Underground Journal

Using Print On Demand Companies To Make Money Online

If you are looking to develop some new avenues of income to reach financial independence, and you have a little artistic talent, then perhaps you could venture into the world of the online print on demand company. Print on demand (POD) companies do exactly as the name suggests; they hold millions of different designs for a range of products, such as t-shirts, hoodies, button badges, stickers, mousepads and many others. All the products are blank, but when a customer places an order, the design that they choose gets printed on the merchandise which is then despatched to them.

For you, there is no financial risk as you do not need to tie up capital having your designs printed onto a batch of products, and then hope you can sell them. For the POD company, they hold an inventory of blank products, but have so many designers – people like you – uploading their designs that they know they will be able to make a profit, and in any case only print as many items as are ordered in any particular design.

One of the big players in the POD marketplace is Zazzle. Once you have signed up for a free account with them, you can then produce your designs; it does not matter whether you create artwork on paper first and scan it, or whether you are good at digital art. You can even just produce designs that are text only if you are good with language or have something amusing that people would wear. This raises an important point: make sure you think about your potential customers. Would they buy what you are creating? Is there a big enough market? For example, if you come up with a product range about two toed sloths, how big is your audience really going to be? Not very big at all! So you need a good high volume of targeted traffic; people who are looking to buy a product that you have made just for them. Perhaps football team fan shirts is a good area; or perhaps you will need to find a suitably small sub-topic within that. After all, football shirts are big business and you’ll have loads of competition – incidentally, many teams have patent rights on their team designs, so be very careful. This is why it’s great to come up with your own artistic masterpieces, upload them and attach them to as many products as you can.

The main trick in making money with POD companies is to keep on publishing new stuff. It’s a numbers game, and the more product ranges you can invent, the better. With Zazzle, you set your own mark-up, and can see in real time how much you will earn per product. And the beauty of it is once you have a bunch of designs uploaded, you can sit back, get on with other projects and watch the money roll in – just make sure you promote your Zazzle store on your blog and elsewhere so people know where it is!

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