And I Made My First Sale
Breakdown of my print-on-demand drop-shipping experience
No fancy intro — let’s jump right into it. If you’ve never heard about RedBubble or Teespring or Spreadshirt or similar platforms, let me tell you the reason for their existence. They are Print-on-Demand platforms, where the artist (or anyone) only needs to upload his/her designs, and the rest of the things — like printing, packaging, shipping — the platform will do by itself.
I’m gonna talk about RedBubble because that’s the one I spent the most time on.
It was August’s end when I created my RedBubble profile, but it was September when I started uploading. Because I was going through many things like — Is it really free of cost? What if there’re hidden charges? What kind of platform is RedBubble? What are the pros and cons of it? What kind of designs does Redbubble accept? Which is the most profitable niche on RedBubble?
After going through all of those doubts. I uploaded my first design and was badly wishing for it to go viral. So that I could make thousands of dollars from the very first design.
What a story it would’ve been?
“Student made thousands in a single move; competitors still couldn’t digest it”
But, like usual, it didn’t happen.
Going viral was way beyond the horizon, as I wasn’t even getting any views, not even after ten designs, or twenty designs, or forty designs.
It was my 43rd design (the one above), upon which I got five views and one heart, and it was Mid-October. Means, a whole month was gone; means, my realistic dream of earning $10000-$15000 a week on RedBubble, was appearing unrealistic; means, I was depressed.
I uploaded the best which I could, and even after all those designs and that hard work. I wasn’t getting any results. I thought that maybe I wasn’t good enough, good enough to achieve the things I’ve planned to achieve.
I was even about to drop RedBubble, and that would’ve been the end. But before that would’ve happened, a doubt came into my mind; and I dropped the idea of dropping it.
Why did only that one design get views?
If it would’ve been my 50th design, that doubt wouldn’t have come. As my brain finds balance in the round off digits. It finds them logical and reasonable. This means if any event happens on 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, 100th, I find it logical. Maybe because it’s a perfect half and my brain can feel the balance in it.
(I don’t know if you can relate)
But if anything happens on 17th, or 39th, or 43rd. My brain cells go crazy, that how something like that is possible. As there isn’t any logical reasoning behind it.
So I started looking for things, things which I did differently while uploading this design. It wasn’t SEO for sure, because I was SEO optimizing all my designs but no results were coming out of them. So what was it?
I researched for a week, and after that thorough analysis of other artists’ RedBubble portfolios, and designs that sells out the most. I found out that, it was SEO. But it wasn’t that cliched one where you just need to put relatable tags in your designs, no. It was much more than that.
All those who say, putting 15–20 keywords in tags is enough, are nothing but scammers. As it isn’t enough, it just isn’t.
You see those above tags, those are of one single design. Yes, you read it right, of one single design. You do have to add that many keywords, in one single design, if you want to sell out products.
Here on Redbubble, and majorly on all big platforms, impression dominates quality. As no matter how delicately you worked upon your craft, it would be of no good if it’ll not appear in front of potential buyers. So the initial goal should be to appear on the search results page, and then quality would come into play.
Remember when I said, putting keywords in tags isn’t enough, I meant this (see above).
Every algorithm — of YouTube, Google, or RedBubble — go through the title, description, and tags of the product/content. To make sure that product is appropriate to those who are searching related keywords of it.
This means adding the same keywords which you used in tags, in title and description is a must to do thing, even though if it looks spammy.
After finding out this “inverted columns” secret hack, I reprogrammed my brain for the way I used to upload my designs, and just after few days of applying it.
I made my first sale.
Not only my first sale, I even managed to get 92 engagements, and a total sale of $6.43, just in the last 5–6 days of October. I don’t know what do you think of it, but for a boy who has never earned a penny online, it meant a lot. There was a sense of achievement in it.
Till now, I’ve sold $250 worth of products, and have earned $100 in profit.
I know it’s not much, but for a guy who wasn’t even getting any views, it’s a huge milestone, which will give him the motivation to work harder and harder, to achieve whatever he has planned to achieve.
