to create and print all their products that they’re selling here on Etsy.

Here is the trick

They’re using print-on-demand services to remove all risks and headaches from their business. Many of my subscribers here at Wholesale Ted will know what print-on-demand is.

However, I will briefly explain it for those of you who aren’t that in here. Here’s an example of a print-on-demand service, Printify.com. I chose it because it’s Etsy sellers’ number one print-on-demand service. What Printify does is it lets you create custom items like mugs and T-shirts.

So you create an account with Printify, the free version being perfect for beginners. You then create your products to sell on it. All you do is place your artwork, which you’ve created in advance, on top of your chosen product, like this T-shirt.

Thanks to Printify’s Etsy integration, you can then list the items you’ve created with Printify for sale in your Etsy store. Each time a customer adds one of your items to their cart and buys it, Printify’s manufacturers will be notified of the sale. They will produce and manufacture that one item, and then they will package and ship it out directly to your customer.

This is an entirely hands-off model, which is why it is semi-passive.

Another awesome thing about it is that you don’t have to purchase your products in advance. As you can see, Printify charges $9.03 to print one custom male basic T-shirt if you have a free Printify account with them, not a premium one.

Once you start making more sales, I recommend upgrading to the premium one because it will give you a discount on each item you order. Well, as you can see, WitticismsRus is selling their T-shirts for $18, with shipping being an additional cost for the customer.

After Etsy selling fees, which are very low by industry standards, I want to add that it would leave Witticisms Rus with $7.08 in profit per T-shirt. That is a 39% profit margin, meaning you could have a 39% profit margin if you took action.

In the future, your margins would increase even more after buying a premium Printify subscription, of course, because that would discount the items even further.

These are very high-profit margins, which makes it even easier to build your store up to over $100 a day in profit if you’re willing to put in the time and effort. And yes, building your store up will take time and patience to be as big as WitticismsRus.

Now, if you don’t have that time or patience or a faster business model and are looking for a faster business model, I recommend that you check out our free e-book. It’s called The Six Steps that Six-Figure Drop Shipping Stores Follow to Make Over $10,000 Every Month, and you can download it for yourself by clicking on the link in the video description below.

However, full disclosure: That business method requires more start-up money. Each business model has its own pros and cons.

The plan for this business model

We want to create our own witty T-shirts, mugs, and products that we can print on demand and sell on Etsy to make over $100 a day.

The question is:

How do we find those jokes, memes, and phrases to print onto our products?

Well, honestly, the easiest way is to go to Etsy, look at these meme joke stores, and see which jokes and phrases they are successfully turning into money-making products themselves. You can then make your variation of the most popular products.

And let me show you why this is a good idea.

So let’s come to a new mug, for example. Not that type of doctor. This is a standard graduate PhD joke. It’s based on a TV trope: the only doctors that exist in TV shows are medical doctors and not other forms of academic doctors. Now, this mug comes from this store here, StrictlyBusinessMugs.

As you can see, they are a super popular Etsy store with over 9,000 sales.

Like most Etsy print-on-demand stores, they have a small percentage of super popular items that bring in regular sales, like this mug, which you can see is in 15 people’s carts. People are regularly buying it.

Now, some people find this mug because it’s popular and snap buy it, but others, well, they will look at their options, and so they’ll come to the search bar, type the item in, and do a search for it to see if there are any similar mugs. As we can see, there are, but there aren’t many. There are only five.

If we look at this one, we can see that it’s not very popular because it has a pretty plain design. It uses fundamental text, a kind of ugly font, on a plain white background.

If we open this other mug, which is very similar, we can see the exact same thing: very boring black font on a white mug.

Of course, if we check out this one, we can see that while it’s more interesting, the font doesn’t fit. It gives off an early, like, young; I’m 20s vibe.

So, honestly, it doesn’t surprise me that coming back, this one here is by far the most popular version of it.

It’s got a professional-looking font, which fits with the idea of what a new PhD graduate would like. So, it would be a great opportunity to piggyback on this phrase and create your variation of this because, with this one, it’s easy to do that.

For example:

You could use the exact same font but switch colors around. Make the mug white and the text black. Or you could spice up the font using this free flatline medical font for the doctor’s text. And maybe you could try something a little bit different. You could print this text onto a travel mug instead to give the potential customer more options.

Now, I’m going to switch back to my computer because I’ve got another important tip for you. As you can see, this meme joke mug store has 1,349 designs. That’s a lot of designs.

How do you know the best sellers for you to make your versions of?

Well, honestly, the easiest way to do it is to focus on mugs that we know customers have added to their carts. To do that, open your browser’s search functionality and type, “People have added this to their cart.”

If we do that, all of the items that have been added to people’s carts will be highlighted, so we can easily identify them and sift through them. Now, when you’re sifting through these designs, focus entirely on the ones that are made out of simple artwork and ignore the ones that feature more elaborate designs and images.

So for example, this is a good mug to make your version of. It’s just basic text, and as we can see, it’s super popular, as over 20 people have added it to their cart. But this mug, this alpaca mug, you want to ignore designs like this because it’s a much more elaborate complex design that, even worse, features artwork. So we have to say no to it, which is sad because I love alpacas.

However, sticking to products with only competitors using text-based designs is essential.

Why?

Because we’ve only got a $20 budget, and pretty much anyone can create basic text art for free. Here’s the thing: As we’ve discussed before on this channel, if you wanted to hire an independent designer to create an image for you, say, by hiring them on Upwork or Fiverr, you would be looking at a minimum of $25 per design.

So, just one design breaks our $20 budget. But take a look at this. I replicated the same word I had designed in Photoshop, which took about five minutes. It’s literally just text. This is what all these meme shops are doing: making basic text art and slapping it on print-on-demand products.

I use Photoshop, which has a monthly subscription of $9.99, but you can download the free open-source graphics editor software, GIMP, which does the same thing. But I don’t suggest that you copy these designs.

I suggest you make your variations of the same product. So, I went here to make my variation here. It’s very similar, but as you can see, it uses a stereotypically academic font, which makes it more targeted towards the demographic here of students.

And you know, it may take you five, 10, or maybe even 20 minutes to create one text-based design, but once you’ve got one design, you can repurpose it with different words, phrases, and jokes. I mean, take a look at this. This store has just created a few templates for this eat, sleep, and repeat design and plugged different words into it.

It’s a really easy way to create new designs to test fast, and this is important because if we look at the designs here at the top, these five designs are pretty popular, with these two being the most popular. They’ve all been added to people’s carts. But if you scroll down, you’ll see that the store has made many other similar designs on different topics, but they aren’t as big sellers. No one has them sitting in their cart.

This is how these stores work

They add lots of different products to the store, with different jokes, targeting different groups of people, like soccer fans and anime fans. Then, they see which items and designs do well and which ones don’t, and this is called product testing.

The ones that do well stay in the store, and the ones that don’t sell well will eventually get removed. They can add lots of these jokes because they either use simple word art or reuse word art and just plug in different jokes. So remember how we’ve set aside $20 in start-up money? Well, now is the time for us to use that.

You see, each time you list an item on Etsy, it costs you 20 cents. The item stays up on the site for free for four whole months. So, if you’re serious about starting this business, then I’d recommend that over the next one to two weeks, you go out there and list five to ten products a day, following this strategy.

You aim to get 100 products to test, and 100 products times 20 cents equals $20. When you’re listing products, make sure that you use simple search engine optimization techniques.

To do that, we need to do a quick brainstorming session.

What sort of people would want to buy this mug?

Well, obviously, people who want to give a funny, fun gift to their friend or family member who either has a PhD or is soon to be graduating with one should use that right now.

Okay, so let’s go to the search bar, start typing in PhD, and see what we get. Etsy shows us in the recommended search the most commonly searched relevant keywords. Some relevant keywords are PhD gift, PhD graduation gift, and PhD mug.

Research relevant keywords

You need to do keyword research first. Then, use these words and phrases in your product tags when you’re listing the item. You also want to make sure that you include these words and phrases in your item listing.

We can see that the seller did it here in their title. To be honest, consumers don’t really read the titles on Etsy. They focus on the images, so even though Etsy says not to do it, I recommend that you feel free to keyword stuff like they did.

Make sure that you also include the joke or phrase you’re targeting. Unlike them, I recommend that you include those keywords inside your product listing description, not just in your title. When you’re writing your description, don’t just put two lines of text.

Spend time looking at top-selling stores and basing your description on what they do so that you can look professional and trustworthy. Remember, Printify does have a refund policy for non-customized items, so you can take advantage of that to add further trust. 

Now, it’s up to you to go out there and list your 100 main products on Etsy while using these search engine optimization techniques. But of course, before we stop here, I did say that there was a bonus step that you could do to supercharge your sales, which would bump up your start-up budget to $100.

What is that?

Well, it’s a bit sneaky, although it’s perfectly legal. So I’m going to show it to you, and then you can make up your own mind about how you feel about it. If I come to Etsy and type PhD mug” into the search bar, below are the ad results, which you have to pay for.

You’ll see a bunch of mugs that Etsy’s search algorithm chooses to sit here. Now, there are hundreds of different products that have been created aimed at PhD students and graduates, and yet, for some reason, our good old mug is sitting here near the very top of the results. And it’s important because, obviously, the higher your item sits in those results, the more likely that someone searching for a PhD mug will find your item and, therefore, buy it.

So here is a question

How is it that the Etsy search engine algorithm sifted through hundreds of relevant items and yet chose this particular mug to sit near the top of its results? There are a few factors, but the biggest are recent sales and conversions. It’s quite similar to the Amazon search engine algorithm, which can be gamed in a very similar way.

What Etsy wants to see is that your item has:

One that your item has been recently purchased.

Two, a high percentage of people who opened up your item listing bought it.

The step-by-step method to gaming Etsy search results to get even more sales

Step one:

Create a heavily discounted coupon and give it to your friends.

Basically, you want to go to the coupon creator inside your Etsy account and create a coupon that applies a big discount, like 99%, to the item, with a no-order minimum requirement.

You should then give this coupon to your friends and make sure that they open an Etsy account.

Step two:

Have five friends each buy a different item using a search keyword. So now, what you want them to do is sign into their Etsy accounts, go to the search bar, and type in the keyword you’re trying to target, like, say, PhD mug.

You then want them to scroll through the results until they find your mug listing and click on it. Keep in mind that because your store will be new, there’s a good chance that your item is sitting back multiple pages along the line, so make sure your friends realize that and are willing to go through and sift through the results until they find yours.

Step three:

Have them immediately buy the item using the discount coupon code and reimburse them. Now, when they click on your item listing, make sure that they buy it immediately without leaving the page or bouncing. This will indicate to Etsy that your product has a high conversion rate of people landing on your item listing and then purchasing it.

Because your friends will be using a discount coupon code, your Etsy fees will be super low, and of course, you can reimburse them for the cost of the item and the shipping.

Step four:

Get them to leave a review with a photo.

And finally:

Ask your friends very nicely to please leave a review of your product and upload a photo when they do this. Hopefully, your friends will give you a perfect five-out-of-five-star review. For legalities and transparency, you can get your friends to say that they were given a review copy inside the review.

Customers will still trust it if the review is reasonably detailed and includes a photo. So, as I see it, this is an entirely optional step. However, it is a great way to boost five of your items to the top of the Etsy search results while getting reviews for your store and helping build trust with new customers.

I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial. If you would like even more videos and tutorials on how to build a money-making online business, be sure to subscribe to Wholesale Ted and click that little notification bell next to it so that you don’t miss out on any of our videos.

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