Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another video. In today's video, I'm going to be showing you the very important task of finding low competition niches for print on demand.
Now, this is something that has become very important over the last couple of years as print on demand has started to get more popular. Essentially, the big general popular niches have all essentially filled up with sellers. So if you are getting into print on demand or if you've been in print on demand and you wanna keep growing your business, then you need to find these low competition sub-niches.
When it comes to this, there's kind of good news and there's bad news. Well, starting with the good news, there's literally tens of thousands of these undiscovered sub-niches that people are not selling in. However, the bad news is you need to know how to do this, and it takes a little bit of research.
Don't worry though, I've been doing this for a while now, so I'll walk you through on the computer step by step how to do this, and once you see how to do it one time, you'll be able to just take over and start finding all of these for yourself. Now, in just a second, I'll switch us over to the computer and I'll walk you through this literally step by step. However, just a preface before we get into this.
Once you start finding these sub niches for yourself, my best recommendation for you is to make as many designs as you can in them. For me, that's typically anywhere from 10 to 40, if it's a really big sub niche that just has a lot of ideas I can get going. And then once you've created those designs and you've uploaded them to your print on demand accounts, then just move on to the next sub niche.
It's kind of a rinse and repeat process, and what you're trying to do is diversify your accounts as much as possible by being one of the first sellers into all of these small niches. And then lastly, a very common question is do you need to create multiple different stores or multiple different accounts to upload these sub-niches into? The short answer here is no.
You can just have your single account on the print on the man website, and you can upload all of the different sub niches into that same account. And what the website's going to do is they're going to market those designs individually. So let's go ahead and switch over to the computer now, and as we go through this, I'll answer more of the common questions, so hopefully as they come up for you, you're getting your answers and you can follow right along.
So the first thing that we need to do here is come up with ideas for sub niches. Now, for some people, this can be a really hard part of the process. However, I've been using a tool that uses artificial intelligence just to help me with the brainstorming and it saves a ton of time.
So the first website we're going to come to is completely free to use, it's called ChatGPT. And if you haven't used it before, it's essentially like Google where you can type in something down here, a search, and it will give you an answer back that is generated using artificial intelligence. Think of this basically as an assistant, so you can ask it a question and it'll give you an answer back.
Now throughout this process, we're actually going to use ChatGPT a couple different ways, I'll show you all of that. But to start out here, what we need to do is we need it to write us a list of different ideas. Now, from experience and selling print on demand for almost 10 years, there are seven different general niches that you can break into to find tens of thousands of sub niches.
I'll go ahead and put this up on the screen for you so you can screenshot it or you can write it down, whatever you like, but these are the ones that I would remember. Geographical and local nostalgia, occupational, hobbies and interests, educational, personalized and custom designs, environmental and sustainability, and health and wellness. Now, if you take any of these seven and you bring them into ChatGPT and you say, write me a list of 50, you can put in 20, 50, a hundred, however many you want.
50 is a good number to give you a really good idea where you can jump around and pick the ones that you wanna use and then choose one of those seven. So I'm gonna say hobbies. Now, once you click Enter, it's literally just going to generate all of these, and this is just for your brainstorming ideas.
So this is going to keep going here, but we can come back up to the top, not to waste any time here, and I'll bring you right into the second step. So those seven ideas are basically all big general niches. And then once we bring them into ChatGPT, they're going to break them down into a bunch of different ideas, but I would still consider a lot of these as general niches.
Something like hiking or gardening is still a general niche. The sub niches that we're looking for, and what this whole video is about are what's within those? So what is within hiking?
That's what we need to find out, and that's where we need to create our designs. So the process that not many people are aware of is that you can take this hiking, I'm just going to select it and copy it and then bring it into another tool that will break it down into sub niches. So this is the next tool here.
This is one that I've literally been using for years. It's called Merch Informer, and they keep evolving the tool and adding in more features for us to use. But there's one specific feature in here that breaks the general niche down into the sub niches and shows you literally which ones of them are low competition, which ones of them are high competition, and you can just cherry pick the ones that you wanna use.
So this is going to be one of the tools that is actually a paid tool, but they do have a free trial. So if you do register for free, you can use it for three days totally for free. But their pricing here is a couple dollars per month.
You don't need the professional plan. That's just going to give you even more features and limits. All of this can be done on the Newbie plan.
It's $10 per month. I have a coupon code from them since I've been using them for so many years, so that brings it down to about $8 per month. I'll put the link in the description if you do wanna check that out, but just remember, you can use the free trial for this.
So I'm going to get logged into my account and then I'll show you how to use this. Okay, so once you are logged into Merch Informer, we're going to come to the left side and this is where all of their different features break down, you can just click these and kind of open them up. What we're going to be using is the keyword research and then the keyword finder.
Now this is where you enter the general niche. You click search and it breaks it down into all of these sub niches. So I'm going to paste the hiking that we copied over here and then click Search.
Now essentially what you're looking at right now is a full breakdown of this into sub niches, and then most importantly, it's going to tell you what is the competition within that sub niche. This way you don't have to go check Amazon or check the other print on demand websites to see if other people have created designs in that. Plus, how are you going to come up with all of these ideas?
I've struggled with this for years, so this makes it so much easier. So with that said, basically come to the left side here and look at all of these ideas and then match them to the right side and look at the competition. All of the information that's in the middle, I would say you can totally disregard.
This is basically telling you how much search volume there is. So a lot of people will tell you to aim for the ones that have the most search volume and also low competition. But I found from my personal experience, some of these that have very low search volume turn out to be massive sellers, you just wouldn't really know.
So I would say don't skip over them even if they have very little search volume. So as you scroll through here, just look on the left and find something that's interesting to you and then make sure that it's low competition. All of these are ideas, so just within the hiking, which is just one general niche, there's 331 results.
Now keep in mind obviously something like hiking, which is the general niche that we're trying to break down, still says that it's low competition. So right off the bat, we have a good general niche that we can go into that is not high competition yet. However, the whole point of this is to get even deeper than that and that's where you're really going to succeed in print on demand.
Now, a perfect example here for a common question is something like adventure hiking. So you might be asking yourself like, what is adventure hiking? Well, most importantly, what this is telling you is that this keyword, so if you put adventure hiking in your title and your description of your listing, it's going to show up because people are searching for it, but there are not many sellers creating designs in it, so it's low competition.
So whenever you create a design in any of these, you basically want the design that you're creating to represent what this is. Adirondack Hiking, which is a location. Barefoot hiking, climbing hiking, desert hiking.
But then you wanna make sure that the actual keyword is in your title and your description. That's how you're going to rank for it. So let's go ahead and use one of these as an example and keep going through the process.
I'm gonna use the adventure hiking because it's a little bit more vague so I can show you and you'll probably learn a little bit more this way as opposed to if I was doing something like keto hiking or Florida hiking, those are very specific things. So creating the design and the keywords are very straightforward. So once you have your very first sub niche that you're going to go into, now we wanna create anywhere from that 10 to 40 designs on this sub niche until we come back and we do more of these sub niches.
So just go ahead and highlight this and copy it. And now we're going to go back to the free tool, ChatGPT, and now we're going to ask it to come up with copyright-free T-shirt slogans that we can actually use based on this sub niche. Again, just click Enter and watch it go to work.
Now, just like that, there's 10 T-shirt slogans that you can use. You can just cherry pick the ones that you wanna use. Remember, you can do 10, 20, 30, however many you want here.
And then one more step. If you just say remove the quotation marks, it'll redo it without the quotation marks, which will save us more time in the next step. Alright, just a quick note here.
Hopefully, you're sticking along with this, it's all making sense and you don't have any questions yet. If you do have any questions, let me know down in the comments, I will be monitoring them to try to answer anything that I've missed in this. Number two, if you are enjoying this video, please give it a thumbs up.
And number three, I'm going to put a full print on demand tutorial that's here on YouTube. Everything even more than this, what you do beyond and all that is going to be linked in the description, so just keep that in mind once you finish this video. If you wanna watch that one, I'll put the link down there.
Okay, so getting back to this, now we have 10 copyright-free T-shirt slogans. Now if you've used ChatGPT before, then you probably know that it's not always factual. So although we asked it for copyright-free T-shirt slogans, they're not always going to be copyright free, so you kind of have to double check this.
It's actually something that's very important in print on demand. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is using something that is already protected, either copyright or trademarked by someone else because once you upload that to the print on-demand platform, it can get removed as a copyright or trademark infringement. And if that happens to your account too many times, they just ban your entire account.
So this is one step that you want to kind of be careful with. Although this tool is really impressive and creative, just make sure that you are double checking to make sure that it's not protected 'cause that's one thing that can really hurt you in print on demand. So with that being said, go ahead and copy all 10 of these or however many that you made, and then we're going to come back over to Merch Informer and they actually have another feature within here.
As I was saying, they just keep adding features that are super helpful. They're all included for that $8 a month. You don't have to pay more to use them.
And then all we need to do is instead of the keyword research tab, go to the Trademarks tab and then go to Trademark Alerts. Now come right over here and we can paste all of those different phrases that we just came up with and click Save. And what this is going to do, it'll bring it right down here and it says, not checked yet, but this is actually a tool that once you click Check Trademarks, it will check all of these basically instantly to see if they are protected on apparel.
So without getting into too much detail on this, when it comes to copyrights and trademarks, they can be protected on different types of items. When it comes to print on demand, we need to make sure that they are not already protected specifically on apparel. This tool basically does it all for you and it's either going to give you a check mark that means yes, you can use this, or a red X that means no, don't use this, it's already protected.
So just go ahead and click Check Trademarks. Give it just one second. It's going to say we're checking your data.
If you scroll down, nothing's going to happen yet. Just go ahead and click refresh on your page. And most of the times, this is done instantly for you.
So as you can see right here, all 10 of these are actually copyright free and they're safe to use for print on demand. ChatGPT sometimes nails this and you get all 10 of them are perfect to use. Other times, you get only a few of them are good to use.
So just be careful. This is my one disclaimer here is to make sure that you are checking these. So, so far we've done a few steps.
We've taken one of those seven big old general niches and we broke it down into smaller niches and then we've taken that smaller niche and broke it down into all of the sub niches that we need. Then, we came up with 10 phrases about that sub niche and then we check them to make sure that they're not trademarked. So from here, we really only have one more step and that is creating the designs based off of these slogans that we just came up with.
So for this, I use another very specific tool. This tool is called Placeit. net.
And the reason that I use this is because they have a ton of T-shirt design templates. However, they are all commercially usable and copyright free. Remember how we were just talking about how the slogans need to be copyright and trademark free?
Well, the designs do as well. So if you're using other tools like Canva or some other designer, they're not all guaranteed to be copyright or trademark free. So you might go through your entire design process and right at the last minute, you create your design and upload it and a font or a graphic or something that's on that design is protected, even though the phrase is free to use, the actual elements in the design could also be a problem.
So just use a tool like this and you won't have to worry about anything. It literally says it in their terms and everything, commercially usable, copyright free. So what we're going to do here is look for hiking T-shirt designs.
Specifically we're looking for adventure hiking T-shirt designs. And then once we find 'em, we're going to put in our slogans that we created here. But let me show you how to find these first.
So on Placeit on the homepage, it's just going to show you a bunch of different things they have. These are actually their mockups. So once you do create a design, you could put that on a model per se, and it'll make it look like the model's actually wearing that.
It's a really cool feature if you're going to be posting on social media or anything like that. They also have full-on templates for social media, but the main thing that we're in here for is the T-shirt designs. So I'm going to type in hiking and then I'm going to come down on the left side.
And here's where I'm going to go to T-shirt designs. So specifically for hiking, they have 25 different T-shirt design templates. Remember you can use all of these.
Now we are going to be customizing our T-shirt designs with these slogans here and as closely as we can get the design to represent what that sub niche is, which is adventure hiking, that's what we're going to be trying to pick those templates. So all of these are literally fair game to use. I love this design right here, so I'm going to use this one to show you how to customize it, just going to click on it.
And now all of this is customizable. So on the left, all of this text is going to correspond to what's on the screen. You can move this text around, you can make it bigger or smaller if you want to.
And then if you wanna go back, all you have to do is hit the Back button here and it'll just basically undo your last move or you can hit reset and it's going to bring it back to how you started in that template. Now a couple other things to know here is that this graphic that's in the middle, you can change that. So if you hit Edit, it's going to show you all different graphics that you can use.
And remember, all of these are going to be copyright free and commercially usable, so just like that, you're changing up the design kind of on the fly. This is a really cool feature and saves you a lot of time. So I'm going to leave the design in the middle as is, but you can literally change even what you're searching for.
If you just typed in hiking, you can come up with a bunch of different things that you can sub into here as well. So I'm going to X out of that. Remember, you can change your background colors and things like that too, so you can change different backdrops, you can sub them in here.
And then the background color, we'll come back to in a minute and that's really important, but I'll show you what that is in a second. So let's go back to our phrases and let's pick one that we wanna start with here. So all of these are going to be good, but I'm going to go with hike more, worry less.
I just really like that. I'm gonna copy that and then I'm going to come back over to place it. And then I'm going to put it up here.
I'm just going to paste it and we'll see what that looks like. And this literally could be our design right here. I might move this up a little bit just to make that a little bit more in that image.
And that's really good to go. Now, something else I can see is here is this is another line of text in this design. So if you click on the three dots, you can do show, and this is going to be a whole nother line of text that's built into this template that you can use.
So I'm going to see what this looks like if I take hike more, and then I do worry less down here. And I can center this and then this, I can make a little bit bigger, put that right here. And I'm actually going to change that to the same font, just not really a fan of that font right there.
So if you click on this, you can bring it to the same font. You can actually choose from all of these. They're all going to be copyright-free and commercially usable, but this one is the same one that says up here.
So let's see what that looks like. Hike more, worry less. Let's see if I can make that a little bit bigger.
Center it right there. Center that one as well. So that right there is a perfect example of a good design that you can upload into this sub niche.
Now the last thing that we need to do before you click download to actually download this is you need to go to the background color and then scroll all the way down to the bottom, make sure you're on colors, and then click the checkerboard. What this is going to do is it's going to remove the background of that design so that once you print this on a shirt, it's only going to show the design that we created and not actually print the border or the actual rectangle around it. This means that this design can be printed on any color T-shirt, so that's perfect for print on demand.
You can upload the design and have all different color T-shirts available so whoever comes in and picks what color they want it printed on, it's going to print perfectly. Now from here, all we have to do is literally click Download and it's going to download this design to our computer. Now, once the design is downloaded to our computer, then it doesn't get uploaded to any print on-demand websites yet.
We take that file and then we upload that specifically to a print on demand website and that's where we enter in the adventure hiking as the keyword and the title and the description. But I just wanted to clarify that once you click Download, it's not going to upload it to any print on demand websites for you. So as you can see, here's our design right here, literally saved to our computer.
And once you zoom in on this, you can see that the quality of the design is really good, so you won't have any printing issues. But what's nice about having the design file saved to your computer is that you own it. It's not going directly to a print on demand website.
So the big print on demand websites out there are non-exclusive. So you can upload this design to multiple different websites. Literally the exact same design with the title and description can be uploaded to multiple different websites.
So as traffic is coming into different websites, you can get the sale on the same design on multiple different ones. Again, this will be covered in the full print on demand tutorial a lot more than it is right now. I just wanted to make sure that you were aware of it in case you don't get the chance to watch that other video.
Okay, so the last thing here that I wanna show you that's actually really cool is if you come back to place it, it will show you on the right side some things that you might like as well. So if I open this in a new tab, this is going to take our same phrase and it's just going to put it into another T-shirt template. So you might actually like this one better, or you might wanna swap this one out with another one of the phrases that you get over here and you can just see how easy this kind of is to scroll through here and find all of your camping templates and just build all of these out a lot faster than if you were starting from scratch and you're kind of creating the designs by hand.
So guys, that is how you find low competition niches for print on demand. If you have any questions about this, please let me know down in the comments if I missed anything. And then refer to that full print on demand tutorial.
I'll put a link to it down in the description, I'll also put it up on the side so you know what that thumbnail looks like. And that should answer a lot of your print on demand questions. As always, I'm here if you need me and I will see you guys all in the next video.
