A day in the Life of a BillingtonPix Graphic Designer and Business Owner
The main aim, obviously is sales. RedBubble is most of my traffic resides, so I have that as a number one priority. You can upload up to 60 designs a day on RedBubble, so I am currently ensuring that I maximise my product uploads there every day. That is the first thing I do in the mornings. I am currently uploading manually, although I have been investigating automation.
Once my uploads to RedBubble are completed (by about 10am) my day is free to look at other things.
The next task to perform is to share some of my newly updated products to RedBubble. My current designs work best of t-shirts, so I choose the t-shirt type from a number of my RedBubble designs and share them to my t-shirt and tops board. I used to share as I created, which is a useful feature that RedBubble provides at the end of every upload. However that only selects a default color, which are all the same. By going in afterwards, I can change the color to provide more variety on my boards.
It might be worth noting that I am no longer sharing most of my 60 daily products. Whilst I did do that in the past, I've been concerned of late about appearing a bit too "spammy", so I'm currently selecting about 5-6 products daily during this process.
Next I create a couple of more elaborate pins for scheduling. The aim is to get to sharing about 25 elaborate pins a day. By "elaborate" I mean larger, portrait style (2:3 or 3:4 ratio) that I have created myself. My style is currently to use a recently created pattern, with a smaller product inserted above and styled with a border. Then I add branding at the top and bottom and a comment, which might be a call to action, or just a meme or saying.
I think Pinterest is an excellent way to get traffic to your site. I do also use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It is proving impossible to maintain all of these social media channels at once so my priority for now is Pinterest. I create my pin designs for that, and if I have time I might share the PNG file to another channel if it fits well.
After lunch I try to focus on at least one new design. Whilst I have been uploading a lot of my vintage sunset logo designs to my BillingtonPix RedBubble shop, I am also working on patterns, which can be easily altered to create completely different designs which I find quite useful.
I use Printful to create my products from the design files. This way I can spread my designs not only to my website but also to Ebay and Etsy if I wish. Obviously everything that goes up to my website, then comes back down to Pinterest into my shop. It can take me an hour or so to configure the product page in Shopify as well as within Ebay.
Yesterday I spent a bit of time working on my BillingtonPix Pinterest shop as the categories are not organised properly. I made some changes to my XML feed to incorporate sale price detail. I'm still in conversation with them as they seemed to be suggesting that UK shops could now apply to make use of rich pins in the product feed to the shop. I've already set up Rich Pins for manually creating product pins, although they don't seem to show all the detail I was expecting. We'll see what the outcome to this is....
By mid afternoon I am back making "elaborate" pins from my new designs. Same as before and straight into Pinterest scheduling. I have been looking at Tailwind as a means to design and schedule pins. I think I prefer to design the pins myself within Photopea and Canva for now. I've also reached the maximum amount of scheduling I can do, so my work there is rather redundant. I also find Tailwind to not be very user friendly. It is good, however, for scheduling the same pin to multiple boards at different times and also to Facebook / Instagram. Plus it allows you to join groups where for each pin uploaded there you commit to sharing 2 others of someone else's. Seem fair!
Writing a blog post takes up another hour in the afternoon, although I have neglected writing them for a couple of days. I think it's a great way for SEO and also just to get my thoughts straight about what my priorities are.
For the last couple of days I have also spent some time under the hood of my website, changing the code around templates so that I can display certain collections together properly. I don't really have a great search capability on my Shopify shop, so I figured that I need to start doing the slicing and dicing and creating dedicated collection pages within different views, such as one for all my contemporary retro patterns. For example this morning I created multiple color themed patterns pages that group together products by their color.
In the past I have invested money into advertising, but to no avail. For now I am relying on SEO. I think Pinterest is a great help. Just connecting with others is even better. For every page I create I will ensure it is registered in Google Search Console.
For any time in between I am checking out my analytics. Traffic still isn't brilliant, but it is growing. Print on Demand is very much a slow burner business. But if you put the time and effort in, create the products, promote them efficiently, identify what works and what doesn't then you are laying out the foundations for success.
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