What are Print On Demand Companies?

Selling your art through Print On Demand sites can be a very lucrative additional or primary income.

Why are print on demand sites so great? Because all you have to do is create the art, upload the photo, and they do the rest!

No inventory, customer service stuff, or anything else!

You just create your beautiful art and the more people buy it, the more money you make.

Each company will have slightly different items to offer like shirts, pillowcases, bedspread, clocks, phone cases, etc.

As far as the art goes, you can create it yourself, take a high resolution photo of it OR scan it in (at least 600dpi, you can adjust this on your printer in the settings) then digitize your art.

If the picture is high quality enough you don't necessarily have to digitize your art, but you will have A LOT more options as far as which items you can have your art printed on if you do. Just don't stress if you can't or don't have the means to digitize, your smart phone will take high enough quality photos to work.

Once you upload the high resolution photo or scan it in, upload to PicMonkey (or whichever photo edit program you use) and crop it to your liking.

Make sure you save it to the correct pixel requirement.

Best Programs to edit your creations:

Illustrator and/or PhotoShop will be something you want if you are going to do this seriously. Illustrator and Photoshop are going to give you much higher quality results).

Each POD company is going to have different items for sale and a different size for each item. That is actually why it is nice to have the Pro version of PicMonkey because you can just save the template online, and then pull it up and simply save at a different size.

If you are going to digitize your art, you will just be adding a couple more steps, but you will have a higher quality design that you can do more with. For digitizing art, I absolutely recommend Illustrator for this (you can get a FREE TRIAL through my link).

Same initial process: you will either take a high resolution photo to upload or scan in the work of art.

Once uploaded, you will open Illustrator, upload your document so you can digitize this piece.

I will be uploading an instructional post for this specific process soon, but for now, HELLOBRIO is the person that I learned this whole process from.

Once the art pic is digitized you save it to your computer, figure out which POD companies you want to work with. Then you will open up your shop through their site and start creating products to sell!

Zazzle was the first POD company that I uploaded designs to, and they have a super cool Widget you can add anywhere to your site and it will display all your products gallery style.

Again, no inventory, nothing is made until someone orders it. And you don't do anything. Just upload awesome art, make sure you use powerful keyword descriptors, tags, categories, etc. Market your stuff on social media, and you will have successfully “planted your hypothetical seeds” for a passive income “garden”.

You will need access to a photo editing software to adjust the pixels because each item has very different (and very specific) requirements. PicMonkey is my personal favorite and FREE to set up an account!

How to market your POD Site items:

As long as you attach an accurate description, category, tags, and photos, the customers can find your products through the PrintOnDemand by searching for a specific design, item, or an artist. Outside of this, your biggest draw is going to come from Pinterest and other social media accounts.

You can sell your art on POD (print on demand) sites with OR without a blog. If you are seriously wanting to sell some stuff on social media, I would suggest using some type of social media management tool because then you don't have to keep posting all your pictures, these websites do it for you!

Most are about $10 a month, and the one I have been using for the past six months is Tailwind I love them because the price was lowered to $9.99/mo, which may sound high at first, but once you start selling (because your pins/posts will be CONSISTENTLY be posted) this tool will allow you to do money making activities instead of keeping up with things like the hours and hours of posting you would be doing otherwise.