Fear and Self-Sabotage Disguised as Reason – Graphic Tee Coach

Fear and Self-Sabotage Disguised as Reason

Meet Jill.   Jill manages a service operation that consumes her week days.  Back in September, 2019 Jill decided start an online tee shop so she took the plunge and became a Graphic Tee Coach member.  I pulled these numbers from her account:

Month

results

September

She sold 20 shirts and made about $200. Not bad for month one.

October

She sold 50 shirts. She made around $500. How does an extra $500 in your bank account sound? Heck that’s $7,000 a year!  (No, my math is not wrong… December counts for three months… read on)

November

40 shirts sold.  $400. Why the small drop? Well, she hit on a  bit of a hot seller in October. Those come and go.  You'll learn more about hot sellers later.

December

She sold 300 shirts.  An extra $3,000 into the bank during a month when most people are scared to look at their credit card bill!  

January 2020

100 shirts,  $1,000 in the bank.  That's pretty good as January is one of the worst sales months because many people have spent all their money in December.

February 2020

107 shirts and another K in the bank.

March 2020

Here’s the most important part of all… in March (yes, March 2020… the month we all started feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic), she’s on pace to sell 100 shirts.  She has sold 75 as of March 20th - the time of this writing.  What does this mean to you? Even if you’re stuck at home during a pandemic that’s causing a global financial crisis, you can still earn money selling t-shirts online!

Okay, so I promised you I’d tell you how to do it.  Here's how I got Jill there:

  • First order of business is to set up shop on a selling platform of some kind - Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Bonanza, or your own store with your own domain (e.g. mycoolstore.com).  In Jill’s case, we set her up with her own free website and added an Etsy shop a couple months down the road.
  • Next I needed to connect her shop to a dropshipper.  What this means is that Jill does not have to stock any inventory or ship anything herself.  The dropshipper takes care of all of that.  Avoiding upfront inventory and equipment costs is key to making this venture successful! 
  • Next we needed some products on there.  To hit this level you'll want around 650 shirts a month added to your store.  (Note that these are not physical shirts... just mocked up images.)  That’ll get you up to around 4,000 or so after 6 months.  Now, you don’t need to take a month to get 650 shirts. And you don’t need to take six months to get 4,000.  There are ways to generate designs in bulk. So one idea could convert to hundreds of shirts. And, there’s product packs out there you could purchase.  Or you could do it yourself… it’s only 22 shirts a day or so. With my very limited design skills, I could do that in about 2 hours. Or, hire someone to do it.  Lots of options. Jill used a combination. Made a few shirts on her own, but mostly purchased product packs. TIP: You’ll need two types of shirts: Long-term sellers and hot sellers.  I'll explain those later.
  • Finally, we needed to market Jill's products.  There are many options, but from my experience, when selling on your own domain, a combination of pay per click ads and social media marketing work best.  In order to make a $10 profit per shirt sold, we optimized Google Ads to spend no more than $2 (on average) in advertising to sell a shirt. 

Is self sabotage holding you back from making money from POD? Maybe it's an even bigger problem, that almost everyone has when starting out as a seller...but I have a solution for that one too.  So keep your eye out for my next email coming in a couple of days.  And if you haven't already, please add my email address to your contacts list to prevent it from going to spam.

By the way, if you’ve found this post without seeing our Facebook posts, click here to see what this course is all about! 

If you think someone else could benefit from this information, please share below!  And, feel free to comment or ask questions below.  I'll be monitoring and answering regularly.

Steve

Steve got into the t-shirt business several years ago and has never looked back. He is now able to pass on his knowledge and experience through Graphic Tee Coach, including how to design winning tees, marketing your shop, and sustaining a strong profitable business in the long run.

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below

Leave a Comment: