ESYB2 142 - How to Sell Physical Products Without Manufacturing
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[00:00:00] In this video, I want to introduce you to cafe press, which is a website that can help you manufacture a very large number of different items. Of course it acts as a store, but for us, it's interesting because you see on top here, you can design your own. So what you would do is they have mugs. You see like on the left here, for example, if we just take the mug example, they have a very standard white.

But what you would do is add a design on it. You can hire designers on fiverr. com on upwork. com on 99designs. com. There's no shortage of designers out there, or you think you could try your hand at designing. All these options are open for you. You can create. Your own cups anything if you look on top here t shirts hoodies pajamas a lot of people want to get into the t shirt business This is a fantastic way to enter it It might not be the way to stay there long term, but at least to get started what this does really well is It has standard relative quality items It's not the best [00:01:00] quality in the world, but pretty good good enough And you can see if you're able to sell you can manufacture any product here so You don't have to deal with your local printers and once you have your item here, you can also get your item shipped to you and then try to sell the same item on eBay, Amazon, your own website, even Etsy.

Once one is selling well, then you can consider how can I get the production to be in higher volumes? How can I? Reduce the cost of my items. But before all that, you need to see which ones am I actually able to sell. So this is a fantastic way to test it quickly. Because you'll be able to get very standard, very common items, very quickly.

The challenge is that these are very standard items. T shirts, pajamas, underwear. I mean, like these are items with which you'll compete with thousands of other very similar items. That's the main problem. Anybody can slap a [00:02:00] logo on a hat, or a mug, or a cup, or whatever. Let's talk about how to solve this issue.

Very likely, you might think, I'm going to promote on social media. It's actually not accurate for e commerce, meaning selling products. Most products are sold through people searching. When they need some product, they search for it. And for you, you have to think, OK, I'll make a cup, for example. But maybe it will be specifically a Mother's Day cup.

Obviously, we don't even have to go to research it to understand that's probably also very competitive right now because it's a very popular holiday, but something like that. So you need themes. When you have a theme, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Birthday, those give you keywords people search for. Great gift for mom, mug for dad.

You see, you have to find niches in which you'll be able to differentiate yourself. Or niches in which you already have an existing audience. For example, like I have an audience in entrepreneurship. [00:03:00] In that case, I can make some cool funny hats or funny t shirts for entrepreneurs and try to sell them with my brand as well.

Selling merchandise doesn't make a big difference financially. It's just a tiny revenue boost usually. But in your case, what you would want to do is find some niche that's not too competitive. And once you think of one, go to Google, search for it. If there's not a lot of good products, great, then it's not competitive.

Go to Amazon, search for the same thing. If there's not a lot of very strong competitors, great, that might be an opportunity. Do your common keyword research to see what kind of demand there is for this. And once you sift through a lot of ideas for themes, you might want to try these out. And the great thing about CafePress is that you can try these experiments relatively cheaply.

for dollars or tens of dollars, but not hundreds of dollars. Just get a little bit of inventory, try to sell. If you can sell, get more inventory and grow it that way. [00:04:00] Experiment, experiment, experiment. And pretty soon, you'll get very good at finding interesting niche, like long tail niches. Not birthday, not Mother's Day, but maybe Teacher's Day.

Obviously, that's still Possibly competitive, but certainly not as competitive as Mother's Day. So, you kind of go down the line. And the great thing about them is, once you get some niches right, and you're selling on your site, and you have the SEO going on your site, you have some ads maybe, you maybe have some Amazon listing that you sell from, that's passive income.

So you attain that goal, you'll just grow in your niches and you'll just keep gaining more and more niches. And thinking now you might think, well, all the niches are competitive and it always feels that way when you're on the outside looking in, but when you're on the inside, when you've tried it out and you've gotten a lot of experience, you can find a lot of niches.

For example, you can just go after. Current topic niches. If there's some news next month and you're the first one to, let's say, make a [00:05:00] funny t shirt about that topic, whatever it might be, as long as being funny is appropriate, there might be a little bit of a market for it. Is that market gonna last? No, probably not, because the month after that, people will stop talking about that news item, but you didn't have to invest a lot to have products on that theme.

And that's just one example. You can have plenty of So, I'm going to show you a couple of niche examples that I promise you'll find once you practice and become good at finding these kinds of very long tail niches. One example literally might be, every industry has a day, like speech therapist day, doctor's day, nurse's day, truck driver's day, I don't know.

But like, for every job, you know, you can make a mug saying, to my favorite truck driver, or best truck driver in the world, or something like that, just a little cuter than my example. More. Heartwarming, maybe with T shirts it will be a little funnier because T shirts are usually made to be funnier. Same with hats.

Try to think of all of these, there are hundreds and hundreds of [00:06:00] potential niches that are not really that competitive. And so, I'm sure you'll be able to find a lot of good potential long tail niches, which because they won't be competitive, you'll be able to get into and sell relatively quickly.

