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Selling T-Shirts Online: Is It
Really Zero Costs?
For more information on the book,
All Income, No Costs: Sell Your T-shirts On The Web by
Thomas Christopher, PhD
click the image:
Selling your T-shirt designs at print-on-demand sites online has a very
low barrier to entry, nearly "zero cost."
Assuming you already have a home computer, an Internet connection, and
time, you can set up a Web T-shirt shop at no extra expense. That
counts as "zero cost." Let's see how that works.
You can set up an account at a print on demand T-shirt website for
free. You then set up "stores" or "galleries" at that site.
Printfection and Zazzle let you open stores for free. An equivalent,
"premium" store at CafePress costs about $60 a year, pretty much pocket
change, a month's coffee money.
To create your designs, you need an image editor. The GNU Image
Manipulation Program (GIMP) is available free and has as much power as
you would ever need.
Your image editor may have a steep learning curve. A powerful enough
image editor -- powerful enough for you to grow with -- is complex
enough so that you might get lost in its intricacies when you're just
starting out. At this point you may find it worthwhile to pay for a
book on how to use it, another couple of weeks' coffee money.
You don't need to be artistic -- text-only designs sell. You don't need
to be clever with words -- some false, blunt, unwitty slogans sell. You
need only express the feelings and attitudes of your customers.
You need to attract people to your Web T-shirt shop. You need to know
what keywords they are searching for and how many pages are competing
to attract them with those keywords. You want the most people searching
and the fewest pages competing. This information is available free
through Google's keyword tool and the Google search page. At
WordTracker, you can pay $60 per month to save time and effort, or
$27.50 per month if you buy their service by the year.
You'll want to advertise your site, but you had better be careful. The
markup on any T-shirt, the amount you get when one is sold, is in the
$1-$3 range, and most customers buy only one. You cannot afford to pay
very much for any customer you attract your site. Fortunately there are
places to advertise for free on the Web.
What you most want though, is for your site to end up on page one of
the search engine results for the search terms your customers are
using. For that you need quality back links, that is links pointing to
your website from other quality websites. The best way to get quality
back links is to post useful information online containing links back
to your shop. There are several ways that you can give away information
on the net: through your blog or ezine, posting comments at blogs and
forums, writing articles (such as this) for ezines, putting up pages at
Squidoo and HubPages...
None of these things costs much. You can do it all for free, if you
know how to. Tee shirt shops require mostly time and knowing what to
do.
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