Marketing and selling your t-shirt designs can be a daunting task in what has become an increasingly crowded marketplace. Fortunately, there are a growing number of merch tools available to entrepreneurs to help you thrive in this often industry. Merch by Amazon, Teespring, and Redbubble are my top 3 print on-demand websites that can really help you grow your t-shirt business by handling the marketing, production, sales, shipping, and listings for you.
Merch Informer has been my secret weapon for years to research and identify keywords that match well with designs and get a real advantage over other sellers. It includes several tools related to niche research and keywords that allow you to gain an edge over your competitors in your listing traffic. This is a powerful toolkit to have on hand if you want to grow your t-shirt business. In this article, I’ll cover how you can use this software to sell more t-shirts for your business.
How to Use Merch Informer to Sell T-Shirts
Merch Informer provides a wealth of blog posts, documentation, and videos to help you learn how to use its many features and modules. In this section, I’ll touch on the specific tools that I use most.
Find the Best Niches for Your Designs
This is the most important feature on Merch Informer. The Competition Checker is a must-use tool that allows you to see how your keywords stack up against the ones your competitors are using to list their designs. You can see how each set of keywords and phrases generates results specific to the merch you are selling and score them based on how they do.
In short, you can see how competitive the niche is that you are thinking about going into. The less competitors, the most views your listings will get. The more views, the more sales.
Any t-shirt seller’s goal should be to find a niche in the market that is currently underserved or under-represented, and the Competition Checker is the tool to use to find these niches.
Using the Keyword Tool
Once you’ve found a niche that has low competition, then it’s time to use the Keyword Finder to find the best variations of keywords to use within that niche you found.
Within a niche, there are going to be more specific phrases or keywords you can put in your listing titles and descriptions to get more traffic from buyers.
Design and Trademark Checking
Once you’ve found a great niche, and great keywords, now it’s time to check those keywords for trademarks.
Merch Informer has a feature called Trademark Alerts that instantly checks your keywords for trademarks.
If a keyword is protected by a trademark, all of your hard work creating your listing will be for nothing because the print on-demand website will automatically remove your listing.
The Trademark tool on Merch Informer will give you a real-time ‘green check mark’ or ‘red x’ to tell you which keywords you can use in your titles and descriptions.
Using the Product Search Tool
Once you’ve narrowed it down to a niche and found the best keywords, you can start getting design ideas with the Product Search tool to see the current top-selling shirts in that niche.
This tool literally shows you the best selling designs in that niche. This information is GOLD because it’s the only way to see what is actually selling right now.
As a general rule, use these top-selling designs as inspiration for your new designs. Making similar (but different) designs, with your new-found keywords and phrases, will lead to some of your own top-selling designs.
Designing Your T-Shirts
This step is one of the most important. Your research can be great, but if your designs are bad, nobody will buy them.
Although Merch Informer is working on developing their own t-shirt design tool, I personally use and recommend using Placeit.net.
Placeit is the absolute best t-shirt design tool out there. Thousands of customizable t-shirt templates and thousands of mockups to show them off, Placeit is a the best t-shirt design tool I’ve ever used.
Listing Your T-Shirts
Finally, it’s time to list your products. Previously, once you finished making your t-shirt designs, you had to manually upload the designs to Merch by Amazon, Teespring, and Redbubble one-by-one.
This was the longest part of the process, and took up the most time.
Merch Informer’s most recent feature is the Single Upload Interface. This tool is a HUGE time-saver.
By using this tool, you can upload your new designs, titles, and descriptions, and the Single Upload Interface will automatically upload them to Merch by Amazon, Teespring, and Redbubble all at once!
How Can Merch Informer Increase T-Shirt Sales?
Any software is an investment of time and money, so you would be justified in asking if Merch Informer is really worth it.
Finding Niches That Will Actually Sell
The Niche Research tool is my favorite, and most used, tool because it allows me to only spend time creating designs in niches that I know will sell.
You could make the best design, but if it’s in a niche that tis way too competitive, you may not make a single sale.
Finding the best niches is a priceless tool to have at your fingertips.
Make Listing Less of a Hassle
Listing your designs on the Merch by Amazon, Teespring, and Redbubble one-by-one will take a lot of time.
Using the Single Upload Interface will save you literally hours of ‘busy work’ by uploading your designs for you.
Protect Yourself Against Trademark Infringement
No one wants to go to the trouble of uploading a design only to have it taken down because of Trademark Infringement.
By using the Trademark Alert tool, you can check your designs against trademarked phrases and feel confident that your designs are protected against accusations of infringement.
Final Thoughts
Standing out from the crowd is one of the most important aspects of sales in any business, and especially selling t-shirts with print on-demand. Whether you use a tool suite such as Merch Informer, it’s a good idea to have a strategy for finding your niche, and a means to execute on it. It helps a great deal to have a way to protect your designs from being targeted for takedowns and to find the best keywords that will lead to higher traffic.
Merch Informer is truly a must-use tool if you want to turn print on-demand into a full time income. If you want to get your toes wet, Merch Informer has a 3 day free trial that gives you full access to their tools. Further, you can get 20% off with the code “greg20“.