Journey to 2000/m with POD

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Comrade Luigi

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I recall starting journey threads before only to abandon them. Something I learned is that you just have to commit to something and be consistent with it. I'm using this journey thread to hold myself accountable with committing to POD. In all the years that I've tried to do internet marketing the only thing that I got success in was in POD. So that's what I'll be focusing on.

Right now I make about 300-400/m from POD. Mostly from Merch by Amazon but some sales in Teepublic. My approach is quantity based uploads. Upload thousands of designs and some percentage of them will sell. The MBA account has 1000 designs. I was kind of slacking with the other POD sites that exist because I thought MBA was the best place to make money. I wasn't wrong but when my Amazon account got suspended I got fucked in the ass so to speak. I still collect royalties from it each month but not being able to edit or manage my account sucks.

When my access to the MBA account went down I was motivated to explore other PODs like redbubble and teepublic. It's good to diversify. The past few weeks I've been uploading the 1000 designs I had on MBA to Teepublic. Now I'm expanding on redbubble because why not. Fortunately, I was able to acquire a brand new amazon merch account for a small fee. I can start over again with that account. I'm already starting to upload designs there.

How am I developing the designs? I do my own keyword research and outsource the development to a design team. Sometimes I get ideas from the design team itself and I implement it.

So what will be my approach going forward? Finish uploading everything on Teepublic. I have about 800 listings on Teepublic and 50 on Redbubble. The bulk of my efforts is now focused on Redbubble. I'll also be uploading some stuff on spreadshirt because it looks promising. I placed a order for 500 designs from my design team so I have about 1500 designs to implement and manage.

I do have several goals in the future that I want to take with this.

1. Learn Adobe Illustrator so I can create my own stuff. (I have no design skills.) I've been procrastinating on this so hard due to laziness.
2. Try to do SEO on a listing and rank some keywords.
3. Open my own e-commerce shop by driving FB ads. I want to collect a bunch of sales data from what I sell on these platforms and use them to run paid traffic.
4. Grow my second MBA account.

There's a lot of grinding to this and it's quite frustrating. Some days I just want to give up and do nothing. I use a spreadsheet to keep track of all the designs to make things efficient. I'll do my best to keep on updating this journey as much as I can. If anyone has any questions based on my limited experience then I'm more than happy to do so.
 
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Good luck. You are missing out on Amazon FBM And Etsy. If you have some money for account and listing fees, go for it. Its a numbers game, get as much real estate as you can.
 
Unfortunately, I got banned on Etsy 2 years ago. I was setting up Etsy + Printful integration and uploaded a couple of designs. Then they instantly banned me. I appealed and they just said "we think you're going to violate our policies and we don't want to take the risk. ban is final." I can always get another Etsy account if I was determined but I don't have the desire to do so.

FBM is something that I did before. My seller central account got suspended though over some nonsense lol. What makes FBM tough is that those chinese sellers always comes in and beats you on price. I like MBA because you can't have sellers try to outbid you on your own listing lol. Though I'd consider doing FBM if I was able to manufacture the apparel myself from some cheap third world country. Then I'd be able to compete with them.
 
Minor update.

Uploaded 50 designs on Redbubble and Teepublic. Spent 1-2 hours researching appropriate tags and put it in my sheet. Makes it easier to mass upload. I use this site to help me with ideas. https://automation.merchtitans.com/tools/redbubble-tag-generator

I'm planning on using this service to get myself into T25 on my Merch account. The interesting thing is that those reviews will help me with organic rankings and can help me get sales in the long run. Just waiting for my design to get approved before I do it.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/a...cement-guarantee-black-friday-20-off.1084279/
All this grinding is pretty tiring work. I'm spending about 4-5 hours a day on POD related stuff. Most of it is just uploading stuff and keyword research.

Here's some sales data I have on teepublic. 883 listings uploaded. The work is kind of paying off.

1599400491816.png
 
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Is somebody here working with Shopify + Printful?
 
Minor update.

Uploaded 50 designs on Redbubble and Teepublic. Spent 1-2 hours researching appropriate tags and put it in my sheet. Makes it easier to mass upload. I use this site to help me with ideas. https://automation.merchtitans.com/tools/redbubble-tag-generator

I'm planning on using this service to get myself into T25 on my Merch account. The interesting thing is that those reviews will help me with organic rankings and can help me get sales in the long run. Just waiting for my design to get approved before I do it.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/amazon-reviews-services-at-15-only-on-bhw-with-replacement-guarantee-black-friday-20-off.1084279/
All this grinding is pretty tiring work. I'm spending about 4-5 hours a day on POD related stuff. Most of it is just uploading stuff and keyword research.

Here's some sales data I have on teepublic. 883 listings uploaded. The work is kind of paying off.

View attachment 145308
Are you getting all these teepublic sales from organic traffic or running ads somewhere to bring traffic to your product??
Also, I want some help to getting an MBA Account. How can I get approved by amazon?
 
Is somebody here working with Shopify + Printful?

No. I have a plan to do so in the future but not at the present moment.

Are you getting all these teepublic sales from organic traffic or running ads somewhere to bring traffic to your product??
Also, I want some help to getting an MBA Account. How can I get approved by amazon?

It's all organic traffic. My whole strategy is centered around getting organic traffic to make sales. This is why my next step is to do google seo. MBA is currently difficult to get into. I recommend buying an account from someone that has them. It's what I ended up doing.

Minor update: uploaded another 50 designs to redbubble and another 40 on teepublic. I now have 930 listings on teepublic. 150 on redbubble. Uploaded 3 designs in total on my Merch account. Waiting for approval. When they get approved I’ll start buying amazon reviews to get tiered up.

I've been watching videos on adobe illustrator to get the hang on making my own designs.
 
Minor update.

Uploaded 50 designs on Redbubble and Teepublic. Spent 1-2 hours researching appropriate tags and put it in my sheet. Makes it easier to mass upload. I use this site to help me with ideas. https://automation.merchtitans.com/tools/redbubble-tag-generator

I'm planning on using this service to get myself into T25 on my Merch account. The interesting thing is that those reviews will help me with organic rankings and can help me get sales in the long run. Just waiting for my design to get approved before I do it.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/a...cement-guarantee-black-friday-20-off.1084279/
All this grinding is pretty tiring work. I'm spending about 4-5 hours a day on POD related stuff. Most of it is just uploading stuff and keyword research.

Here's some sales data I have on teepublic. 883 listings uploaded. The work is kind of paying off.

View attachment 145308
Nice to see that you already started earning. KEEP IT UP.
 
Nice to see that you already started earning. KEEP IT UP.

Thanks! Just trying to scale to the best of my ability.

Minor update: I now have 977 listings on teepublic. Will be done by tomorrow. My design team will be giving me 100 designs to upload on the 11th. Procrastinated on uploading on redbubble. Was binge watching "The Good Place" on netflix.

Earnings have picked up today. Today was the most I sold on Teepublic which was 5 shirts. I'm sure my suspended amazon account is still earning money but I won't gain access to the amount I earned until the end of the month. Though if I had to guess it's another 200 or 300 dollars this month. No sales on my Redbubble yet. I'm getting activity in the form of favorites and a follower though.

1599540173823.png

I'm going to slow down on the uploading and fill out my sheet with tags and descriptions. Picked up a subscription of ahrefs so that I can do keyword research for google seo. I'm wondering if I can do parasite SEO on my MBA account. I'm also finding a lot of ideas for designs. You can find a lot of ideas to put on a shirt when you're browsing through social media.
 
Tried to upload on Redbubble but only uploaded 35 designs. I think I got hit with their upload limit. Hopefully, I didn't get barred from uploading permanently. I opened a Etsy account and I didn't get suspended right away. Maybe I'll be able to expand on Etsy after all.

I got so many keyword ideas by playing with ahrefs. Filled my sheet with a bunch of stuff.
 
I used printful for a personal order of mine. Prices were ok. 12.95 for a shirt. Arrived in a week.
 
how do u come up with so many design ? how is your creative process ?
 
how do u come up with so many design ? how is your creative process ?

Ahrefs (recently), casual social media browsing, paying attention to the merch that people wear irl, design team gives me ideas, looking at what has sold already, etc etc. Ideas are everywhere if you open up your mind. It's seeing if there's a lot of competition already on the idea or not. If there's thousands of listings then I'm not going for it. But if it's a handful? It's in the bucket list.
 
How do you have time to upload so many designs and make them SEO ready so fast?
 
Following keenly, wish you the best

Thanks.

How do you have time to upload so many designs and make them SEO ready so fast?

I work on my spreadsheet first. Fill up all the tags and descriptions. Then I just need to mass open a bunch of tabs to upload the designs. (Teepublic allows you to do bulk uploads so it's easier.) Then I quickly upload everything. When you're doing such tedious work like this you learn to do things as efficently as possible.

I'm now officially done uploading on Teepublic for now. All 1000 listings are on it. Now I can go all in on redbubble until those new designs come my way. I decided to upload last month's Merch earnings because why not.

1599611482967.png
 
Really a special journey, good luck and I am following!
 
Where do you get the designs? Do you make them from other sites? or make them?
 
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