You’ve identified your niche, registered your business, designed your shirts, and launched your online t-shirt store. Now what? If you’re like we were, you need some sales, you weren’t blessed with $20,000 of marketing money to buy pay per click ads from Google. These few tips should help save you a few headaches as well as give you a few ideas on how to market your product for free.

Don’t give away your shirts for free

Don’t give your shirts away for free to people unless you are guaranteed at least a write up in a blog or a link back to your site or some sort of return on investment. I can’t count the number of times we’ve sent free shirts to websites and companies who said they were doing t-shirt roundups and then never posted anything of the sort after we sent them free product.

If you have limited inventory like we do–reserve your inventory for sales. This may sound like we are slightly bitter, and that’s because we are. I designed most of the shirts on our site and I even pay for them. When you’re just getting started, you can only afford so many shirts. This means every sale counts. Unless you are going to get some sort of ROI on your give away, there’s no reason to do this. GoMedia has a great article about doing design work for the apparel industry that touches upon a similar subject.

GoMediaZine

I know I’ve mentioned them before on this site and in this post, but Go Media is a great resource for tutorials and design insight. If there’s one thing you can take away from this post it’s to subscribe to Go Media’s RSS  feed. They’re the best at what they do. One article that I know can help for you people starting up an on demand t-shirt store is the tutorial that shows you how to make realistic t-shirt mockups.

Here at Assault, we were lucky enough to know a few photographers who would take awesome photos for our site, but if you don’t happen to know any photographers and don’t want your photos to look amateurish this is a great tutorial to get your design renderings onto realistic t-shirts.

Put yourself out there – Network in your industry and local area

Don’t be shy. Send emails to local magazines and websites that are similar to yours. What’s the worst thing that could happen? They don’t respond or they say not interested. It’s a numbers game. Not everyone is going to like your stuff. The people of QBN and Digg LOVE to slam our designs and site. It’s not big deal. Most of the time, they give good insight and can be quite humorous. Your friends and family are going to say your stuff is cool, but people who don’t care about you will be blatantly honest behind the protection of anonymity on the internet.

The first thing we did after launching our store was to send friendly emails to t-shirt blogs and design websites with links to our store and our blog and tutorials. The best way to find sites similar to yours in your industry is to do Google searches. We did searches like “t-shirt blogs”, “t-shirt resources” and “apparel design resources” and sent emails to sites that appeared to be open to reviewing our products.

Forget Myspace. It’s fine to have a myspace page to get in contact with bands for instance, but it’s useless for the most part as far as getting sales. Make friends with fellow designers on twitter. Download Twitteriffic or a similar twitter application and join in the conversation. Share links you find and comment on other t-shirt blogs’ posts. Thank everyone who comments on your products. Send personal emails back to your customers who comment on their orders.

Monitor your site traffic for forum post links

When you’re not getting much traffic it’s pretty easy to monitor your traffic and referrals. I recommend  using something like Sitemeter since it gives you real time stats. (We also use Google Analytics) There’s been plenty of times that a user in some obscure forum posts a poll asking which shirt they should buy (with links to one of our shirts as well as other shirts they like)

Create an account and add a comment to the forum post with a discount or a coupon code to help persuade the users to buy your product. When every sale counts, this is a good way to get a sale.

Give coupon codes to sites that review shirts

Some of our top sales referrals are from sites that we gave non-expiring coupon codes to like Shirts On Sale and Hide Your Arms. They show up for many t-shirt related searches and users are often at their site to do exactly what you’d think–get coupons for t-shirts. It’s the best way to get exposure to your shirts directly to customers who are ready to buy stuff.

Why would you spend $1,000 dollars for Google Ad Words when you can get the same target visitors to  your site for free? We’ve ran a few pay per click ad campaigns, and let me tell you that we’ve never even come close to breaking even. On the other hand, some of our top sales referrers are from a coupon code on a t-shirt blog that we didn’t pay a cent for.

Know of any good tips that I missed?

I know there are countless tips and tricks that I haven’t told as of yet (Maybe a part two?) I’m sure there’s also people who disagree with me on Ad Words, and giving away our product for free. If you have anything you’d like to add, or if you have your own site, post it in the comments!

Assault shirts is FINALLY an official operating entity within Cook County IL. (plus we ship out of Dallas) Behold, a picture of me in my room aka Assault Headquarters holding our assumed name certificate (yet to be framed). You may remember my previous experience with the Cook County Chicago Business Registration Office… well I’m happy to say they came through and sent us our assumed name certificate!

We also have gotten our business cards printed (with a 10% off code written all over them). A tip to all you future business owners out there: use vistaprint.com to print your cards and do a web search for “Vista Print Coupons”. I got a 50% off coupon code that got us 500 business cards for only $9.99! The only negative thing to ordering from Vista Print is the fact that they try to upsell you on EVERYTHING IN THE BOOK. I, being the smart shopper that I am, passed by all the extra offers, but one did catch my eye:

I don’t know if you notice that, but they’re offering to sell me a digital copy of my business card for $1.99 so I can put it in OUTLOOK! How exciting! (of course it only works in outlook) I wonder if they realized that I uploaded a digital copy of my god damn business card already. Why the hell would I pay two bucks for you to give me my digital business card back to me to attach to my emails? Stupid Vista Print.

From now on everyone will be receiving business cards in their packages with a 10% off coupon code instead of Mr. 51%’s hand written personal notes. We’ve also made several improvements to the website based on feedback from our initial customers and visitors from Woot and OSCommerce.com forums. We’ve spread the site out a bit so that there can be 3 shirts per row on the homepage and a bit more space on the product descriptions, as well as optimized our site for search using some of the SEO tips for t-shirt websites post that I wrote a few days ago.

The other item we have added to the website is a Friends section. I don’t mean Myspace friends, but rather other clothing, t-shirt, and band websites of people that we’d consider our internet homies. If you write an article about us, or link to one of our shirts let us know and we’ll be happy to get you up in our friends section asap. Us small guys gotta stick together…

It is up! Our legal notice has been posted in the Chicago Reader giving you all the juicy, ambiguous lawyer blah that tells you that we are a legit business operating out of Cook County in Chicago, IL! Despite taking two trips to the Cook County Clerk’s office we are finally on our way to being one step better than your average Ebay Nigerian scam-jobs.

We have also setup our FTP and have made our initial payment on our first batch of shirts. That means you guys will actually be able to place orders and you will actually be receiving a shirt in the mail after we take the money from your bank account!

After venturing around 118 Clark in Chicago, and around City hall and Daley plaza I find myself waiting in line for a marriage license. I’m the only person standing in line by myself…

It’s at this point that a tiny asian lady who speaks with a very thick accent of some kind tells me that I’m in the wrong line, and that I can step right up to her to register Assault Inc. with her. After looking at my completed Assumed Name Certificate for a bout .2 seconds she says something that I can’t understand. Our conversation went a little something like this.
Tim: “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“yo fworms, dey awr wong. He [motions to the part where Craig's name should be] needs to have it notawized in Texas, I told heem that on phone so dis is wong”

Tim: “Can’t we register it under my name only.”

“No! It is a general pawtnership no? You need to get heem to sign the documents and get them notawized befowe you I can file them.”

Tim: “Can you at least notarize my partnership agreement?”

“Nowah. You can take it acwoss the stweet to Tomasen building and get dem notawized thewre”

Tim: “Wait, what? Where The Thompson building?”

“yes the Tomasen building”

Tim: “umm, say again? The who?”

“It’s acwoss the stweet!”

Tim: “I’m sorry, can you just write it down for me. I can’t understand you.”

That’s just about how I remember the whole ordeal going, and it looks like we are not going to be able to get our Economy Checking Account setup at Bank of America until we get that crazy asian lady to sign off on our Assumed Name Certificate. I hope I never have to go through this again, and this brings up another point. When is Craig going to get out of Texas and move back to the motherland? What a royal pain in the ass!

On top of that Private Phone appears to be going out of business or something and after using their voicemail numbers for roughly 2 months and getting them on all of our documents to file with the government, it appears as though we will now have to pay $19.99/month to keep our number! @#&*$! Thanks alot Net Zeros. The new company is called Packet8. They seem reputable. Nothing beats free though.

Some good news came out of my insane 8 hour drink-a-thon aka Christmas party though last week, and that is that I’ve gotten a few good business tips from the CEO of my full time job and from one of our new marketing people. As a result, we will be printing all 12 of our designs, and probably following that up with about 4 more new ones in the coming months. We’re getting a smaller quantity of the designs printed and we’re selling them extra cheap! We’ll also be running a few contests through the Film School Rejects, and hopefully a few other sites including one of my favorites: Shirt.Woot! So keep checking back, give us 3 weeks and we’ll be selling like hotcakes!