How to Make $500 a Month with Print on Demand

Did you know you can make hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars a month selling fun and popular products like mugs and t-shirts without ever having to hold a physical product in your hand?

This is 100% doable – and easier than you think! – with something called print on demand, and I’m going to share with you how with this post.

If you want to skip straight to more in-depth details, you can grab this free ebook called 17 Hot-Selling Print-on-Demand Products That Can Pay for Your Next Vacation (and More!).

What print on demand is (and isn’t)

Print on demand is essentially a digital products business, even though your customer receives a physical product in their hand at the end of the transaction. This makes things really easy for you!

Unless you order samples, your involvement is entirely digital:

• You create a product design (a lot easier than it sounds)
• You upload your design to your production partner’s site (I’ll explain this in a minute)
• You list your product for sale (there are lots of places to do this, but one is my favorite)
• When your product sells, you pay your production partner a small fee to print, package and ship your product to your customer (this makes your life so easy!)

See? It’s entirely digital from your end!

FYI, this is not the same as dropshipping, although the two business models have some similarities.

With both business models, you don’t hold any inventory and a third party packages and ships the product to your customer.

With dropshipping, you sell pre-made products. You don’t have any control over the product design, which means you’re competing with everyone else selling those products.

With print on demand, you have complete control over the product design because YOU are the designer! Don’t let that idea scare you – designing products is easy with the right tools.

Your designs can be completely unique, which means you will have a competitive advantage.

Plus, you can also choose to allow your customers to customize their designs, making the product they purchase unlike anyone else’s.

What can you sell via print on demand?

Just about anything you can think of! Here are just a few of the products you can sell via print on demand:

• T-shirts
• Sweatshirts
• Ornaments
• Stickers
• Blankets
• Notebooks
• Posters
• Pillows
• Socks
• Tote bags
• Phone cases
• Pet bandanas
• and more!

This mug was made with print on demand:

How print on demand saves you money and time

I know you’re probably excited to learn about how to make money with a print-on-demand business or side hustle, but first I want to explain how print on demand saves you money (and time).

With print on demand, you work with a company called a ‘production partner.’

A production partner is a company that takes your product design and prints it on a product when an order for your product comes in. They also carefully package the item and ship it directly to your customer.

You could do all of this yourself… but by using a production partner, you don’t have to spend money buying or storing:

• A machine that prints your particular product (these can cost thousands of dollars!)
• Blank products in wide varieties
• Packaging materials, like boxes, bags, labels and tape

You also don’t have to spend time printing the product, packaging the product or taking it to the post office. Your time is valuable, so saving this time has a monetary value too.

There are many production partners to choose from, but some of the most popular include Printful, Printify, CustomCat, and teelaunch. 

How to make $500 a month with print on demand

We’re keeping the math super simple here, but here are some easy paths to making $500 a month with print on demand:

• Sell 100 mugs at $5 profit each
• Sell 50 sweatshirts at $10 profit each
• Sell 25 blankets at $20 profit each

Keep in mind that the above figures don’t mean that you have to sell, for example, 100 of a single mug design in a month.

You might have 25 mug designs, which means you only need to sell four of each design each month.

That’s very doable ~ and very scalable if you want to make more!

How to design print on demand products (no design skills necessary)

If you’re an artist or you’ve done graphic design work before, the idea of designing products may sound completely doable.

But if you’re brand new to the concept, it can sound a little intimidating. Don’t let it be ~ there are tools to make the process super easy!

First things first: you can’t use any random graphic, image or font you find online in your product designs.

That’s a fast track to getting sued, and you definitely don’t want that to happen.

Instead, you can use graphics, images or fonts you’ve created, OR you can purchase the rights to use graphics, images or fonts other people have created.

Unless you’re an artist (or want to be), the second option is what most people do for their print-on-demand business. Purchasing the rights to use other people’s creations makes the process so much easier.

It’s also much cheaper than you may expect.

With inexpensive subscriptions to sites like Creative Market or Creative Fabrica, you can have access to millions of graphics, images and fonts to use in your designs!

You can keep your designs super simple if you want. Believe it or not, plain text designs can sell very well if you come up with a phrase that appeals to people.

To design your products, it’s best to use professional quality design software like Adobe Illustrator.

While I’m a big fan of Canva for projects like Pinterest pins, the quality isn’t high enough for designs that will be printed on physical products.

Where to sell your products

The easiest place to sell your print-on-demand products is Etsy!

They have a massive built-in marketplace, so it’s a lot easier to find buyers for your products.

You can also set up your own store on Shopify. Because a Shopify store is an independent store instead of a marketplace, it’s up to you to send traffic to your store.

You can do this through organic social media, paid social media (ads), organic or paid Pinterest or even by word of mouth, all of which can drive a ton of traffic to your store with the right branding and messaging.

But Etsy truly is the easiest, especially if you’re new to print on demand.

Want to learn print on demand from someone with a track record of success?

If all of this sounds exciting to you, you should probably consider starting a print-on-demand side hustle!

If you want to learn print on demand from someone with a track record of success, I highly recommend the course I Love Print on Demand by my friend Jessica.

She made her first print-on-demand sale on Etsy in May of 2021 and has been going strong ever since.

She’s sold $70k+ in products and runs a solid side hustle in only a few hours a month.

In her I Love Print on Demand course, she shares her best tips, tricks and secrets for starting a print-on-demand business as quickly and efficiently as possible so you can start making money sooner.

She cuts out all of the noise and makes the path to success easy for you!

How to make money with print on demand

If you have any questions on how to make money with print on demand, leave a comment below!