The Secret Behind Every Successful Online Print on Demand Shop
The Secret Behind Every Successful Online Print on Demand Shop
So you've decided to create your online pod store. Now you stand in front of two choices-
Do it just for fun - without thinking too much about being able to sell your designs.
Build yourself an online business that will work for you 24/7.
I believe that most of you belong to the second category.
Print on demand services are offering a wonderful opportunity to develop a business with no financial risks and headaches. And even better - within a short period of time, you can have a source of passive income. But still, there is one major thing that is keeping talented shop owners from making money in this industry. Why do many creative and motivated shop owners still fail?
In every business (online and offline), the long-term vision is extremely important. The most important thing is your customer, it is a known fact that it's easier to sell to an existing costumer, than finding and selling to a new one. This is why you must find a way to collect your customers' (and potential customers') e-mails for example. Otherwise, your customer who bought your designs is now getting mails from the POD, and is a customer of the print on demand service.
This is also the reason why all the really successful shop owners have their own website and domain name. This allows them to build their own reputation instead of working hard just for the POD to reap the benefits. Having your own domain name allows other people to link to you (and not to http://www.pod.com/yourstorename ); that is the only way to build a serious online business because otherwise, the pod is getting all your links and the fruits of your hard work. Not to mention you can also keep your statistics and learn how to improve your service all the time.
When you know who your customers are, it is much easier to offer and sell them more products and services, even things that are not related to POD products. Just to give you some ideas - you can put google adsense ads; you can combine affiliate offers in your site; you can even sell advertising space. These are just a few ways to develop your store, but this can happen only if you think big from the start.
It is true - it is much easier to take the template that the pods are offering, but taking the easy way here will lead to a failure in most cases. This is one of the reasons that Zazzle is so huge these days - it is very hard (not to say impossible) to link a Zazzle store to an existing website. However, there are a few POD services that offer quick and smooth ways to combine between your site and their service. Today I work mainly with Spreadshirt, but there are enough companies that can offer a good solution.
The good news is that the POD will still deal with the things we don't want to deal with -
Customer service
Shipping
Paying process
Producing the products
I know this sounds a bit confusing at start, but for beginners I believe it is even more important than other key factors in print on demand like choosing the subject of your designs, and checking the strength of the competition. The conceptual approach makes the difference.
Don't worry if you don't know how to build sites, I don't know either, I outsource it to people who do know - and it saves time, frustration, and money. Why money? Because instead of doing technical things, I can let someone else do it for 4$ per hour and use the time to enlarge my business and profits.
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