Addiction and goals; making POD work in your life

In my poorly titled chicken post, I talked about how POD is a very unpredictable beast, yet so lucrative it’s hard to ignore. Passive income generally appeals to me so much because of the benefits (I love waking up to sales!), but there is also a dark side.

Hi I’m Jack, and I’m addicted to Redbubble. Before this, I was addicted to one of my information sites that ran affiliate links and Adsense. I’m not even entirely sure what it is.

There is just something so compelling about not trading your time directly for money. It feels like you’ve found a hack for life. “If it goes well, I’ll never have to work again”, is something we’ve probably said to ourselves more than once.

What makes passive income and POD so addictive?

Addiction probably isn’t the best word, I would say that I have an invested and ongoing interest in Redbubble. I want to get better at it, I enjoy it, and as hobbies go, it is quite a positive, productive one!

Recently, there have been days where I would spend hours on Redbubble, uploading work, fixing older uploads, researching niches, creating designs. While this can be good, it’s not the best idea to keep this up. It can get exhausting, it can infect your dreams and daily life.

I would have a monitor dedicated to Redbubble; with half a chrome window on my Gmail filter, and the other half on my Redbubble activity feed.

Looking back I suppose it was for the short dopamine rush every time I saw a sale. It’s great to see that filter light up with a new message. It means nothing though. Seeing a sale as soon as it is made is no different to seeing it tomorrow.

I started limiting my time looking at Redbubble sales. I now check them once in the morning, and only a few times in the day. Passive income really has an unpredictable quality. Just look at this chart of earnings over the past month. Who knows what’s going on there, it’s completely wild.

Apart from Sundays, there is no real pattern to this. The massive bulk payment was something I uploaded a few days before, so I must have hit a niche just right. let’s hope this continues!

It’s because of this wild difference in days that it becomes to exciting.

You just never know if somebody is going to buy that £150 art print and absolutely destroy your day. Other days, you might just get a few sticker sales and nothing else.

Sunday is usually my best day. I suppose people are at home, getting cosy before Monday morning, maybe wanting to buy something to try and buy a slice of happiness before the working week.

You have to accept the nature of passive income and print on demand businesses. With inconsistency and disorder comes a desire for order. While I can’t control who buys things, I can set actionable goals to create a sense of order.

Creating good goals

Actionable goals are things you can do, which only require effort on your part. they are good goals. A recent goal of mine was ‘Get to 300 designs!’ This is a good actionable goal.

It’s clear and achievable and I have the means and ability to do it. There is nothing really stopping me from having 300 designs uploaded. The only party that could have any impact on it was me, and after putting a few days in, I got to 300.

A bad example for a goal would be ‘Sell this product x times before the end of the month’. You just can’t control it directly, it might not even be a popular product, who knows. You might be able to achieve this if you’re certain of a niche and have an advertising budget, but I wouldn’t worry about that.

Between these two goals is ‘I want to make x amount this month’. While you can’t directly make a certain amount every month, you can see it as something to aim for. I am aiming for £1000 a month. It’s a long term goal, and I know I’ll feel achieved when I reach it. There is no time limit, £1000 is just what I want to get out of my passive income.

Remember, it’s not a get rich quick scheme. If you do it well, it’s a get rich slow scheme.

In summary

  • Spend time wisely getting better at something, not just blindly looking at your stats
  • Remember that daily statistics don’t really mean anything at all
  • Focus on long term analytics; visitors month by month
  • Create short term actionable goals
  • Create long term achievable goals

Exciting update

JeezPod now has a Facebook page. If you like it, you’ll see when new posts are up. You can check it out by clicking or tapping below:

Jeezpod facebook page 🙂

I’m not sure how active it will be, but I think it’s better than me manually pasting the link into a few Facebook groups. Thanks for reading.

How to find a good niche for Redbubble

Selling stuff online now is all about niches. Very rarely now will you find an untapped audience. The internet is too prevalent in our lives that big companies can come along with their gigantic advertising budgets and obliterate a general interest.

Lol bants.

It’s up to us to tap the little niches, there are still people with unique interests and even juicier wallets just waiting to buy that obscure Bangladeshi kite design or Indonesia basket weaving joke you’ve turned into a T-Shirt. The best place to find a potentially untapped niche is to start with your own interests.

Do you even need a niche?

Not really, no. You don’t need a niche, but if you’re starting out, it can be a great place to grow an audience, and somewhat theme your account. You definitely don’t need a niche to succeed in Redbubble.

I started my account solely based off of a website I was working on; it was the store portion of the website. As I’ve sold the site now, the Redbubble account is just a general account I have to upload work, most of it isn’t even related anymore.

Customers are more likely to search for specific products in the search bar than browse account pages.

What am I basing that off of? It’s just human nature. I have previously worked on online stores, professionally. Checking the analytics, people come to your store to find a specific product, rarely will they come to browse.

Simply don’t worry about ‘branding’ yourself if you’re just starting out. Your first goal should be to get work up, and get your first sale. Once you know what sells, post related work. You may discover a niche this way, organically.

Start with what you like

Okay, so you want to start with a niche anyway. Maybe you already have a good few ideas for some related products. Brilliant! If not, just read on to get inspired.

What weird hobbies do you have? What odd TV shows, beliefs, sayings or in-jokes, do you have? How could you turn that into a product for Redbubble? If you have an interest in something, no matter how small, then somebody else probably shares that interest too. My best selling designs on Redbubble are all based off an interest. It’s also lucky that this interest is easily turned into products.

There are other benefits for working within an existing interest of yours, and while at the start it might not seem obvious, eventually Redbubble and any form of passive income will rely on a lot of time put in beforehand.

You need to stay focused during the start. Things can get very boring very quickly.

Working within an interest you already have will make things so much easier at the start. Starting with your own interests is also great for a new account. You don’t want to bother yourself with things like keyword research at the start.

You just need to start getting products out there at the start. There is no need to ‘brand’ yourself if you don’t want to. Most customers won’t care.

It can be easy to get stuck with analysis paralysis when it comes to this sort of thing. The best advice anyone can give you when it comes to Redbubble, and pretty much any other aspect of your life, is to just start. Even if it’s terrible, just start. You can do improve it later on.

A good example is this site. JeezPod right now just looks absolutely terrible, but I’d already been putting it off for a month. When it comes to websites, it’s best to start and improve later. Google will rank your content quicker; audiences will grow and see your site change, there rarely is a negative. Just start.

What if you can’t market your own interests?

Maybe you’re really into movies, video games or other copyrighted material. While it will be tough to make designs off these that aren’t taken down or automatically deleted, you can still succeed. You need to ‘work around’ the intellectual property.

Personally, I wouldn’t suggest working on anyone else’s intellectual property at all, outside of the Redbubble fan-art programme. This, still unsaturated marketplace on Redbubble allows you to create and sell your own fan-art. I have recently put some some designs up here, and while they do take some time to get verified, I have heard some great success stories! I’ll be sure to report in with any sales!

If you’re determined to make that Zelda T-Shirt or Star Wars quote, there are some things you can do, but be aware that you’ll likely always be at some risk.

Quotes you’ve written that can be closely associated to the work will likely be accepted, even better if you write it in a similar font to the title header. You’ll see a lot of this on Redbubble.

There’s a downside to this sort of work though; it’s so trend based. Outliers aside, TV Shows, Movies and Games aren’t going to stay popular forever, and the ones that do will probably control their copyright tightly; think Nintendo, Disney, etc.

What if I’ve already milked my niches dry?

Well then strap yourself in because you’re going on a product research journey. Concise niches aren’t for everybody, and while my main Redbubble store started with a niche, it quickly grew out of it.

As Mr Pat Flynn used to say; ‘The Riches are in the Niches’. He’s right, but this doesn’t mean you need to stick to one niche. Cover multiple.

A great place to start when you’re stuck is to see what you and your friends already own, that could be sold on Redbubble. What’s popular in your local group? I used to work for a software developer, and you’d see a lot of Off-brand ‘Nerd’ T-Shirts that other developers wore. It’s this sort of thing you need to start to recognise.

In a non-creepy way, see what people are wearing casually when you are out next. You might spot a joke on a T-shirt, or a fancy phone cover that you’ve not seen on Redbubble before. A quick search is all it needs.

You can do the same thing online. Plenty of people post their own designs on the Redbubble subreddit, and Redbubble designer groups on Facebook. I’m not entirely sure why they wish to advertise to people they are competing with, but use that folly to your advantage, there might be something there to inspire you.

A final thing to consider if you have an idea is; ‘Is this something people would want to, or are able to buy?’

You may have a killer design for something like Minecraft, for example, or some flavour of the month meme. While the audience might be enormous for Minecraft, it may also be mainly children who have no means of purchasing from Redbubble. You may get the parent audience but it’s something to consider.

The Flavour of the Month meme might also net you some quick cash, but before long it’ll be completely dead, and you’ll be competing with so many other people who will set their prices low for a sale.

How I worked a successful niche

I was lucky to get in early with my website and Redbubble store and related niche. I talked about it a little earlier. Honestly, I was so casual about it at the start, I had no idea what I was doing, but this was in 2015. A lot has changed. At the start I didn’t even look for competition, I just uploaded a bunch of designs relating to a hobby and left it at that.

Over time, I kept going back, retagging the designs. I even went through each design (around 100 of them!), up-scaled each of them and retouched them so they would show on all products. This took months.

I really curate the niche I work in and because of that I’m lucky to make sales everyday. I am not here to brag, but when I compare designs to others that are similar, mine are better quality and sell well because of the effort I initially put in.

I didn’t enjoy months of retouching my art, but it paid off. That’s just the ethos of passive income.

Put the work in now, reap the benefit later.

There is more competition now, but even when there is competition, you should make our work the most appealing. if there is competition, it means there are sales.

Have the cleanest looking design, on the widest range of products, at the best price.

I’m not saying race to the bottom with price at all, as people will pay more for a better design.

One of the great things about getting in early is that you become become somewhat related to the area. I got so many repeat sales and requests to customise my work for others, and all off of what was at first an afterthought.

In summary; finding your own niche

  • Start with your own interests
  • Always keep open to new markets
  • Look for evergreen designs over flavour of the month

Basic tips to increase revenue on Redbubble

We’re all on RedBubble for one reason; to make money. Some might be out there to widen a brand, and some are on there for fun, but I would imagine the majority of us want to see a sizeable income for our efforts. I certainly do. While I really do enjoy posting up work and chatting to people who buy my designs, I am more interested in increasing my profits. Hey ho capitalism.

Redbubble can be a great little earner, and with a few quick tips, you can double your income or more. I certainly did, and I think it’s easy for others to as well. It’s very likely you already do some of the tips posted here, but read on just in case there’s a key thing you have neglected!

Optimise for Organic discovery

Redbubble does a lot of behind the scenes work for you, so all you need to do is enter the correct data to get catalogued correctly. The organic discovery on Redbubble is where I make all of my sales (which really just means I don’t buy adverts or post on social media)

Do not neglect any field that Redbubble gives you to put something in. Optional it may be, but if you leave it, it will only hurt your sales. Uploading products to Redbubble can be a pain, but you need to do it right or it isn’t worth doing at all.

redbubble upload process

The Title should be clear and concise as to what it is. Put the ‘type’ of design in; ‘Logo’ in this case; ‘Oil Painting’, ‘Vector art’, etc. It will help you rank better and I think people are more inclined to have a look. All they see on the search page is the title of the product and the image.

Tags are the most important part of discovery on the Redbubble search. Some people say to use few, some say many.

In my experience, more tags are better.

I did some split testing for some of my designs and the ones with more tags were being found, favourited and bought more than those with fewer. I will write up the stats later on, but I have a lot to get through before then!

There is a ‘rumour’ that you have some sort of ‘tag Strength’, and for each tag you put down, you take Strength from other tags.

For example, say I have 100 ‘strength’ per product. I tag the product as ‘Jeez’ ‘Logo’ ‘Design’ ‘Typography’. As there are 4 tags, they each have 25 Strength. It is rumoured that if someone just tagged their product as ‘Logo’, then their ‘Logo’ tag would have 100 ‘Strength’, and would outrank me.

I believe the entire idea of tag Strength is incorrect, I haven’t noticed a difference with more tags. You show up in more searches, which means more visibility, which means more sales. Use as many tags as you think are appropriate!

I use a tool from Merch Titans to generate tags for some of my products. Find it here. It’s a free tool, and it will show you popular tags; use as many as you think fit to your product.

The description is important for SEO, and may have an effect on how Redbubble puts you in their adverts, as well as how you are shown on Google. Redbubble is great for Google discovery. So many people neglect their product description. Please don’t! Anything here is better than nothing!

Upload for as many product types as possible

Depending on the file size you uploaded, some products will be automatically disabled. You’ll want to enable them manually, or just increase the file size. I usually upload a 12000×12000 PNG, which is suitable for most products, depending on the design.

The thing is, some people will come and search for something like ‘Dinosaur bath mat’. Redbubble then automatically appends ‘bath mat’ to the search filter. So, no bath mat enabled? No view.

Uploading to more products increases the potential expose of your existing portfolio. Do it.

It’s well worth going over your existing designs and making sure they are available on suitable products. If it’s uploaded for one T-Shirt type and not another, why? So long as you can make it look good, then make it enabled.

Even if you’re sure nobody will buy it, you really never know. The dinosaur bath mat isn’t that far off. Somebody once bought a quote I put on a bath mat that just didn’t suit it at all. I had no idea how or why. People are strange, and it works to our advantage.

Tinker with your margins

This is something I don’t think I have seen anybody else do, but I find it useful to find optimum pricing. It isn’t at all ‘passive’ at the start, but it will pay off.

When you sell a product, increase the margin by 1%

Simple. While you might lose sales if you increase it too high, you’d hopefully stop by then. If you aren’t feeling too keen to make the 1% jump, go by 0.5%. This is something you have to measure over a longer time, but I make sure that when I make a sale for a product, to change the pricing after.

If you notice that you aren’t making any sales, just bring the pricing down. Price changes on Redbubble are almost immediate.

I tend to group product types, so when a sticker sells, I increase each sticker margin by 1%. You might be surprised what people will pay for some things, and jointly annoyed by all the money you missed out on.

Upload more designs!

The best way to increase revenue on Redbubble is just to add more products. Nothing more can be said for it. If you read the previous post with the chicken analogy, more chickens just means the chance for more eggs.

Uploading more products keeps your account fresh, it’ll keep you in the ‘recently updated’ sections, and others will discover you easier.

The only downside is that it isn’t passive, but throwing one product a day on Redbubble is a small price to pay.

Summary

  • Enter better product details
  • Tag like crazy
  • Upload to every product that looks good
  • Don’t settle for the default product margins
  • Upload more!
  • Check out the uploaded design! I don’t think anybody would buy it, but I’ve made a JeezPod account on Redbubble to illustrate processes!

In this epilogue I’d like to give mention to Passive Owl, without whom I wouldn’t be making as much as I am now. I started Redbubble before he did, but I just started and forgot about it. Finding his Youtube Channel by accident really pushed me back into Redbubble after seeing it’s potential.

Passive Owl isn’t around anymore, but his blog has some good info and he gave it all away for free. I suppose I’m trying to continue what he started by helping out others. It’s nice to give back!

Realistic Eggspectations : The Unpredictable Chicken of Print on Demand

Apologies for the terrible pun. Trying to explain POD as a business model is quite difficult, especially when I had to describe to my parents and say I was selling stickers and T-Shirts online instead of having a real job (for now). Passive income online is generally a new area of work. Passive probably isn’t the correct word; ‘residual’ might be better. You do the work, leave it, and then later reap the rewards.

Print on Demand, and Redbubble especially, can be very unpredictable. It’s like owning a special chicken. You can feed it all you want, but it might not give you any eggs. It might sit there and eat up all your time and effort, and then three months later you open up the hutch and it’s exploding, eggs everywhere. Too many eggs to count.

chickens

You can probably mitigate the risk by owning multiple chickens; add more products, develop more income streams, maybe you invest in some cows or sheep (That would be an analogy for opening up other accounts, say MBA or a KDP account), but at it’s core, you don’t really have an active role in selling. You feed the chicken, you make sure the conditions are right, but it’s up to the chicken to make the egg.

For example, I just made my first Merch by Amazon sale. I’ve had the account for a few weeks, and there, first sale. Out of nowhere.

The wild ride of Print on Demand

Nice

One of the first things I do when I wake up is check my Redbubble filter on my gmail account. Sad I know. But one thing that is striking is how different it can be day to day.

One day I wake up to nothing, or just a single sticker sale. One day I wake up to £40, some complete maniac has bought a piece of my work on an art print or bath mat, or someone has bulk ordered some T-Shirts. That’s as much as I was earning working in a shop all day, and I’m not even out of bed yet!

As a business, it can be completely unpredictable. A piece of work that hasn’t made any sales in two years is suddenly flying from the (digital) shelves. Who knows what will happen tomorrow. It’s tough to realise what you should expect when it comes to POD, especially when starting out. As it’s tough what to expect, it’s tough to work out what to do to increase your own sales.

So far, I have found that the safest approach to increase sales and make more money is to increase the amount of products I list.

I am lucky to be making sales every day. I can’t even remember the last day I didn’t make any sales on, it was so long ago. To get to this stage, it really is a numbers game.

I make sure all of my current designs are listed for as many products as they look good on, and I just generally make sure to upload a few designs to Redbubble every day. I don’t think it hurts your ranking at all to add more products. I don’t even stick to a niche anymore.

How do you estimate sales?

I’m not sure where I heard it first, but I go by the following rule;

1 Design Uploaded = £1 / Month Average

It works out more or less. At the time of writing, my main store has 290 designs, and I earned around £300 last month. I see any number over 1:1 as a success. It must be shocking to be one of those accounts which has 200,000+ designs. Even if 1% sells to the above formula, that’s still £2k a month. Amazing.

Adding more products mitigates risk throughout your store. You just don’t know if your next upload is going to be a hit or not. Look at my top sellers for the past year:

The top seller sells 3x more than the next one, and it came completely out of nowhere. I didn’t have any idea it would sell so well. Creeping up the list are things I have uploaded in the past week or so, something I really couldn’t have predicted.

Pages 2-5 are somewhat consistent, and from then on are outliers and newer posts. Wait a minute, this isn’t passive at all is it? Well, not at this stage, no.

Passive income can be passive, but it generally won’t improve sharply without your input. If I was happy to plateau, I could probably leave it where it is, and thanks to Redbubble’s awesome advertising, I will probably stay at this level for the foreseeable future.

My goal, however, is a little over 3x as much as I am currently earning.

Quick tips to increase sales

Looking back at the chart I made for the first post, there were a lot of things I did in November to more than double my Redbubble income. One of those things was to sort out my profit margins.

Before November, my profit margins for ALL PRODUCTS was at 18.5%. Redbubble was just an afterthought for me, I didn’t bother uploading anything new, I didn’t bother promoting work, I just left it. Things I had added 5 years ago were selling, and I was happy. I was probably also undercutting everyone else.

It was only in November 2019 that I started looking to the wider Redbubble community. Everyone was selling stickers at 100% margin or above. Oof. I’ve been missing out!

I instantly changed my margins to 100% and I have never changed them back since. I changed all of my other margins to at least 25%.

A few things happened when I changed my margins. I earned more money, and I actually sold more products. Doesn’t seem to make sense until we look up the rule of perceived value.

“This costs more, so it must be better quality and therefore worth the price” – Any customer.

That’s why brands do so well I suppose. I haven’t looked back after charging more, I realised I was simply selling myself short. I tinker with my margins now and then as we all should but this was such an impactful change, I would recommend everyone do it.

Key Takeaways from this post

I’ll summarise the post, especially good if you can’t be bothered to read it all (Good, you should be uploading stuff instead, but do remember to take breaks now and then!)

  • More designs = More Sales
  • Review existing designs to make them compatible with all more products
  • Put your sticker margins up to 100% at least
  • Be prepared to upload something and then potentially wait months before it sells
  • Don’t sell yourself short; your designs are worth more than the bare minimum
  • Understand that selling on a Print on demand service is not a linear upward curve, but will be a bumpy ride
  • Expect nothing at all in the short term

JeezPod – A Passive Income and Print-on-Demand blog

Hi there! My name is Jack and my goal is to earn £1000 a month passively, online, (that’s around $1200 USD dollars). I’m getting close, and I’m learning a lot along the way that I want to share, so what initially started as an unfunny joke has now turned into a concept for a website. Welcome to JeezPod.

JeezPod is going to be a collection for the little tips and tricks I have learned to more than double my passive income in the past few months. I keep saying to myself and others “This has been my best day yet”, and I’m seeing quite a bit of success, at least proportionate to the effort I’m putting in. I think they’re getting sick of me talking about passive income and Redbubble so much, so maybe a website is a better idea.

I’m currently focussing on Redbubble as my main source of income, and I’ve only recently started focusing on it. It’s nice to see it paying off, as the graph below shows.

Redbubble passive income chart

My Passive Income Background

I actually started my passive income ‘adventure’ properly back in 2014, with an adsense-enabled website, focusing on specific silly little gifts. In fact the first site I made went absolutely nowhere and I’d nearly forgotten about it until I started this post. The site was all about taxidermy, which was an area I nearly had no interest or knowledge in, but saw as an untapped niche.

I had very little interest and knowledge in it, so it went nowhere. The one lesson I learned from this was to go with your passions and interests. Things get really boring if you go by the numbers, and it isn’t fun at all. It turns into a real job, which is something I’d like to avoid! After this, I started a website about game reviews, which is one of the most saturated areas of the internet. That too, went nowhere.

Actual, though minor success

Undeterred, and realising I only needed a niche, my first ‘real’ passive website was an Amazon associate site, based on quirky gifts from Japan. It did okay, and was certainly a good site to learn from. It didn’t make any real money, but I think it had potential to. I branched this off into a USA specific site too, to take advantage of Amazon’s large US customer base. Both of these sites are gone forever. RIP.

After these sites, I jumped into creating a website for another hobby, which although it was a saturated niche, I felt I could do well in. I started in January 2015, and after a slow start, I started seeing success.

There is far too much to talk about this here, as it deserves it’s own post later on, but this recent project really made me believe it was possible to make a full time living online. I branched off the main site and turned it into a brand; there was a Redbubble store, a Youtube Channel, eBooks.

The site made an easy £100 a month. I was contacted a number of times by people interested in buying it. Eventually I sold the site for £10,000, took a few months off, and then started two other sites. Whether this was the right decision or not, is something I still think about, but it allowed me to buy a house and move on it life. Anyway, let’s keep that flywheel spinning.

What I’m up to now

As well as this, newly formed website, I currently run;

JeezPod is going to be my focus for the next few weeks. I have a lot of lessons I have learned which I intend to share. Plus, starting a new project is always interesting and motivating. I love having something to tinker with and improve, and i hope you all find some use out of this site.

JeezPod is’t going to be much more than a blog, but it’ll be easy to find what you need.

That’s enough for an intro, I hope you find JeezPod useful, and here’s to all of us having chunky passive incomes!

Big mention to POD Passion on Facebook, I am quite active in this group so send me a message if you like!