I’ve always blogged about the good side of Teespring. This time I thought I’d blog about the ugly side. One that isn’t painted with success stories and $$ everywhere.
Firstly, let’s tackle the most common question I get,
How much money do I need to start with Teespring?
Almost every one that considers Teespring will have asked themselves this question. It’s a fair question. But what isn’t’ fair, is what most people expect the answer to be.
A few $100? Maybe $500? Or *gasp* what if it’s in the $1,000s?
Most likely it IS in the $1,000s. In fact, if you’re starting Teespring and your intent is to make a consistent profit from it then I don’t recommend you starting without having at least $1,000-$2,000 in the bank that you’re completely ok losing. Most people might think this is a lot of money to get started, but name me one business that will allow you to work anywhere around the world with almost complete anonymity and has the potential to earn you millions where the $$ you need to get started is in the $1000s?
There may be people that have found success straight off the bat. They launched their very first campaign and bam, $500 profit in the bank. This was definitely not my story and should NOT be considered the norm.
The normal path to a Teespring Affiliate is someone that has to learn design, learn FB marketing, learn the delicate balance between these two and after a lot of testing and trialling and pain staking hours, he or she should see success.
This is business, not a side hobby. You can’t master it in a week or even a couple of months. Business is a journey. Just like it takes years in getting your university degree, or years climbing the ranks of your career, business takes time to learn and get good at.
You have to spend money, you have to expend effort. You can’t do it here and there and expect massive returns. If you want to earn real money than you have to learn to spend money.
You may have seen my income reports consistently being in the green. I’m sorry if this painted a ‘this business seems easy’ picture in peoples heads because it definitely isn’t easy. From the 3-5 camps that bring me my profit, I have 100+ camps that were total fails. That’s how it works.
Throughout being an affiliate marketer for almost 2 years I’ve realized there is no certainty in this business. Well I guess there is no certainty in anything if you want to get philosophical but in this case more than most others, the only thing that fuels the average affiliate marketer throughout his self doubts is his faith in himself and his ability to find something eventually.
It starts of as faith but then, when success comes and you realize there’s a direct correlation with the amount of effort you put in and your success, you’re dependence on faith changes to being confident in yourself and your abilities. As you experience more and more you realize what you’re average ‘hit’ ratio is. 1 in 5 campaigns or 1 in 30 campaigns or something like that. You know it takes you on average 30 camps to find something so it doesn’t bother you that you’re losing all this money as you’ve experienced time and time again, finding something eventually that covers everything spent testing the others.
The only difference between the successful affiliate and the unsuccessful affiliate is,
The successful affiliate knows for certain, if he continues trying to fine tune this system, he can earn the same as what other people have earned. With this attitude, whether his 5 campaigns flop or 10, he continues knowing that as long as he’s learning, he’s getting closer and closer.
The unsuccessful affiliate, will give it a shot. It failed, no worries, let’s try again. Oh no, that failed also? There must be something wrong. This thing must be saturated, there’s a problem with people right now. They’re just not in buying mood, it’s cold, people aren’t buying shirts, etc, etc. At the same time there will be people absolutely banking, with Teespring, making 1000s of sales.
Bottom line, you need more than a couple $100 to get started here. This is a very real business where people earn millions. I spent 1.5k with not a single tipped campaign. The only thing that kept me going was knowing that there were holes in my model and I can change something here or there that would fix it and give it another chance.
I can almost guarantee you’ll get there if you switch to the right attitude. One of patience, perseverance and reality. One that doesn’t quit after a couple of months.
All the best
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This is a good post on setting expectations, too many times I see people wanting to spend $20-50 and expect to make thousands 🙂
yes, a lot of people get confused because a lot of guru teach that they only need 20 dollars to start, even if you need a fe thousand to start is way less than starting an offline clothing business
last month was very hard for me two, but it has been picking up lately, i have been working on getting better at my designs and targeting
also if you are interested in chatting you can add me on skype gold4topcash
i have been selling at least 20k a moth on teespring since june last year, maybe we can exchange some ideas
When selling teespring courses a lot of gurus show their hundreds of dollars per day profit screenshots but they forgot to mention how many hundreds of dollars per day they should spend to get it.
True,
Too many people get sold on the fact that this is easy or It shouldn’t take too long to get it.
has the business picked up for you Mateen ?
A few designs are showing signs of promise, nothing big though. Something like $50/day profit all up but their still in test mode.
How much do you have to pay for a day or a week? Did you spend the money on advertising or what did you spend it on. I’m a teenager and I’m not asking you to baby me and give me every step but I just need to know what you spent the money on, and it when you have a successful campaign if I send it to my paypal does it require my password to send it?
It depends,
Sometimes I spend a couple hundred, sometimes tens of thousands. If I’m making sales and profiting then I’ll increase my ‘investment’ by as much as I think will still give me profit.
Hello all,
I’m new to this. I was wondering of you would take a few minutes to anwera few questions of mine:
Do you guys add “purchase behavior” when creating an audience? If do you, do you use mid-ticket items? I tried using thinking it’s gonna work like a charm and surprise surprise.. it didn’t.
Also, do you guys do CPM or CPC? I tired CPC but it’s very expensive.. something in the line of .50 per click.
I would really appreciate any feed back.
Cheers.
I personally have never used purchasing behaviour so can’t really help there.
CPM over CPC anyday. You can get real cheap clicks this way, (if your design and targeting is right)
Hi
Thank you for the reply. So you basically do only PPE and CPM for it? that’s it?
Also, how many interests do you usually use? Say I wanna target a die-hard fishing community… I target boat brands, fishing equipment brands, famous fisherman, fishing tournaments and some small (20K fans) fishing pages. My audience is around 500K at this time and I am plannig on using CPM and test with 10-15 dollars and see what happens. Also, I am going for men between 27-64 in the USA alone.
In your professional teespringer opinion.. do you this is a good audience? Too big maybe? Sorry for so many questions. I just wanna do it right lol Thanks again.
yep!
It’s pretty targeted in my opinion so go for it! Don’t worry about the size, as long as it’s targeted it’s fine. USUALLY, when I’m starting off. I’ll just select one or two targets, (enough to get me over 30k audience). Only because there’s no use going all the way up to 500k when the campaign’s a flop. At the start, we’re just testing the waters, once the campaign shows promise, I’ll go back in and add as many interests as I can find.
Also, I usually don’t touch the age filters unless it’s specifically for grandpas or something. If it’s for all audiences, leave it as is, track conversions and tighten age targeting from there.
Hope that helps!
You said once the campaign shows promise you will go back and add interests. Can you explain a little more on this? The reason why I’m asking is because I have had a couple camps show a lot of promise (lots of likes, shares, comments, 3-5 cents per engagement, 7-10% CTR) but no sales. Is it a concept issue? When do you pull the plug even after much promise but no sales?
That happens a lot don’t worry. $30 and no sales – end it.
Here is a more detailed post about it.
Your stats look real good but sometimes the niche are just social and not buyers. You can try another design if you think it’ll help but don’t stay on it too long. Better to move on if you’ve spent more than $30 with no sales.
Thanks for the tips and the link. Very nice post! I have a few other questions…
I am assuming you do mostly PPE campaigns through FB. Do you create a whole new fan page for each campaign or just post on one main page? Also, how long does it take you to roll out a new campaign from soup to nuts? By the time I come up with an idea, research a targeted audience, design it, launch it in tee spring, create a facebook page, post my campaign, boost the post, target the audience, and launch the FB campaign its been a good amount of time. Is this the general sequence of how it should go? If so, do you have any pointers on how to speed this up maybe?
No, just post it on one fanpage. If it works, THEN make a new fanpage dedicated for it.
It takes about 5-10 minutes for a simple design. Most of the time spent is on design. Once that’s done it should literally take you 2-5 minutes to do the rest.
You’ll get quicker as you launch more. To save time I,
– Launch all camps on the same FB page
– Have a generic, copy/paste description for all campaigns
– Let FB autosuggest do a lot of the targeting for you
Like I said, do more and you’ll get quicker!
Hey there, for your post descriptions do you ever add #hashtags a the bottom of the description? Do you know if adding a lot of relevant tags are effective at all??? Thanks.
Nah I don’t nor do I know anyone that does. Might look a little spammy though.