Starting a buisness is sooooo hard...

[FreddyE]

I´m trying to earn some additional money as a t-shirt designer and I found this website where you can set up your own online t-shirt shop with your designs. Basically, you upload your designs, create the producs, the produce the stuff and ship it if someone orders something....you get a few bucks for every item sold.

My plan was to earn the budget to start my "REAL" business that way....

Sounds good right? Well..of course you have to get people to even visit your shop website somehow. My problem is: I don´t have the budget to really buy any advertising...so I tried going "viral"...I´ve been bloggin, posting on facebook, added my site to stumbleupon and similar, spent as much as I can afford on paid facebook ads....

but nothing.

So maybe it´s my designs or the prices? Maybe my designs are just tooo stupid?

Please have a look....any suggestions and opinions would be very welcome.

The URL is: http://freddysshop.spreadshirt.com

 

[RoJoHen]

I wouldn't say your designs are stupid, but they're not really targeting a particular market. There are already so many T-shirt websites out there; you've got to give people a reason to visit yours.

 

[Pingfah]

Yeah, agree. The designs are good, but on their own it isn't enough. You might sell some of those at some point, but you need to bring people in with something more mainstream or they'll never see them.

Clever jokes, satire, or recognisable cultural references are the sorts of things many people want on tshirts. You obviously can't afford to license anything popular, but you could come up with some memes based on popular cultural stuff.

Take that YOLO for instance, that somebody turned into a joke about Owls, You Obviously Love Owls. They came up with a clever design for some cute looking owls, and bang, they had a hit clothing design. They created their own meme with wide mainstream appeal based on something that already existed, without infringing anybody's trademarks.

 

[Triskelion]

The designs are fine! If you want POD marketplace traffic, start with their top selling - and most competitor-crowded - categories/SEO.

Or, buy a heat press and stock, cut production costs to a couple bucks, and market in the real world. Now you're looking at custom services, events & trade shows. Flea markets. Line sheet mailers to retailers.

The random art/POD space is just saturated, low sales are typical. After all, those costs are enormous, and people aren't going to spend $20 on a mediocre (non-stunning art) shirt as a rule, without some special personal reason.

Good luck, it can be done! But there is a lot of supply you are up against in the POD channels - plus, you 're competing with your own producer in some cases, like Cafepress, whose trafficked marketplace sets their own lowball-margin prices on your merch regardless of your shop's prices. As for SEO/SMO, you're on your own there.

Sorry this isn't more helpful.