How to market damn shirts?

M

Myler

the horror.
Apr 25, 2009
531
6
0
G16
So I got my first online business going. Shirts. Original? Well, no less original than slinging ebooks or subscriptions.

Anyway, what I want to know is how would you approach the marketing. Football shirts "with a twist" of course.

Should I pay someone for backlinking? Spam the blogs and forums? Pay bloggers to plug the website?

Am I missing methods?
 


I think you should've figured out your marketing plan before you went ahead with the idea.

You can do shirt giveaways to influential bloggers / youtube vloggers with a relevant audience, spam craigslist, buy sponsorships on football forums / sub-reddits, twitterers, go near stadiums on gameday and pass out flyers, etc.

I dunno man, seems like there's bigger opportunities out there than another t-shirt business.
 
Its true, but this is something to do on the side while I figure something better. And I never dealt with this kind of work so experience will be great, to actually do something.

I found a guy who will do shirts for me, Im in Europe so I'll never meet him probably, it's all via email, I basically make the design and mark up the price :)
 
Hold on a sec, did you do the basics yet like keyword analysis, competitor research, market research etc?

If you are starting with a clean slate you should probably:

* Get your target keywords together,
* Hone in on your primaries,
* Do a thorough analysis of the first page ranking competitors (backlink analysis, likes/dislikes about what they are doing, etc),
* Build a site, create a blog with some quality content. Looks like you are a designer so create some posts that give back - how-to's on how to design a t-shirt or some shit like that,
* Generate 20-30 nice relevant posts on your own so you know they'll be tits,
* Get a content VA to start pumping out more articles,
* Get another SEO VA to create some web 2.0's, relevant community profiles that are properly backlinked with engagement (contribute with posts, comments, etc),
* Use a clean service for some directory submissions, social bookmarks, backlinks,
* Create the traditional social media sites - pintrest could be huge if you leverage some bombass photography of your products,
* Campaign on Stumbleupon, Google Content Network, maybe PPC

..and whatever else. I'm not claiming to be an expert either this is just off the top of my head and would be my first draft for a plan of attack.
 
Also take a look at importbible dot com it's a t-shirt company that's local to me and they've built a really strong brand from scratch much like what you are trying to do. I would examine their model and see what they've done, they've managed to get their shirts published in big magazines as 'must have swag'.
 
Is this gui legitimate?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjcSz6Pi2Fk&feature=plcp]Twitter wait and reply bot - Learn how to use twitter auto to get website traffic - YouTube[/ame]

and will this twitter autobotting help? I mean, that's a stupid question...but...if i have shirts for specific audience, this seems to me like a helpful tool...altho the robotweets is something Im personally allergic, you can spot those miles away...
 
#1 rule IMO. Shirts have to be wearable. Sounds like a stupid answer but I've seen insanely good marketing campaigns, flawless demographic targeting, proper use of advertising channels etc. but the product (in this case clothing) was absolute shit and you couldn't pay anybody to wear their stuff.

If you have a good product, find natural ways to get eyes on them. Target the people who are most likely to buy. If the product is good, you will get sales.
 
kingscotty38 said:
#1 rule IMO. Shirts have to be wearable. Sounds like a stupid answer but I've seen insanely good marketing campaigns, flawless demographic targeting, proper use of advertising channels etc. but the product (in this case clothing) was absolute shit and you couldn't pay anybody to wear their stuff.

If you have a good product, find natural ways to get eyes on them. Target the people who are most likely to buy. If the product is good, you will get sales.
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This.

Talk to 100 people in your demographic. Ask if they'd even wear the shirts, much less buy them. If you get an overwhelming "fuck yeah" type of response, then proceed to roll out.

Shirts are a market that you'll be able to tell pretty quickly, if they don't sell themselves from the start you're most likely wasting any money on marketing them.
 
scottspfd82 said:
This.

Talk to 100 people in your demographic. Ask if they'd even wear the shirts, much less buy them. If you get an overwhelming "fuck yeah" type of response, then proceed to roll out.

Shirts are a market that you'll be able to tell pretty quickly, if they don't sell themselves from the start you're most likely wasting any money on marketing them.
Click to expand...

After you've followed through with this, proceed to find sites/forums that you can post on with an audience that would be interested in your shirts.

Contribute, and try to seem like a nice person.

In your signature, have some apologetic/help me out pitch like this:

"Hey guys, I'm entering the ___ shirt scene! I put a lot of effort into these, check em out!"

This is a very friendly way of making it go somewhat viral to your audience, since you're leaving your mark at where ever you post and the forum members will more than likely spread the word if your shirts are great.
 
spreadshirt.com

Edit: A great validation method is to setup an online shop featuring images of your shirts. Before you create them, feature all of your ideas and when a customer clicks on an item's call to action (such as "Add to Card"), instead throw them a script saying the shirt is out of stock but if they put their e-mail in, you'll notify them immediately when it's available.

There are all kinds of scripts out there that are readily available without requiring much time investment.
 
jsphfcll said:
lol help me run a t -shirt business lol
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Seconded.

You prolly should have started at the beginning, which usually entails market research and an ROI eval, mate. Instead, you've jumped right into one of the most over-saturated and hyper-competitive markets online today.

Good luck bro. :love-smiley-086:
 
You have to make sure that the shirts that you are offering are quality and have the fitted look. Now you will have to focus on creating a brand or unique design. It's very hard right now to compete with those established crowd sourced online retailers such as Threadless, so you would probably have to build an offline business first and then take it online.
 
current events. Just read an article about a company selling "Trampire" Tshirts based off the news of Kristen Stewart cheating on that Twilight guy.

Pretty clever.
 
Honestly, I've thought about the TShirt biz for a while now...

And I cant really see any way a business like that can make more than $30k-$50k a year. and thats if everything goes perfectly.


Plus there would be some major headaches with that. I would stick to IM.
 
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