Scaling Online Shirt Sales?

Hello all,

First of all I should probably say that I'm not entirely sure that this is the proper forum for this post. If that is the case, I would papreciate it if someone could direct me to a more appropriate section of the site.

Back to the post--

I'm fairly new to IM, however I've been selling shirts online using services like Zazzle and screened for a couple of years now. I haven't really done much when it comes to promotion to sell my shirts other than listing them on a social site that's kind of a mix between amazon and pinterest. Since doing that, the whole operation has more or less been on autopilot and earns me a small monthly sum.

For a while, one of my shirts on zazzle was the top ranking result for what I would say is a somewhat popular, fairly specific search. It was also advertised by Zazzle, who took a cut whenever I made a sale because of one of their ads. Today, however, I've come to find that my shirt was knocked to #2 by an amazon post, and that my shirt is no longer being advertised by zazzle. I'm looking to start regrowing my operation, but after years on autopilot, I'm just not sure how to do so. I've reached out to the owners of popular twitter accounts which I think have a concentration of followers in the niche which would be interested in my shirts, but I have yet to find anyone dedicated enough to follow through with the promotion; neither paid nor with a generous "affiliate" incentive.

Have any of you grown an operation like this successfully? Are there ways to automate the shirt creation and design grabbing process?

I understand that nobody here wants to give away their secrets (and rightfully so) but I would really appreciate any sort of help, feedback, or commentary.

Thanks

- Create a Pinterest account (Female preferably - Women majority)
- Create Board for tees (Women tees preferably)
- Get Pinterest bot (FollowLiker is good & easy to use)
- Set bot to pin all tees on board or pin the best one's manually if you can (Zazzle automatically adds ref id in link)
- Set bot to follow members in similar boards
- Sit back & collect ref commission
- Scale up - Create new boards for other clothing (Jacket, Hoodies, Tanktop, Underwears...)

Read pinterest journey threads: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/f167-my-journey-discussions/

Here's one: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...watch-me-i-go-1000-week-pinterest-amazon.html

Hope this helps. Best of luck.

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for your help!

In simple terms, you want to be able to have maximum visibility on the platforms you're selling as well as external exposure.

On Amazon, to have more visibility for whatever key term or niche you're product is listed in, you'd need high sales velocity, and an optimised listing. This would increase your BSR (best seller rank). Separately and to help sales you need to get high numbers of reviews. The simplest way to achieve both is to do a giveaway for a few hundred units to review clubs. This will get you your reviews, and it will spike your sales velocity. I'm not too familiar with Zazzle so I cannot comment on that.

In terms of driving external exposure and visibility - use the visual platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr & Instagram. Share content (this is product based content and then niche based content) periodically. Learn how to build followings on these platforms. There are lots of guides here on how to utilize these platforms to their fullest potential.

I know I've over simplified and there are other ways which I've missed out but I'm pretty sure that if you do the above you'll see a positive shift.

Hope this helps.

utterlyadrift25 said:

In simple terms, you want to be able to have maximum visibility on the platforms you're selling as well as external exposure.

On Amazon, to have more visibility for whatever key term or niche you're product is listed in, you'd need high sales velocity, and an optimised listing. This would increase your BSR (best seller rank). Separately and to help sales you need to get high numbers of reviews. The simplest way to achieve both is to do a giveaway for a few hundred units to review clubs. This will get you your reviews, and it will spike your sales velocity. I'm not too familiar with Zazzle so I cannot comment on that.

In terms of driving external exposure and visibility - use the visual platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr & Instagram. Share content (this is product based content and then niche based content) periodically. Learn how to build followings on these platforms. There are lots of guides here on how to utilize these platforms to their fullest potential.

I know I've over simplified and there are other ways which I've missed out but I'm pretty sure that if you do the above you'll see a positive shift.

Hope this helps.

Click to expand...

For his social following he wants to build content designed entirely to entertain the consumer, but has strong sales emotions built in that they are triggered to want to buy the product or service after watching the sales pitch ads... So right now I think he needs to work on excellent quality content to build up repeat sales.

I've had great success selling apparel online through using FB Ads, Instagram and Twitter. Grew my accounts using followliker and shoutouts, now it's pretty easy for my to make sales. Contrary to popular belief, I get sales on Twitter, in fact most of my sales come from the Twitter accounts I've grown.