My Print on Demand Story

A bit of background about me and some detail on how I have tried to build up my print on demand enterprise in the last 12 months. I've listed out a few general starter tips that might help someone to succeed at selling their digital artwork, although I am by no means an expert at this!

Covid changed everything

Until last year I worked in IT. I've done so since 1998. In April 2020 that all changed when Covid hit and I had to choose between a reduced salary or a redundancy. I chose the latter. For a while I haven't been enjoying my IT career. I was a solution architect but had not progressed for a while and was feeling rather disillusioned. So I left my job.

For the next month I binge-watched Netflix, applying for new IT jobs and getting lots of rejections. The economy was hitting a buffer as companies froze their IT recruitment and I found myself just wasting my time preparing for interviews that never progressed.

At that time I thought about selling my photography. I thought I'd create some greeting cards to sell. So I looked around for a way to do it at the lowest risk possible. It wasn't long before I came across the idea of selling my artwork using Print on Demand (POD). This meant I was able to reduce my financial risk to zero by not holding any stock that might never sell. Seems perfect right? Well almost, except the cost of the POD process meant that my margin could not be much at all if I were to sell anything at a reasonable price.

Regardless I thought I'd give it a go and created my BillingtonPix.com website. The name of the website is quite interesting for me at least. I wrote a blog about it in fact. In this blog I talk about my ancestors arriving in Manchester from Ireland around 1850. I always wondered why they waited until after the potato famine to escape the starvation, but more recently I have come to a conclusion that they were probably evicted from their property for asking to pay less rent. I'm horrified that this might have been happened to them, having only recently survived the famine. Anyway, they came to live in and around Billington Street in Chorlton upon Medlock, Manchester. This was in the area known notoriously as Little Ireland, where the poor Irish were forced to live in filthy slums. I decided to name my brand and website after this street where they lived. It had come up a lot in my family research and it just felt right.

My Story of Print on Demand

Build a branded website

I built my website on Shopify, using their offer of 3 months free use. My coding skills came in very useful for this. It wasn't long, however, before I encountered my first major problem - traffic, or rather lack of it. It became clear to me that by building your own site, yes you were in control of exactly how your brand might be and what products you might want to sell, but you were not in control of how many visitors you could acquire. No visitors equals no sales. I had no sales.

Venture into marketplaces

Initially I had an idea to place some photography on Etsy, which was the first marketplace I came across that had an integration with Shopify. This seemed quite easy, although there was a small charge for each product placed. Integration was via the same product I was selling on my Shopify website, using the same POD partner in the background. Etsy is a bit odd I think, in that it still wasn't so easy to pick up sales. I used Pinterest to drive traffic over to my products but nothing really took off. Even when I ventured into Facebook adverts that did produce traffic, I didn't get any bites. Still, I kept going, building up my portfolio on my website and my products on Etsy to the point at which I had probably about 500 products on billingtonpix.com and about 100 on Etsy.

No sales.

The importance of content marketing

I then tried blogging. Content marketing is quite a good tool to bring in some SEO. This is why I am blogging this - I still believe in it as an alternative to paid media advertising. This has helped a lot, but hasn't really brought sales to my website, only traffic.

I have also set up an email list with the offer of a discount if the user subscribes. This again has led to some interest in terms of signing up, but sales on the website remain low.

Find the best marketplace for you

Where I have had some limited success is on RedBubble. This is a great marketplace for setting up products to be sold online. Margins are not too bad, and since my first sales there last year I have seen traffic slowly starting to increase. I am integrated with Google Analytics, so I can see what is popular and what isn't. 

I am also with Zazzle and Society6. The latter doesn't allow analytics integration but I think it is worth having a presence on there anyway. With all these marketplaces I use Pinterest to create links that Google will pick up. This is invaluable for generating traffic with no cost.

Use Facebook pixels

Ideally, more investment into Facebook ads would be useful, but this is expensive in my view and whilst it does generate clicks, for me at least it hasn't generated any sales this way. Nevertheless I do have a pixel on my website that will build up anonymous users into an audience that I can use in the future. I also have set up targeted advertising for any visitors who do come to my website, just in case that generates anything. That is not expensive and I think worth it. I also have a Facebook page that lists products that I want to share.

Integrate with Instagram and Facebook shop

Facebook and Instagram are a great free tool to use too. Shopify allows you to integrate with them, but you can do it regardless so long as you have a dataset of products. The way I have done it is via Facebook shop integration initially, which then connects seamlessly to Instagram. I have an account on Instagram where I sell my products too. Instagram allows you to link to the Facebook shop directly from the image, which is great. You can use the insights tool to see what interest you have generated.

Invest your time wisely

So for the time being I am plugging away at RedBubble, releasing the maximum products a day and also on Zazzle. The latter has not yet provided much of a return for my time, but I think the investment is worth it in the long run.

Whilst POD can be a free enterprise, your time really is of value to you. Decide how you want to spend it during your working hours to the maximum benefit. POD is not a get rich quick scheme. It takes a lot of effort. I am working most waking hours to maximise my exposure across the internet to provide the best possible opportunity to acquire traffic and sales. It is a labour of love.

Keep going

Most people fail in the first few months of POD because they expect an instant return. You need to have a large body of work available across the internet and this takes time to generate. You also need the magic of Google to index everything. Keep going with your efforts and good quality content and you should see a result after a few months.