Redbubble is the perfect solution for Print On Demand creators who are looking for extra income.
The platform lets you upload artworks to custom white-labeled products, that space from apparel to accessories to home decors and much, much more.
There is no entry barrier, which is the main reason why anyone can start to create their Print On Demand storefronts from scratch and for free.
However, the hardest challenge is to make the right promotion, because Redbubble won’t provide it. This is why we wanted to share these ideas to increase your Redbubble sales:
- Be honest with your designs
- Be realistic!
- Flexibility
- Make some tweaks
- Check size requirements
- Upload regularly
- Keywords optimization
- Redbubble promotions
You may get lost from the thousands of items published in this marketplace, but don’t get confused by that. If you have already an idea in mind just pursue it.
Otherwise, you could start from the trendiest designs of the moment and use them as inspiration.
1. Be Honest With Your Designs
If you’re not sure about what to sell on Redbubble, the first useful adviser is yourself.
What’s your hobby? What are your tastes? Start collecting ideas on your experience.
What kind of products would you prefer if you were the customer?
Would you buy this item with your design on it?
If the answer is no it’s time to make some changes.
If the answer is yes then save this design and move to another one. Or create variations of the same that you would still like to buy for yourself.
But if your analysis isn’t fair enough, you should ask friends and relatives.
Would they be willing to buy your items? Based on their answers, decide whether to continue or start over with another idea.
Get inspired by what happens around you. Enter the stores, look at the trendy items, and consider recreating a possibly similar design.
Furthermore, social networks are an important showcase that makes you monitor the current trends.
Facebook and Instagram are good allies for this purpose. Maybe one of your designs contains a viral quote you never expected.
As you see, ideas and inspirations can come from small things.
2. Be Realistic!
The initial premise is that running a successful store on Redbubble is not nearly as easy as you believe.
We are all attracted to easy money quotes and cool advertisements on Youtube.
These so-called “Gurus” want to convince us that RedBubble is a gold mine and it’s possible to make money fast with it.
We reveal to you that most people who start on Redbubble don’t even make a single sale.
We don’t want to discourage you, we’re just saying that not all glitters are gold.
Don’t get discouraged from the no sales during the first months, especially if you rely solely on organic advertising. It takes time to build an effective resonance within the Redbubble marketplace.
Therefore, the right mindset is what it takes to treat this activity as a real business, which implies a large initial investment (in terms of time and creativity) for probable future return.
3. Flexibility
Be versatile in the choice of your items, don’t limit yourself to a single product category, like a t-shirt or mug.
The same design can be used on 5 or 10 different product categories.
And beware, we’re not saying to offer more variations of the same design, but simply expanding the range of products on which you can apply a unique design.
Redbubble, from this point of view, offers wider solutions from which you can choose (clothing, accessories, home decors, and much more).
Of course, not everything can be included because it depends on the type of design.
But make sure you choose all available options as far as possible.
4. Make Some Tweaks
Offering several variations of the same design is an option you should consider.
Maybe a customer loves that particular embroidery or the quote in your design but doesn’t like at all the color in the background. What will be the result? No purchase.
As always, success or failure is a matter of details.
Try to imagine how many sales you lost because you never changed some features of your design.
Changing one color, changing word order, changing layouts, zooming in or out on design, centering, or off-centering images…how many effortlessly variations could you make?
However, don’t try to offer too many alternatives of the same design, or you will create too much confusion in the head of the customer, who will end up buying nothing.
For instance, if your idea is to change color, you should provide a maximum of 5 color variations.
5. Check Size Requirements
A flawless design is better from a technical point of view.
Transparent background with no traces of colors, black or white no matter, won’t compromise the quality of the final product and prevent delivering the low-quality product to your customers.
Furthermore, the design should have an adequate size in terms of pixels, as it can better adapt to any type of surface.
Redbubble recommends a size of 7.632×6.480 pixels. However, as much as we know, it’s enough to create 4.500×5.400 pixels’ images.
This is the standard measure adopted by other Print On Demand marketplaces as well, including Merch by Amazon.
The resolution is crucial as it avoids the risk of grainy effects on your product.
The quality of the output depends on the cleanliness and sharpness of your design.
Please don’t underestimate this aspect.
Make sure all of your designs follow these technical guidelines before moving forward.
6. Upload Regularly
Redbubble recommends uploading at least one design per month to have a constant stream of visibility in its marketplace.
Don’t let your store stagnate for a long time or you will lose your chances of being visible.
The algorithm rewards the active creators, not those who interpret this business as a simple hobby.
The advice we give you before launching your storefront is to create a catalog of 100 finished designs and upload them once a day until the end.
Once you reach your peak, you can continue uploading less frequently, even once a month.
But it’s important to give the right input first.
Always put yourself in a position to have higher chances of success than others. Consider that statistically, people will buy 10% of your products, which means that out of a selection of 100 designs, expect to receive orders on at least a dozen of them.
Therefore, if you want to get more sales, you have to take care of the amount, not only of the quality, of your catalog, and open new storefronts for different niches.
Once you’ve secured a steady stream of sales, you can outsource the creation of new designs to somebody else.
By doing so, you create the perfect, scalable, and extremely passive business ever imagined.
This is the point of arrival. But first, you have to get through the right steps, before reaching that level.
7. Keywords Optimization
Keywords are a very important feature that boosts organic traffic to your store.
Redbubble provides 15 keywords space per single product. So, which should I choose?
Focus on the most relevant ones to your niche, as they appear through social networks.
Instagram, for example, shows the top trending hashtags of the moment in the search bar.
Just type your niche and collect the 25 most relevant ones. After that, paste them on the related tag box and publish the product.
if you can match the right keywords to your product, it will probably appear in Redbulbble search results.
The description is also very important. Spend some time curating your product descriptions, as it contributes to the promotion as well.
Add some relevant keywords in the text, among the ones chosen previously, as they can facilitate the Redbubble search algorithm.
The perfect combination would be using the same keywords in both the title, description, and tags.
We insist a lot on this point because we found better evidence than generically described products, in terms of exposure and organic traffic overall.
8. Redbubble Promotions
Try to make the most of the promotions that Redbubble offers you.
The reduced margins would make you believe that you can’t apply discounts at all.
However, there is a very simple and effective strategy that makes you get around this problem.
You have to increase the initial price of your product by 20-30% (even 50% in some cases) and then apply a discount of the same value to get the final price to the original level (which means, the price at which you would normally sell it).
It can be applied to those products which value depends on the perception given by the customers.
An example is tot bags or leggings. The product itself doesn’t have such a high value but the mere application of a high-quality design can change its perception in the customer’s eyes.
So if a neutral legging is worth $14, a legging with a particular design can boost its value at least three times more.
This is the power of high professional print-on-demand techniques.
They let you range over various strategies and carry out targeted promotions on those higher perceived value products.
Summary
If you’re new in the Print On Demand industry and want to hop into the next trend of the moment, please note that you may race against thousands of professional designers who already do the same thing on Redbubble.
It may happen that your designs will get lost in the oceans of products published every day. These strategies hopefully will let you increase your sales, but be aware that there’s no magic formula, every case has to be tested stand-alone.
However, it’s important to treat Redbubble as a real business, not only as a simple hobby. This involves analyzing statistics and KPIs of your products, and, sometimes, waiting a few months before receiving the first sales.
But no matter what will be, if you’ve done all the necessary to run a successful store (which means, niche research, professional designs, and adequate promotion) all your effort will end up with a result, and if your niche belongs to a rising trend, a boost on your sales is assured in the future!
Stop listening to fake promises about easy and quick money online. You need to make the right steps, apply a valid method, and wait the necessary time. No easy path in this.
Be ready to catch the next trend and prepare yourself to launch your Redbubble store!
