Ok, yes, I’m sorry. I missed a week! Were you worried that I abandonned you? I’m offended at the thought, I would never! (she says to herself as no one else is reading these posts anyway…by the way, if you are, leave me a comment below and let me know I’m not alone!). Anyways, my bad on the delay. On the long to-do list I made for myself, this is just one of the things I didn’t end up getting to last week. But let’s not harp on the past eh? Let me fill you in on where we’re now following the last two weeks.
I did build my Zazzle store! Check it out here!
I have 15 products uploaded so far, across 3 different designs (pillows, blankets and mugs so far). I moved to this platform because quite honestly, I was very disappointed with the overall quality of the merchandise that was coming from Redbubble (I’m aware, it’s really not smart for me to unpromote myself). I ordered a number of items and whereas the prints look great, the merchandise themselves left something to be desired. Two things I can’t complain about though: The mugs and the cards. Those were actually pretty good.
Zazzle supposedly has better quality merchandise, for better prices and less shipping cost. The main downside? I can’t upload to 87 products at the same time like I can with Redbubble. Each product has it’s own upload which can become very time consuming and tedious. Also, one of the main benefits of this platform is the customization options that customers have, and it’s one of the main things people look for when they shop here. That being said, my previous plan of just uploading premade designs isn’t going to work as well here, I think I’m going to have to do more of a spin off and actually handmake a lot of my products so that they fit this niche.
I created an official portfolio site using Crevado. You can check that one out here!
I submitted the “Design” page as my portfolio on two different platform applications, then realized, I should really just have a portfolio for these purposes! So I created one! Crevado came recommended as a very simple and free drag and drop platform. It has options for more than just drag and drop if that’s what you want, but I just wanted to keep this one simple and less time consuming for now. I did end up deciding to upgrade my plan to a paid one (I think it’s $9 a month?), to get more size and more gallery collections. I love a lot of my designs and hated the idea of being limited to the 30 or so images in the free plan. One very cool thing from this though, was that apparently I can also link this to a platform called Fotomoto. With this platform, you can purchase any of the artwork I’ve created directly from my portfolio in various sizes and forms. To do this, just go into one of my galleries, click on the artwork you like, hover over it and you’ll see a little shopping cart pop up on the bottom right hand side of the image. From there, it will let you choose all the options available to you.
I went on a crazy design spree with Procreate fractal brushes, iColorama and Repper
I must have made hundreds of new designs in the last couple of weeks. The new fractal brush in Procreate I had mentioned last time was so insanely cool! It took my artwork into a completely different direction. I made so many amazing looking fractal designs. On top of that, I started playing with iColorama, another app on the ipad. There are so many options to play with in this platform that you can take one existing design and easily turn it into a hundred on its own. If you have any interest in design, I highly recommend you check this one out. Oh ya, that one is also free!
I also tried out Repper which is another VERY cool tool. This one has a free 14-day trial that I’ve been taking advantage of. Essentially you upload an image, any image, and the program gives you options of about 30 or so different pattern tiles. You pick one and then move it around your image and it creates the most awesome looking patterns! You get to adjust the size, shape and type of pattern, there are a tonne of filters you can apply to tweak the designs even further, and then you can export them as PNG or JPG, in whatever size and resolution you like. I have made so many awesome patterns that will be great for any type of all-over-print apparel (more on this to come), and black and white patterns that are going to be awesome for my upcoming coloring book series. Again, I definitely recommend you to check this one out.
I created a Payhip and Art of Where account
Yes, I may be expanding too fast without building up each platform enough first, but I can’t help it! The building part will come! There are a lot of options for platforms to sell digital downloads, which is a whole market in it’s own, and I chose Payhip. It had pretty good reviews, it’s specific just for digital downloads, and it supposedly makes the setup and upload part pretty easy. On top of that, it is it’s own e-commerce platform, which means I don’t need to upload things here then link it to another platform that has a checkout capability. I haven’t uploaded any designs yet, I’m close to being ready for that. I’ll keep you posted on that progress.
Art of Where is another platform I decided to go with specifically for apparel. Apparently it has very high quality merchandise, including real silk scarves (ooooh)! Even better for me: it has a lot of options for all-over-print apparel. So many of my patterns and designs so far would look great on apparel, but would not look good printed as a rectangle in the middle of a shirt. They would look awesome on any piece of clothing that has the full thing printed though! Again, there are a lot of options for these platforms, but this one had a high recommendation from some of the YouTube gurus I’m following, it has it’s own storefronts that avoids me from having to setup my own checkout system, and it looks pretty user friendly. I’m excited to try this out and test order some of these products. I’ll get back to you on that one too.
I have been preparing my digital downloads and KDP collections, and they are almost ready to go!
Essentially, everything I make can be sold in multiple ways. That’s one of the things I love about this print on demand thing, it can be almost as versatile as you want it to be, just get creative and do the work! For example, the black and white patterns I’ve made can look great on clothing and other merchandise I sell, they can be published and sold on Amazon KDP as fully printed coloring books, and I can also sell packets of those coloring book pages separately as digital downloads for people that just want to print their own coloring pages (apparently this is a big market too!). The color designs I make can again be used on my print on demand merchandise, they can be sold as digital downloads for other creators to use in their content, and they can also be sold as backgrounds, screensavers and awesome looking wall art.
Wow, this post is already a lot longer than I had planned! Ok, real quick recap on the recent challenges and then an update on stats:
I applied to be a designer on CreativeFabrica, which is a site I really love, have a subscription to, and use for most of my stock image needs. They have a really cool setup and compensation plan for designers, and I was very excited to become part of this community and start selling my digital products. Well, I was rejected. Apparently they reviewed the website I submitted to them and they have rejected my application because they feel as though some of my content may be “potentially” infringing on some kind of copyrights or trademarks. Why do people say things like this without specifying the designs they’re referring to?? I wrote them back, very disappointed, but even more concerned about the fact that they think anything might be infringing on this, since I have been very careful not to go down this path. I would immediately take down anything that might be viewed this way, it’s not the type of reputation I’m trying to build. I asked them to let me know which ones specifically. Over a week later, I finally got a response today to that question, stating they have passed my question over to another team for them to provide details. It will take another few more days to get back to me.
I applied to Displate, which is a very cool platform that sells metal wall art. They have so many amazing designs on this thing. When I submitted my application though, I received an automatic message that self-registration is no longer an option that is being provided and they only accept a very limited number of applicants whose artwork closely fits with the themes they are looking for. I haven’t heard anything more specific since, but I’m really not expecting anything to come from this one anymore.
I had my first social media interaction with my favorite YouTube guru mentor (Mey Aroyo), and I completely embarrassed myself. I thought I was asking a really great follow up question to something she mentioned in one of her videos, it was an issue I was struggling with for a while, I had even googled it to find no solution…and yet in the end, it turns out it was a completely stupid question on my part. That was embarrassing and somewhat demoralizing.
There is more, but honestly, I think I need to wrap up this very long post.
I have seriously been neglecting my social media and haven’t been posting too much in the way of my new designs lately. As such, this is seriously reflected in the stats for traffic to my store. Honestly, the numbers don’t look a lot different than the last time I posted here, so I’ll keep this short, but my focus this week really needs to be to create a bulk of promotional materials and have them all scheduled to go out. Otherwise there is no point to what I’m doing!
Pinterest: Essentially, everything here is exactly the same. Seems no one is even seeing any of my standard pins. Come on!
Still only 1 follower, 36 I’m following
Up to 1.2K monthly views so far though! (Still 0 saves)
28 created pins
304 total saved pins
Redbubble:
184 designs uploaded (apparently I’ve uploaded 47 more designs since I decided to move platforms?!!!)
7 followers (increased by 1!)
359 favorites received (up from 335)…no one seems to be liking any of my new designs, which is very disappointing
11 products sold (increased by 1! What’s cool though, is it was someone in Australia!)
Total earnings to date: $15.42
Facebook:
I’ll keep this sad news short: Essentially, no change here. I have 1 new follower, I am now at 9 likes and 18 followers.
Overall take home message at the moment: to all you YouTubers out there that are going on about easy money with this POD approach, BITE ME! They are all lying asshats that deserve to be slapped!
