Easiest Way to Start Print on Demand in 2025

trying to start a print on demand shop from scratch can be overwhelming with all the different steps and strategies that are out there it can be hard to know exactly where to start so in this video I'm going to share the simplest path to get started with print on demand even if you've never owned a business before this is the strategy that I've used time and time again to grow three different shots to over six and seven figures so if I had to start over today from absolute zero well that's exactly what I did I

grew this brand new Etsy shop from0 to over $100 a day in profit in Just 2 and 1/2 Weeks time now that's pretty far from millionaire status but I think almost anyone would be happy with an extra $100 a day keep in mind this was done with almost entirely organic traffic even though I did run a few ads towards the end of week 2 but the paid ads only made about four of the sales in the middle of the second week since the shop was bringing in a few hundred per day I did have to

close it so that I could fulfill all the orders in time I'll explain the product and everything throughout this video but imagine what this shop could be making if I focused on it fulltime or gave it another 2 months or even a year I've been growing shops just like this for over 5 years and they've made me millions of dollars and this just proves that it's working right now today so you know it's worth your time to watch this whole video I've been sharing strategies just like this that get results here on my YouTube channel

and it's helped you guys make over 140,000 sales and millions of dollars in profit so double check that you're subscribed and let's get it but first how does this whole thing even work print on demand allows you to sell blank white label products which are products like posters mugs or t-shirts with your unique design on them these designs can be handmade or generated using AI once the artwork is uploaded to the product you can post it for sale online the thing is you're not actually creating a real product just yet just an image of what

the product will look like when the customer orders the key is that after someone buys your product the order is fulfilled automatically and you only pay to get that product printed and shipped to the customer after someone has already bought it from you that's the on demand part and it takes almost all the Financial Risk out of the business that way you don't have to buy and keep any inventory on hand since you're not fulfilling these orders yourself and you can run the business entirely from your laptop making it mostly passive and allowing you to

scale it when you have time and keep earning income while you sleep work your day job or travel the world there are four pieces that you need to start this business a product a targeted design for that product a digital storefront to sell it on and good marketing so that customers actually buy it now before we get into the weeds here there's a lot of important things that I'm going to say that you don't want to miss so I would suggest saving this video for later so you can come back and rewatch portions that you

need if you feel like you're missing anything there's also going to be time stamps throughout this video and free resources Linked In the description so hopefully this video is enough to get you started component number one is picking a winning product this can be the easiest step but at the same time you don't want to get it wrong because it could ruin your business before you even get started so how do you know what product to sell there's three things that I look for in a winning product first I always make sure that the product

I'm selling is Evergreen this means it's been selling for a long time and will continue to sell into the future look I don't want to put a bunch of work into and make a bunch of designs for a product that's going to eventually stop selling so to find a winning product we have to look at what's already been working and the reason that we start with the product is because the designs that we put on the product are what Target specific niches that we want to sell to nobody's going to buy any of these blank

products so we're mainly selling the design that go on these products and I only ever sell long-term best-selling products which are basically any products in this list like t-shirts mugs posters because they've been proven to work for years and these types of products will continue to sell pretty much no matter what my shops that have done six and seven figures have all sold the most competitive products like t-shirts and mugs and some people see a bunch of competition but I see a huge opportunity with tons of demand remember it's not the mug that we're selling

we're selling the unique design that we put on the mug and that's how we stand out with an evergreen product second the product has to make a good profit what's the point of even owning a business if it doesn't make money my goal is always at least a 20% profit margin but ideally a little closer to 30% let's say that I'm selling a sweatshirt from print to 5 okay this is going to cost me roughly $12 just for the item itself and then another $7 for the shipping so my total cost is about $20 this

bestselling sweatshirt sells for $30 base and then another $10 since it ships from Canada and here's another bestselling sweatshirt again this one sells for $37 to $48 so I think it's reasonable to assume we could make around what $30 to $35 at least with a sweatshirt if we plug these numbers in even after fees you can see we'd be left with around a 27% profit margin or about $9 per sale which is perfect this gives us a really nice profit per order since we're using mostly organic traffic but it also has enough margin that we

could run PID ads if we want to it's just a rule of thumb but again if you sold something more expensive like these custom AI Pet Portraits that I sold in my challenge shop that I grewed at over $100 profit per day you can make a lot more profit per order but it's not really passive at all so you need Less sales to make good money but it's way less scalable over time so you kind of have to pick your poon shops that are easy to grow in the short term usually don't make as much

money long term and the longterm passive shops usually make the most amount of money over the course of its life third the product has to be versatile an evergreen product with a high profit margin only needs one thing to sell and that's targeted designs the design is what the customer is buying and it's the actual Niche that our product is in a versatile product simply means it could have designs from all kinds of niches on it like doctors teachers UFOs martial arts coding and really anything you can make designs for can become the niche so

these could be Custom Designs where you have to modify the design for each sale you usually make a little bit more profit per order this way or you can sell pre-made designs which are just sold as is which obviously sell more passively once they're created they could also be Evergreen designs these will sell occasionally and continue to sell long to the future or trending designs that usually sell really well for a couple weeks and then die off the important thing here is that your product shouldn't box you in to making one type of design when

you're trying to decide what to sell think long term all the top seven and eight figure Etsy shops have hundreds if not thousands of listings posted for sale in their shops to get to that level of success if you have to post a few hundred or few thousand product listings for sale then which type of product would you want to make designs for picking a product that you're excited to sell makes it a lot easier to make designs and stay consistent the goal is to pick a product that can be Evergreen that makes a good

profit that can Target as many niches as possible with different designs so that we can post lots of listings in our shop but even with the best product you're not going to get very far without great designs the thing is making designs is easy but most sellers fail because they don't understand what a good design looks like luckily for you good designs only have two elements a targeted Niche and a targeted art style since we're going to open the shop on Etsy that's where we'll start our research a targeted Niche should be hot and working

right now so that when we post our products for sale they rank quickly and we want to sell on niches that have high search volume but low competition now you can do all of this research for free on Etsy but you're just not going to get the same level of detail unless you use a research tool like listing view which lets me spy on competitor shops view all of their top listings and then validate keyword Niche ideas before I go spend time making the design for example this was the top listing in my challenge shop

a bartender themed pet portrait and this single listing made over 80% of the total sales and total profit and let me show you how I figured out that this would sell you first have to find a shop that's selling the same product that you're selling here's an example shop selling sweatshirts that we could use to model our own shop after so I can use listing view to analyze this shop and see how well it's performing over time so this shop opened up 11 months ago and it's already made over 13,000 sales or around 1,000 sales

a month remember even after all of our costs and fees we can make about $9 of profit per order so with 1,000 sales per month that could be about $99,000 of profit 11 months from now it could be you making $9,000 a month passively from your shop if you took this serious once we know that a shop is successful we can come down here and filter out all of their listings to find the bestselling ones typically the very very top ones are the more General listings that are going to be a lot harder to compete

for so I'm just going to choose one that's a little bit down the list so this one it says dog outline so if we click on it we'll just come and see what this is and it kind of breaks down all of the listing stats now this single listing has made an estimated $3,000 so I say that this could be a good idea now this particular listing is a custom product but the research process is the same no matter what you're selling if you're just doing this on Etsy and you found this winning listing you

would probably just try to make your own version and post it for sale and hope for the best but since I'm using listing view I can validate the niche even further by checking the competition and its score so I want to take the main keyword from the listing so that I can analyze it using the keyword finder so I'm just going to put in a dog portrait outline and you can see a breakdown of how well this keyword should perform so this is a kind detailed breakdown of this keyword if I made listings with this

keyword in it I would be competing with only about 4,100 other listings and that's actually extremely low considering that this keyword's getting around 1.7 million views if a niche has less than 10,000 competing listings your chances of getting sales are pretty good this is cool because it will also show us top keywords for similar top listings that are ranking in search so for example pet line drawing custom line drawing dog ear outline and dog line drawing are also top niches that have a high search volume with low competition we want to Target this kind of

Niche that has Max views with low competition if I tried to search for something like a dog portrait you can see the score is basically zero meaning there's way too much competition don't even try it that's why I found out when I searched for a bartender pet portrait that even though there aren't a ton of views you can see there's hardly any competition ranking for that specific keyword this type of super specific Niche is where all the money is made I could take the idea for a bartender themed pet portrait and switch out bartender for

any other profession and come up with hundreds of listing ideas or for my sweatshirt I could take the dog portrait outline and I could make it a corgi portrait outline or any other specific dog breed and have hundreds of targeted designs this is how we're going to get our products to rank high up in search so we have the best chance of getting sales but once you've identified a winning Niche you need to analyze the art style each Niche has its own art style and when you think about it it makes perfect sense if you

try to sell sweatshirts to grandmothers but you're using some kind of crazy font it's never going to sell we can identify the art style by just searching Etsy to see what products look like in this Niche so there's all kinds of these simple line art style there's also a little bit of variety here as well some of these listings look a little more realistic or a little bit sketched but you kind of get the general Vibe now I like to save these listings as inspiration so I'll click through and I'll try and find some top

performing listings so that I'm not wasting my time making designs that don't look bad and I just want to copy the link to these listings then I can just come over and create one of these these whiteboards over here on canva and I can just paste the link it and it creates this nice little preview icon so that I can always reference this listing or come into this whiteboard for ideas when I'm ready to make my designs doing this process enough should give you a huge list of Niche ideas that you can make designs for

and now after you've identified the art style in a winning Niche and you have some inspiration to go off of it's finally time to start making designs and with that list there's four methods we can use to create different art styles to turn each of those IDE is into lots of sellable designs I have an updated 2025 ultimate design tutorial coming soon so we'll cover this a little bit quicker today and if you really want to master designing then watch that video after this one we're not trying to reinvent the wheel simple designs work best

and our goal is always to make a lot of designs so that we have the best chance at just one of them popping off just take what's working and add a little bit of sauce that said the first method to making designs that's definitely the fastest and currently the most profitable is AI generated designs especially now that marketplaces like Etsy have publicly endorsed the use of AI it's a no-brainer if you're just getting started I personally use mid journey to generate images and the hardest part is just learning how to craft a great prompt but

the image generator takes care of the rest you can go to alpha. Mid journey.com to use mid journey in the browser and here I'll just start by browsing for images that other users has made to kind of double check that mid Journey is capable of making the type of design that I'm trying to get this also allows me to jump in and see the prompts that these other people have used to make that design and then I just have to craft my own prompt the best that I can to make the type of design that

I'm trying to get there's no magic prompt mid journey is very capable but you also have to learn how to use it well so don't get upset if your first 10 images don't look perfect again it's doing all the work for you so the least you can do is learn how to write a prompt I think that I was able to get a few decent results here after running a few different prompts and again it's okay to get a lot of bad results because you only need that one listing to pop off and grow your

entire business there's still skill required here you have to know what type of designs look best and you have to actually put in effort to make good products here even if the AI is doing most of the hard part of the job by making the design but assuming you have the design ready there's three types of edits you might have to make to the image so that you can use it first you might want to remove the background from the Des design there's a lot of free tools but recraft does a good job at this

you just have to upload your design and click this button it is literally that easy you'll notice though if you zoom in the artwork starts to get a little blurry so you might want to vectorize the art so you can make this small image as large as you need to so again right inside of recraft you can just click this vectorize button and once it's done no matter how much you zoom in the lines are still crispy and it's still high quality so then we can just click download and download it in the SVG format

for free you can only really vectorize simple Graphics not these complex painting style images so for that you'll have to rely on Mid Journey's upscale feature to make them high quality enough to use for some products like mugs we're able to make perfectly sized artwork right inside of mid journey in printify if you click on start designing for a product like a mug you'll see this print area size over here on the left so what we want to do is use this as a ratio in the image size for Mid journey and now if we

generate a new design you'll see it's sized perfectly for that product for products like our sweatshirt this is also how we can size our design so the print area for a sweatshirt is 3852 by 4398 so we just have to go over to canva and we can make a new custom siiz document and just put in the dimensions 3852 by 4398 and this will make our design file the correct size then I can just drag in that graphic that we made from mid journey and I can size it so I think it'll look good on

the sweatshirt and here I could just sell this graphic as is or I could come in and I could add some text so maybe I'll grab a nice looking font and I'll just put in the pets name and this could be our custom sweatshirt design just like that we have two designs but I can take this a step further and make another graphic with the same design so I could just duplicate the page and then here maybe I want to use chat gbt to get a funny saying that I could use for my relevant graphic

so maybe this will work so I'll just copy this and paste it into my design and then maybe I want to change the font to something else just to kind of mix it up and get some variety here and now I have a brand new design with basically no extra work then I can click on download the design make sure it has a transparent background and I'm ready to upload it to my product now there's a lot of other types of designs like the good oldfashioned handcrafted text design pre-made designs and hybrid designs and all

these strategies make designing a lot easier which is the step that most beginners get hung up on but for the sake of time in this video I'll save those designing techniques for the ultimate design tutorial as I mentioned before the goal is to make as many designs as possible you want to have so many designs that you don't even know what to do at them all making designs should be your top priority and at this point you should know how to make a lot of designs so next we have to figure out what supplier is

going to be best for our product now look we're not going to waste time trying to sell on Redbubble or Teespring or Society 6 since we're actually trying to make money this means that we have three options for a supplier to use printify printful and gelato printify and printful have recently merged but there's still several reasons why printify is the best in the game I've used printify for years at this point and they've genuinely been the best to work with and they've enabled me to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra profit since I

sell tens of thousands of products and they have the absolute best prices in the game while still delivering high quality prints to customers but that's not the only reason to go with them because we still have an issue see if you've been following along then you'll know we possibly have hundreds of designs that we need to get uploaded to our product on printify if you're actually using AI you could be making dozens of designs per hour so if you have 20 designs it could take you quite a while to get them all uploaded to your

product and that's why we want to automate the process of uploading using prelit preist has a printify product uploader built in and to show you how quick and easy it is to use we first have to create a sort of template in printify so all this means is I have to select the product that we're selling in prini and hit this start designing button then I select all of the colors that I want to sell in this product listing so we'll just select a few and then I just have to add some kind of design

it doesn't matter what it is we just have to add it so that we can save it and then we'll call this our sweatshirt template then I just copy the link to this product template in printify and here I just add the template in so that I can use it for bulk uploading now if I have 20 design files I can drag all of them in at the same time but that's not even the coolest part because printify can Handle Variations let's say I have white versions of the exact same designs but I want to

put those white versions on a few colors and have them in the same listing I can just add a Vari ation and here I can select the colors that I want the white design to show up on and then I can just upload all of those white design files you can see that it links all of them together without me having to do it and then I can just click upload and give it a little bit of time when it's done uploading the products will show up in your printify account you can see all of

the black and white designs are on the correct colors and all of these products are ready to publish this saves so much time so let's say I I have 20 mug designs that are ready to go because I made them in mid Journey so they're perfectly sized and everything I just select a mug template I made drag all of those designs in and click upload it uploads all of them and it even names them based on my settings in preist so literally all I have to do is hit publish doing this manually even for just

a few products takes forever preist automates the uploading now with our products ready to go on printify we still need a shop online a storefront to sell them in and there's several options here but as a beginner we want to sell where the customers are already shopping with over $12 billion of transactions per year and over 400 million active monthly Shoppers Etsy is a Shoppers search engine that's more than capable of getting your business to six or seven figures not to mention opening an Etsy Shop allows you to leverage their brand and trust that they've

built up for over a decade Etsy is the best place for beginners to get started and figure things out and once you're making $5 to $110,000 a month you can think about scaling onto another platform like Shopify Etsy drives so much organic traffic to my businesses that I wouldn't even have to use Shopify or other tools if I didn't want to plus the fact that printify is an Etsy approved integration means that all of those products that we bulk uploaded with preist can simply be published to our shop ready to sell to open up your

Etsy shop I suggest downloading my free guide which will walk you through everything that you need to know about getting your shop open and started from coming up with a business name to creating a free branded email and getting your shop open and ready to sell this guide walks you through it all plus if you decide to use the links that are in that guide it not only helps me out but it also gets you the maximum discounts and coupon codes which totals up to around $66 of free sh you can download it for free

below this video now even though there's no website design here you still have to make the shop look alive take a look at how drastic the change is the before and after of the shop that I recently scaled to $100 profit per day even with just one listing the shop that doesn't have any details added looks completely dead literally there's only like three things that you have to do to make your shop look alive I used AI to come up with a logo that fit the business name and a banner image to go with it

as well and then I added some text to the announcement and the policy section and all of it really brings the shop to life I was to spend money on this shop I would trust the finished version a lot more than the Bare Bones brand new shop even though the listings look exactly the same realistically it should only take you about 15 minutes to open your shop and then from complete start to complete finish and having your shop opened and designed with a logo a banner image a name email and everything all together maybe an

hour an hour and a half done is better than perfect don't over complicate it get your shop open and ready to sell because it only has to be done once and remember no customer is going to care what your logo or your banner image are only that you have one but if you don't have one you're going to look like a complete new remember every image that you use in your shop whether it's AI or handcrafted should always convey that your shop is premium modern custom and an overall trustworthy brand buyers come to Etsy looking

for products to buy and your job is simply to have something ready for anyone looking for the type of product you're selling Etsy is a search engine and that's why specific products work so well if a customer comes to Etsy and they search for a bartender themed pet portrait and you have one of the only listings showing up that actually looks decent you have a really high chance of getting the sale the whole business is just about getting as many of these specifically targeted products posted for sale on Etsy as possible and once you understand

that you're ready to learn marketing assuming that you've done your Niche research and you've made targeted designs then the marketing should be easy my marketing strategy is broken into three different parts getting your listings to rank on Etsy getting them to convert and optionally paying for ads getting your listings to rank on Etsy is the very first step and it's done by using great SEO or search engine optimization which is just a fancy way of saying keywords free way to find keywords is to look on Etsy and see which listings have performed well we would

have to go through and find listings based on our main Niche which in this case is dog line art sweatshirts and try and find listings that have performed well this listing for example has over 200 reviews so it could potentially be a winner we would want to look through the title and see if we can find portions of it that we can use as keywords to make our own title for our own listing then we would want to come to the very bottom of the page where we can find this section which is all of

the tags that they're using to get this listing to rank now that's the freeway but if you have the budget listing view can save you a ton of time and headache in the keyword finder we just have to put in the keyword of our main Niche so in this case a oneline pet portrait and this will show us a list of similar keywords that we can use to build out a title for our own listings now I like to filter these out by recommendation and this is going to show me the keywords with the most

amount of views and the least amount of competing listings we can use our main keyword plus all of these other trending keywords in our product titles to get them to rank and next we can do the tags if we come over to the listings tab here still in the keyword finder we can filter out the top listings matching our keyword and look for the ones that seem to match our product best so I think I'll choose this one and here this just gives us a breakdown again of the listing but more importantly allows us to

just copy all of the tags that they're using to get this listing to rank now this strategy will get our products to show up in search results but to show up in more search results and earn a rank at the top of search results and keep our listings there we have to get customers to click on our products favorite them and even buy them the way that we do that is with the listing presentation and specifically the mock-ups the mockup shows off the design you made to the customer it's like the product image but without

the actual product ever being created this is so important because the customer has to imagine actually owning the product even though it isn't actually real yet the thing is the default mockups that you'll see on printify they don't have the same premium handcrafted highquality vibe that Etsy is known for so we have to fix that look at the other top performing listings selling the same product as you these mockups are the mockups that you need to be using if you want to get the same results most of the time you can find the exact same

mockup or very similar mockups if you just search for it right on Etsy there's almost always a lot of high quality results that you can choose from and they're only a few dollars the thing to remember is that the bestselling listing is a best seller for arza those mockups are proven to convert and since mockup shops sell all the same mockups to everyone you can buy the same mockup and use it for yourself and the best ones are usually only a few dollars I've also got an entire video breaking down exactly how to automate the

process of making mockups and since this video is already getting long I'll just leave a link in the description now one of the questions I get asked most often is should I pay for Etsy ads there's no one siiz fits-all answer here but here's a good rule of thumb there's no substitute for posting lots of listings for sale there's no way around it if you want to be successful you have to make and post a lot of product listings with great keywords that being said if you have a high enough profit margin to spare and

you know that your product listings should be converting then paying for some ads just adds fuel to the fire if you do want to try ads I would recommend only turning on the ads for listings that have already gotten sales organically and that way you're not going to be wasting any money running ads for listings that won't ever sell to begin with keep in mind a lot of the biggest shops get enough free traffic from the Etsy search engine that they don't even have to pay ads my shops included I think that your time and

money is better spent acquiring automation tools buying good mockups and posting a lot of listings I see this happen time and time again with beginners getting into print on demand and that's that they don't fully invest when getting into the business this is one of the most affordable and risk-free businesses that you can start period that said I see so many beginners afraid of of investing even a couple hundred into the business that they expect to eventually make them hundreds of dollars a day if you seriously want to see results be prepared to invest time

and money into the business that's the only way to actually get to the point where it's paying you and buying your time back you're probably curious about how much all of this costs and although pricing can always change right now here's a good estimate of how much you should plan to invest at the beginning of 2025 an Etsy Shop is $15 to open one time that cost is unavoidable and each SC listing you post is 20 if you want to save time do better research and automate everything there's only really two tools you need listing

view has several plans but its onetime payment is by far the best value at just 150 bucks and prist also has a one-time payment of $100 which is an absolute steal in my opinion pry is free with my coupon code and it only makes sense to fully upgrade after you're making around five sales per day other the subscription doesn't save you anything mid journey is $10 a month and canva is free or $15 a month I'll put two sort of payment structures on screen so you can see how they compare paying a little bit more

and getting the yearly or one-time payments upfront is definitely the best value and the smartest decision long term but if you're truly strapped for cash then you can get started for really not that much at all if you're only getting the monthly plans and the absolute Necessities you definitely don't have to but if you spend a couple hundred up front you'd be able to not really worry about the other costs besides the Etsy listing fees and you'd only be down maybe a couple hundred again think about it as an asset that could eventually pay you

a couple hundred a day you don't really need any of these tools you can get started almost completely free for example you could use figma instead of canva if you're a little bit more techsavvy these tools and things just FasTrack your success but the thing that I've seen is the people who invest are the people who see results sooner and those are the people who actually stick with it long enough to make the life-changing money I also hear that print on demand is dead saturated and that it doesn't work anymore but tell me how much

time do you think the world spends online each day chances are you watching this have personally bought something online recently your friends and family make purchases all the time people spend more time on their computers and phones than they do anything else if you don't think they're spending money while they're online you're sadly mistaken online spending just in America is over $1.3 trillion per year growing at 10% a year for you to make even a million dollar a year is absolutely minuscule nobody would even notice it's not even a drop in the bucket Etsy alone

processes over 13 billion in transactions each year and it's growing every year so no online business is just getting started if you've ever had a job before no matter what it is you probably understand that it takes a couple of weeks of training before you even know the basics and then it can take a couple of years of hard work before you get a promotion to advance your career you wouldn't just give up trying to get a promotion because it's too competitive or oversaturated even though there are other people working towards that job would you

if you would give up then business is not for you but if you're the type of person who understands that it's realistic to have a learning curve and to spend time working towards a goal without seeing too much progress at first then you'll be just fine you really can't fail if you continue to improve and don't give up leave your questions and comments down below I hope you found this video helpful and subscribe