Why you should start with just one platform in the beginning before expanding onto other platforms. Whether you start with a RedBubble, Merch by Amazon, Teepublic, Spreadshirt, Society 6, any of the hundreds of print on demand websites out there.
You should stick to just one platform and then move on to other platforms.
This is more for people that are still trying to get from point A to B, with A being starting and B being their first $1.
If you’re producing, really in-depth designs and you are an artist, get your name out there to as many places as you possibly can.
But for somebody who’s doing this more for the revenue rather than the creative outlook or the fame, you want to just stick to one platform and here’s why:
You want to be able to master that platform
You want to be able to figure out
- What descriptions work well on that platform
- What the tags or bullet points look like on a winning product
- How the title should be formatted to increase organic views and sales
You’ll also be able to create some quick workflows so you can spend more time creating designs and less time uploading. It becomes muscle memory going through the uploading process when you’re on your 100th upload.
Workflows are going to save you so much time in the long run, instead of uploading each design to 3 or 4 or 5 platforms after every creation, you can batch them out.
PROTIP: name your images what you would title them.
Some platforms, like Spreadshirt, take the filename and automatically plug it in for the title and draw keyword suggestions from it. You can literally upload and have live 25 products in less than 5 minutes.
Some platforms, like RedBubble, are a bit more cumbersome to upload to, where you’ll want/need to edit each individual product to get it to your liking.
Anyway, the point is that when you master a workflow on a platform you can spend more time designing.
The magic number is around 100 designs before you start seeing some magic happen. Say you only have 2 hours per day to create and it takes you half an hour to upload those creations per platform. That’s 1.5 hours of designing if you upload to one platform. One hour for two platforms. Half an hour for three platforms. See what I mean?
By mastering one, you can start getting that muscle memory down to where you start remembering where you can speed through some steps, where you can copy-paste certain parts, etc. It’s totally worth it.
Here’s a great thing to start doing when you first start this journey: keep a spreadsheet with your titles, descriptions, bullet points, tags, and earnings of every design you create.
If I could go back in time, I would 100% do this. Here’s why…
By keeping track of all of these offline or in a Google Drive, when it’s time for you to expand you can easily start uploading by having all that information in front of you instead of having to copy and paste from TeePublic, Amazon, etc.
Not only that, if you start recording earnings of individual designs, you can order your spreadsheet to prioritize those to upload first.
What you’ll find is about a lot of your top earners will be top earners on other platforms. What you’ll also find is low earning designs on one platform suddenly start earning well on other platforms.
This is because different platforms have different audiences. But you need to master one audience before moving to the next.
Trust me in this spreadsheet and keeping all your design information in.
And once you expand to a new platform, your spreadsheet earnings will update based on new income. A prior low earning design might be your new priority because it took off.