If you’re trying to start your own print on demand business, there are a few very important things that need to be done first. This matters the most for you if you want to sell clothing and other printed products on their own Shopify, (or other online store platform), but it’s also important if you want to use a merch platform, (like Teespring, Merch by Amazon etc…).
in the beginning, Your niche should ideally be something that many people are looking for that doesn’t have so many results yet. Choosing something that’s too general could make it that people won’t see your merch; For example, if I made a brand niche about skateboarding, I probably would’t get a lot of visitors since there’s already a ton of brands that sell clothing for this who’re established. You need to make your niche something that’s not overdone already, so that you can start showing up in the Google search results to get clicks to your new store. A good way of achieving this, is to cross niche.
Cross Niche
This is when you take more than one niche, (that actually work well together), and you combine them to target a more specific audience. A good example of this would be a brand that focuses on people who like both coffee and are very into their pets. Many people who have pets are extremely attached to them, so you’re a lot more likely to want to buy merch with your favorite animal on it. People who’re really into coffee are also much more likely to buy a piece of clothing with a coffee design, Someone who’s into coffee who sees their beloved pet next to a coffee on a tee are basically looking at the perfect piece of clothing to buy themselves. The benefits are amazing.
- Your audience will love you since you align with what they’re into.
- Advertising will be easier and cheaper since there will be way less competition.
- You don’t have to compete with your price since there won’t be much competition.
- Best of all, you’ll eventually get free traffic from Google since your one of the only results for this search.
KW Finder
A great tool to find a good niche for your print on demand merch, is KWFinder. They have a free trial, (that you don’t need to put a credit card in for), that works extremely well. You put in the keyword, (niche), that you want to rank for, and they give you a ton of information.
- They list how many people have searched for this keyword lately with how many actual sites have the thing they’re searching for.
- Give you tons of related keywords with all the same information.
- Rank each keyword for how hard it is to start showing up in the Google search results.
The platform is really easy to use and it gets the job done well. If you run out of searches, you can always make a new account for free or actually pay for their service, (which comes with a bunch of other tools that you can get free trials to).
KW FinderTutorial
The arrow pointing to search, (blue), tells you that there have been 11,000 searches in the last 12 months for gamer t shirts. This is a lot since anything over 1,000 is pretty good, but you need to take other factors into account.
The arrow pointing to PPC tells you how much competition there is for the search result. The number here is 100, (which is the highest), so there’s a lot of competition.
The arrow pointing to the number at the end and the one on the right, (the red and green arrows), show the potential difficulty you’ll have getting using this niche to get a lot of traffic. You ideally want to get a number under 30. If it’s higher than that, you may have trouble getting any traffic. Low traffic means low sales.
Once you’ve found a good niche with a lot of searches and a low difficulty rating, it’s time to move on to the next phase of your print on demand business. You need to build your online store. Check out https://dealbeasts.com/side-hustle-tutorials for the next step.
