Selling Your Designs
As a beginner on Merch, it may be hard to sell your designs, even if you follow everything I have taught until now. As stated near the beginning of this book, you’ll know you’re doing well on Merch if about 30% of your t-shirt designs have sold at least once. But how, especially at lower tiers, can we improve that percentage, or at least make the 30% more profitable?
You can absolutely reach the $1000 per month in 4 months goal with just organic search traffic from Amazon. However, if you want to step up your Merch game and have the desire to earn a lot more with a little bit of effort, there are multiple methods you can use to increase your maximum income potential. Some methods, however, will require a large amount of dedication and time but will pay off greatly after a couple of months.
As Reddit users may already know, sometimes funny t-shirts, quotes, or sayings are featured on the front page of Reddit. These t-shirts are those of which you can likely recreate in your own creative way or outsource easily to professional designers. In the case of a quote or saying, simply create several text-based designs on the given phrase and submit it to Merch. Redditors, as they are called, will almost always request for links to where they can buy the displayed shirt in the comment section, of which you will provide for them in a private message or comment reply. This method is great for earlier Merch tiers, but only leads to a few sales. I completely stopped this method after reaching tier 3 as Reddit users browsing the front page are, from my experience, generally not the ones who are willing and capable of spending money.
Reddit can be used to find evergreen niches in which users are essentially devoted to or very passionate towards. As stated before in the research chapter on Reddit, there are multiple “subreddits” of which are essentially subcategories that make up Reddit. You can click on the “Random” link featured on the top of the Reddit Homepage or search for topics to find subreddits on niches and subjects of which you never knew existed. The next step after you find an active subreddit community, is to become an active member on a potentially profitable subreddit through commenting and discussing in forums. Be helpful and do not say something contradictory to the subreddits values or beliefs. If the subreddit allows it (read the sidebar), advertise a shirt design you made on the given niche the subreddit is based around through a post or comment reply to begin driving sales. I did this a couple times in tier 1 and 2 which led my shirt designs to boost in Amazon Merch rankings. As a result, this led to a couple more organic sales days after the post or comment reply. If done right, this method can lead to dozens of sales and positive t-shirt reviews.