(Member Content) Tip #1 of 10 – How to Turn Headlines into Great Designs
This is part of a 10 minipost series called "10 Tried, Tested, Proven Ways to Make $100K/year Selling T Shirts Online" that will help you become a better t-shirt seller.
Read New News, Not Old News!
The new news… Google News! Okay, so here’s the secret…. And I’m going to repeat it a lot to the point that it is no longer a secret from you. If it’s popular on Google, it should be on your store. You need a mix of “hot sellers” and “long-term sellers” on your site/store. Remember I said we’re taking advantage of Google to get traffic to your store? Okay, so let’s find out what’s popular on Google. Just go to http://www.google.com/news. Here’s a screenshot I just snapped:
Holy politics today! Okay… whatever. The reason behind the news is not your concern. The news itself however, is. You need to source t-shirt ideas and *very importantly* keywords from the news. Let me give you an example.
There seems to be an anti-Russia sentiment here. Now, I’m not here to tell you Russia is bad, good, or otherwise. I couldn’t give two damns… I’m a t-shirt seller, not a politician! But what I can tell you is that I understand the sentiment behind the news and there are going to be people that would be interested in a shirt like… say… “No Russian Meddling” or an anti-Putin shirt. Now, this is where you may immediately come up with some ideas, get on Photoshop and design something. Or, you may go to a third-party graphic designer who knows how to design t-shirts and say, “come up with a cool anti-Putin election meddling t-shirt for me”. Either way, I’d suggest to get 5 current event based potential hot sellers on a day. Note that you might only come up with one *true* hot seller a month, but it doesn’t matter. Tying current events to the shirts on your site will create traffic for your long term sellers. Don’t forget that… and don’t be discouraged if your hot selling ideas don’t become hot sellers.
Do a google news search and see what ideas you come up with. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, don’t worry. They’ll come to you eventually. The more you start noticing graphic tees and see what people are wearing, the more you’ll start making associations between current events and t-shirt ideas. Be patient and persistent.
