So I do alright with my t-shirt designs. I will admit that I sell most of my shirts through the marketplace in spreadshirt. I have tried a few other companies to see if I could get anything to catch but spreadshirt seems to be the one that is working best for me.  I picked them initially because the quality of their printing methods was top notch. Over time I must say that I am happy with their service and the quality of their printing may even be overkill in hindsight, but it’s all good. I sell very well in the marketplace daily. I also have my t-shirt storefront. I spent time and hours coding a SEO friendly site and worked hard so it could grow up to be a real site one day. This post is kind of about that struggle.

So about a year ago I was trying everything I could to drive traffic to my t-shirt site. I still got a huge amount of sales through the marketplace of my POD supplier (spreadshirt) but the pickings were slim on the site I carefully crafted by hand. The hours put into the site hardly turned a profit and frankly I was stumped on how to compete with the big boys. SEO is an industry unto itself and I quickly learned you cannot become an expert over night, or even in a year, so don’t expect to. There is no way you will get top ranked pages on a new site, and frankly it is the specific terms people are looking for that make good SEO, not the sutff you say about your site. What I mean is it will take forever and tonnes of money/effort to get to the first page of Google when someone types in “funny t-shirt”. But if you have a shirt that says something about how awesome bananas are, you might get first page for “funny banana t-shirt”. The key is to integrate good descriptions of your shirts with a well designed site. You will get hits to that shirt, not your landing page, so make it easy for visitors to keep browsing.

Next you gotta spend money to make money. Don’t dump all your profits on that cute redheads cam site, reinvest in your fledgling business and you will get returns. Shirt designs is the only “zero-investment” up front business I have tried, and until I spent the money on a “premium shop” I wasn’t making any. The same goes for traffic, to spread the word, you are going to need to spend some money. But like a good drug dealer, never use more than you have. You still want to make a profit, so invest cautiously and your site will grow slowly. As your site grows, so will your profits will grow with them.

Design the shit out of yourself. Get good at designing shirts and update your site as frequently as possible (kind of ironic me saying that). there is no easy money in this world, and the reality is t-shirts pays jack shit at the beginning for all the work you put it, but it is passive income in the long run. What I mean is you get paid for doing nothing. Build a large inventory and sell in your POD marketplaces and money will come in while you are masturbating on that hot read head’s cam site. that is the real rush in this business, money for nothing. But of course that’s a lie, you spend hours, days and weeks of no pay work getting that inventory/site up and running.

At any rate here is a small list of things I have tried and the success or lack thereof I had:

Paid Advertising – Marginal Success, because I don’t have a tonne of capital to put down it is hard to measure the effect of advertising. I still occasionally advertise but it is hit and miss. I stay away from Googles Adsense, Facebook and other major advertisers when you are starting out. The cost of clicks and the selection of sites to advertise on is overwhelming. Successfully using Adsense is probably a profession in itself that requires a degree in click-o-nomics. I recommend Project Wonderful, and AdEngage for starting out. They have affordable rates and an easy to use interface.

Giving stuff away – I have done t-shirt giveaways, but only when I had enough money to cover the costs. This seems to be a good way to drive traffic to your site and I have had moderate success with this one. It also is a great reason to spam your friends and family and anyone else. A good contest always helps.

Use another site to drive traffic – I started a funny video site to drive traffic to my t-shirt site. I have an ad for my shirt site on the same page and it rotates through with google ads. This seems to be the most successful technique I have used. The small amount of advertising I have on the video site also offsets the cost of running it. It doesn’t make a profit yet, but it’s losses are easily covered by the sales at my shirt site. It’s also a sly way to link my site through larger ones. I submit a funny video to I-Am-Bored.com for instance and I get thousands of hits on my video site, which leads to hundreds of hits on my t-shirt site….pretty clever eh? Just be aware that these secondary sites can have a high overhead and updating them takes a lot of time. Thankfully I have some friends who enjoy that sort of thing and they help me out.

Affiliate Marketing – I honestly found this one baffling, it is very much on my to do list to figure out how it works, if someone can enlighten me that would be great.

Spread the word – I tell everyone I know about my shirt site, and I often get huge orders from that. I also wear my shirts all the time. This is very important.

Social Networking – Meh…. I think this ship has sailed. It does generate traffic, but not a huge amount of sales.

Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Reddit, etc. – Spamming these sites is a sure way to soil an otherwise good internet reputation. Be careful on these sites.

Good Site Design – This seems to be a key for SEO, you cannot just link a domain to your POD shop, you have to design a site that interacts with it. As well you need your site to include pictures and descriptions of your products locally. This takes more skill and time, but it definitely pays off in the long run.

Link Exchange – This seems to be hit and miss, sure you get traffic from it, but really it seems to hurt your SEO in the long run, you will get slapped hard on SEO if you run a link farm. Be very careful doing this. Only link people you genuinely think are good sites, and related to what your site is about in some way.

Top Lists – Evil, bad, stay away. You might get 5-10 hits a day from it, but it will hurt your reputation in the long run. It makes you look amateurish. Which you are, but you don;t want your customers to think that.

The saga continues for me, I am by no means a traffic expert, but I am seeing some growth in my profits and traffic from the varying things I have tried. It is definitely a learning experience and a slow growth thing. You will not throw a site up tomorrow and have hundreds of visitors to your site. You have to plug away at this stuff, and over time that curve on google analytics will start to go up. Just keep trying.

By all means if you are having success with some techniques, let me and my readers know, comment below or post it here. Now if you’ll excuse me there is red headed cam girl that needs my attention, oh and sometime later I have to work on my site redesign.

Cheers,

Fuzzy