Accidentally Made Money on Etsy: 24 Hours of Setting Up My Print On Demand Online Business

Accidentally Made Money on Etsy: 24 Hours of Setting Up My Print On Demand Online Business

Being in quarantine and doing the same thing over and over again has gotten to my head. I was listening to Chamath Palihapitiya on a podcast and one thing he said was to use this time to learn a new skill. I have just trying to learn new things.

First setting up ADvengers and trying to create a community and make it a go-to chat community, getting back and systemizing my Amazon/eBay business, optimizing campaigns and my doing more content for my blog…. trying…

Doing all these can become boring to me as it becomes repetitive. While trying to learn a new skill, I decided to check out print on demand Youtube videos. I just randomly typed it in and watched a continuous flow of videos for about 3 hours, I then started signing up. It was 9 pm on a Saturday night.

I was not even thinking at that time and just started setting stuff up. Within an hour or so I got my store setup and systems linked, I made an image with at that time what I thought was a solid idea. I wanted the least amount of entry when setting my first print on demand store, so I use my eBay account that I already have and set up an Etsy store that I previously had for reselling.

 

The only thing I had to do was set up a print-on-demand service. Everyone was recommending Printful, I didn’t get a chance to do my own research but they integrate with what I currently have so why not. Again everything was synced up and then I went to bed.

Woke up to 7 orders… not a lot but 3 hours of work and just experimenting. Not bad.

I was like “Oh shit” this is legit. I started with no inventory and just an idea graphic in my head. Sunday I started getting more orders. So I started to check out Etsy and see if there was any competition on this trend I picked up on. Not that much actually and I think I caught a wave.

What is Printful?

Printful is a service for your Print on Demand ideas. Want a meme on a t-shirt to sell to the masses? Want a coffee mug with your logo on it? Printful allows you to put your ideas to reality without holding any inventory. You create an idea, make a store, and sync your orders with Printful and they handle the supply chain from the t-shirt inventory to the printing to even shipping it out to your customers.

All you need is an idea and a computer to start signing up.

Now, as the excitement grew, I came up with more ideas to see what else I can print on. Where else can I add POD to a store similar to Etsy? I was wired with excitement. I started reading where Printful can be integrated. Then I notice …

There are going to be delayed when printing, I didn’t think of it and didn’t bother reading it. Later in the day as I got my second image drafted up I decided to read it. What… 22 days to 30 days delayed!!

As of this writing, they have closed certain products to the public such as t-shirts and all-over prints. You can not add any new products within Printful until they catch up on their current orders. Good call for them, but now I have orders to fulfill!

With the pandemic going on and people stuck at home, they just buy things. Even Amazon and Walmart recognized sales that are similar to Black Friday but now every day while during the COVID pandemic.

So 2 things came to mind, cancel all the orders, and refund them or find a local shop to get this t-shirt printed. I decided to open up Google maps and find local print shops that are open. I called every one of them to see if they can do a turn around time by Monday/Tuesday.

One came back and took the order to be done by Monday. I paid double, the loss on the total set of orders was just $40. Now the best part is I have a new set of relationships that I can use just in case this happens again. I also now have their tier pricing for t-shirts and how long they need to print the shirts. So did I lose money?

Luckily for me, my t-shirt was just one color and decided to go with screen printing with the local shops. It is far cheaper than DTG and more efficient. If it was a complicated design then I would have reconsidered, but I wanted these shirts to be printed in a short amount of time while still trying to be cost-effective.

Print on Demand Dead?

Now here is my opinion on Print on Demand industry. It is currently slowly dying. Why the supply chain is broken. Printful can only buy so many more printers and they are the biggest ones out there (from what I have read so far). The problem of printing t-shirts is still a manual process.

Yes, I went down the rabbit hole and understood how t-shirts and screen printing vs DTG (direct to garment) works. It allowed me to understand the hiccups DTG printing has – the prep itself is manual from treating the shirt to heating to finally printing! A lot goes into it and a lot of these Print on Demand business owners do not understand the process.

Watch this video here on how one shirt is being printed and the prep it takes…

Hit up Reyes and maybe he will print and ship your POD t-shirts. He is a hardcore hustler.

Print on Demand for t-shirts will not die but right now or later, but right now they have to keep up with current orders. If you are going to start out a Print on Demand online business, then this isn’t the year to start. When the supply chain lessens then it will be much easier for your products to get to the consumer.

Remember people got used to 2-day shipping and now are used to 5-day shipping because they understand the delays – no one is waiting 4 weeks! Would YOU ever wait 4 weeks for a product? Probably not. Our brains probably do not even remember what we ordered 2 days ago let alone, 4 weeks.

So I believe it is a viable online business model ‘Print on Demand’. When the supply chain eases then it will be a great way to get back on it. I personally now bought a bunch of shirts with the meme on it and now is going to put these orders back on Etsy, eBay, Mercari, etc – where I can sell these items.

What you need to look for is what products are not being delayed. Looking at Printful list – phone cases, jewelry, and framed posters currently have no delays in creating and fulfilling the orders. T-shirts for sure is backed up, so I personally would stick away from that unless you can work with local print shops as I have.

If you want to know what shop I have contacted send me a message and I will put you in contact with them.


 


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How to Index a Website in Google Search in 24 Hours [Case Study]

How to Index a Website in Google Search in 24 Hours [Case Study]

How to Index a Website in Google Search in 24 Hours [Case Study]

Having a website today is an essential part of an online presence, and it’s important that your target customers can find your website by your brand name in search engines.

Many businesses have already added blogs to their websites for faster indexing and for more exposure from search engines and social media.

In this article, I’m going to share information which will help you to make your site visible to search engines in no time.

Recently I worked on two websites – one for my client and one for myself.

The challenge with both was to index a website in Google within 24 hours. This is not a simple task, but neither is it an overwhelming one if you pay attention to what I am about to teach you here.

A proper strategy will help you to put your website into search engines within 24 hours – and maybe only in a couple of hours!

You can try the following instructions with any new domain you have purchased, or with any site which you created in the past but which is not getting traffic from search engines.

The first step is to determine whether or not your site is indexed in Google or any other search engines.

Go to Google.com and type site:domain.com  (Replace “domain.com” with your actual domain name, (example: shoutmeloud.com), and check to see whether the site is indexed or not.

If there are no results, it’s time to follow the steps below and get your site into Google. Here is a screenshot for my query:

 

Want to understand what we just did? let’s understand this..

What is indexing of a website?

Many of you may not be aware of the meaning of the term indexing. Indexing in SEO refers to search engines keeping a record of your web pages. When working on indexing of our site, we should target all major search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex etc).

Usually when a search engine bot comes onto your site, it starts crawling and, based on “index” and “noindex” meta tags, it adds pages with index tags in that search engine.

This is how you control what pages from your website should be found in the various search engines.

You can watch the video below from 5:27 to learn more about how search engines work:

Here is a synopsis of the strategy I used to put both my client’s website and mine into the search engines within 24 hours.

Apart from On-page SEO optimization like meta tags, meta descriptions and on-site SEO (noindex, nofollow), I used sitemap to put the websites into search engines in just a few hours.

Before you try to index a new website, make sure you have your content prepared, because you don’t want Google bots to come and crawl your empty homepage!

Make sure you do all of the basic onsite SEO work mentioned above first, and then work on the following steps to get your site indexed fast.

Guide to Indexing a Website in Google Within a Few Hours:

This strategy should work with all websites, as we will be using external sites to send crawlers to our site. The results also depend on how fast Google updates the newly indexed pages.

Note that if you are doing this work for a client, you may wish to research the index status in all countries to check for data replication delays.

Submission to blog networks :

We talk about blog directories and blog networks as though they were things of the past, but in fact even today networks and directories work.

As in the past, however, you should not submit your blog to every blog network or directory. Instead, submit your blog only to selected blog networks and directories, making sure to avoid link exchange directories!

Sitemap submission :

A sitemap is created to help search engine crawlers to effectively crawl your blog, so make sure you have created a sitemap for your site or your client’s site. If you are using WordPress platform for your website or blog, you can use popular Yoast SEO plugin or any of these sitemap plugins to generate Sitemap file for free.

Next, submit the sitemap to Google/ Bing/ Yahoo/Ask and other popular search engines.

Comment on other blogs

Since one of the sites in my example was related to a paid job and it had to be completed within a given time-frame, I added almost 30+ comments for on other popular WordPress website.

I did not check for do-follow or nofollow attributes, but I did comment on popular, high traffic blogs. This confirmed that search engine bots will follow the comment links and will land on my blog, and that is exactly what happened.

Popular website stats program :

IMT Website Submitter

Some of you may not be aware of websites which keep stats of domains or show the price and value of any domain. This is a nice way to get your site indexed, however submitting to multiple stat sites is not easy, so it may require a bit of manual work.

With this tool, all you need to do is to add the link and anchor text, and IMT submitter will submit your site to sites like who.is, “website stats” and other such sites.

Social bookmarking submission :

This is another very effective method, though somehow within four hours my website was in the search engines despite the fact that I did not seek social bookmarking submissions.

If you wish to do so however, you can start with

  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Flipboard
  • Facebook (Public share)
  • Twitter

for faster indexing of your content.

Guest posting:

If your budget is sufficient and you have the necessary time and patience required, prepare 5-10 quality posts and ask your fellow bloggers in your niche for permission to publish your articles on their blogs as a guest author and enjoy the resulting backlinks.

If you are doing this for a client, buy 5-10 quality articles and do the same.

Along with backlinks it will drive some traffic to your blog. Try to guest post on relevant popular, high-ranking pages and on regularly updated websites.

Ping services:

Ping services offer another effective way to notify search engines of your existence. Pingomatic is one such tool which you can use to notify multiple search engines at once, and another you can try is Pingler.

WordPress does have a default feature to ping services, but giving one of these other options a shot can’t hurt.  If you are using WordPress, you should check out: WordPress ping services & update Ping services from your dashboard (It’s easy).

Here are my results, achieved within four hours:

The screenshot above is for one of my websites. I simply tried indexing that parked domain site for test purposes, so kindly avoid the meta description shown.

For your website, make sure you add a meta description and all of the other important SEO details, as you don’t want search engines to index useless pages of your site

I would love to hear your feedback about this post as well as your thoughts on any other information which might be useful to the topic of indexing websites.

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