How to Easily Make An Extra $1000 Per Month with Canva and Creativity

Put your creative hat on, and let’s make money!

Today, I am going to mix it up again. I have been writing about photography advice and inspiration for a long while, and sure it gets some traffic and a lot of you find it helpful. I won’t stop the daily letters, but what I am going to do is share some secrets with you on how to make money online in your niche.

You say hogwash? Think again. It is definitely possible to make money online in your niche of choice. You simply have to know how to research, create, and then market. We’ll get back to things of this sort in a future piece though.

Technically, what I am about to share with you is not really even a secret. It is common sense in my opinion. So many folks are looking for a “quick” way to make a buck, but the real secret to success is that slow and steady wins the race.

I am living proof of this when I started Coffee x Cameras a year and a half ago. I have steadily been able to grow and build things to support my family. If you go back in my Medium article history, you will see that we were struggling at one point when I lost all remote work here in Colombia. Yet, now I am able to sustain us until we can get out of here.

So today, I am going to publicly talk about print on demand services and tell you exactly how you can monetize them and make around an extra grand per month.

Who doesn’t want an extra $1000 in their pocket after all?

The Setup

First things first, let’s go over a list of things that you will need to make this happen:

1. A laptop or device with internet connection.
2. 4 hours of spare time.
3. A Printful.com account (it’s free).
4. An Etsy.com account (it is also free).
5. A Canva.com account (you can use the free version, or level up with the pro version). Note: both versions work just fine for what we will do. The pro version simply gives you more tools to work with.
6. Bonus: If you have some form of image editing software like Photoshop (monthly fee on Adobe’s website), GIMP (free), or the likes, it may be helpful down the road.
7. Bonus 2: Grab a free ChatGPT account over on OpenAI’s site if you don’t have a free or paid version already.

First Things First

If you have not already, please take a moment to create your free Printful, Etsy, and Canva accounts. You’ll need these in order to proceed with the next steps.

All set? Good.

Let’s proceed.

So here’s the thing. In Canva, they have thousands of pieces of quality clipart that you can use for FREE (or get more of with the pro version) and that you can use for commercial usage.

This comes as an advantage to us as creators as we need tools at our disposal to create products to put in our store.

Now, we are not going to invent just any product. We are going to specifically target products that sell. How do you find these you ask? Easy peasy. Simply visit Etsy.com and do a search at the top search bar for whatever your niche is.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s say that your niche is fountain pens. Cool. What we have to do is visit Etsy, and then search “fountain pen shirts” in the top search bar like this:

You can see from our search that you get a lot of different pen related merchandise that pops up, but less results for shirts than you get on say for example searching “cat shirts.”

This is a good thing. You want to be able to niche down to find something that does not have a lot of competition, but still has steady sales. I normally look for products that have reviews of 100 or more for base point to riff off of. Afterall, are you going to buy a product that has no reviews? Most likely not.

So here’s a quick example where you can see a shop that has a 4.8 star rating with over 1.7k reviews. That is a good start:

Cool, so we have a base idea here. A base idea is already something that is selling, but that we want to use a cross formula with in order to make something new and unique. You will find this idea has been straight up copied by other shops if you do the search. Not cool for several reasons.

1. Copying designs may have copyright implications.
2. Copying designs creates more competition for an idea that leads to less sales.
3. If you want break out sales, you have to come up with your own take.

So let’s say for example that you like fountain pens and cameras like I do. You could come up with a combo shirt of a fountain pen and a camera.

Let’s give it a go.

First we jump over to Canva and start a new shirt design:

I always start with the blank template whenever I am designing a new shirt idea personally. There are technically tons of shirt templates that you can use that have other designs on them, but again, originality with the base idea making it our own is the key here.

So I personally click on the “Create a blank T-shirt” option when I start my designs. You can try it differently, but be aware that if you don’t make a slight variation by around 30% to any of the other designs, that your design will not be considered original and may have issues down the road to sell.

You will end up on a screen that is ready for you to play and create with. Now for the sake of this tutorial I am going to design a fountain pen and camera shirt to test in my shop to see if it hits the mark in the realm of the other popular shirt that is already selling on Etsy with an audience that likes both fountain pens and cameras like me.

Here goes nothing.

First things first, we need to find some fountain pen clipart, and we need to find some camera clipart that we like for our shirt design.

I am going to pick a pen that I like, and a camera that I like to add to the canvas like this:

For the sake of time and not making this tutorial a mile long, it took me around 20 minutes to find a fountain pen graphic, camera graphic, and an x graphic that I liked.

I switched the color of the background to black, and I switched all of the graphics colors to white so that it would be stark and contrasted like the popular shirt that we saw over on Etsy. For today I am not going to go into details on how to use basic functions in Canva like this, but if you like, you are welcome to visit me on coffeexcameras.com and sign up for a mentorship session with me, and I can teach you in a single two hour session how to do all of the basics.

Now that I have the graphics the way that I would like them, I am going to export the design into a file that I can upload to Printful to get this going. Make sure that when you download like I am that you maximize the size of the download so that you get the best quality on your shirts when they are printed:

Make sure that when you do your download that you also check the “transparent background” checkbox in the download window. This will make sure that you get a PNG file that just has the graphics and not the background color which will make your life a lot easier if you want to sell different color t-shirt options.

Now that we have the file downloaded, I am going to jump over to Printful.com and put the design on a shirt in my store.

Note: On Printful, it is important that you navigate to the “store” section and follow the steps to get your Printful store linked with Etsy. For this tutorial, I am not going to go into step by step details on how to do this, but you will need the two joined by following the prompts on Printful’s site to set up your store there.

Once you have a Printful store, it is important to select a popular product that is already selling to put your design on. This increases your chances of sales dramatically.

I like T-shirts and mugs personally because they are every day items that a good percent of the population uses. Yet, if you want to put your design on a blanket or something, that is your choice too.

For this tutorial, I am going to select the Classic Tee option on the left.

You can see that the design looks really awesome! The thing that I always tell myself is to design products and designs that I myself get excited about. If I am excited about them, others normally are also. If I feel like they are half-hatched ideas or simply there for fillers, they normally are and do not perform so well.

So, here we have a design that I absolutely love, and that I myself will be wearing in the near future!

On the next page when you hit continue at the bottom right of the screen, you will choose what are called “basic mockups.” This is free to do it this way, and all you really need to sell a shirt is a basic flat lay without going over the top too complex.

Next, it will bring you to your product description page. This is important that you are accurate and thorough on your details here. Printful gives you a basic generic description, but I prefer to hop over to ChatGPT to prompt a more intriguing and custom description like this:

For today, again keeping this short, I am not going to teach you a ChatGPT course. I will mention that I use ChatGPT pro though which has the latest ChatGPT 4. You can get ChatGPT through OpenAI for free and use the 3.5 version if you want to test it out for this project also. It works perfectly fine, but I find it not to be quite as detailed as GPT 4 honestly. If you want to learn all about creating prompts and such, you can also book a mentorship session with me on my Coffee x Cameras site, and I am happy to teach you. I am a professional prompt creator also.

Now that we have our fancy product description, I am going to paste it in on Printful just like this:

If you scroll down on this page to the bottom, there is a spot to put your keywords there for your product to be found. You have a maximum of 13 keywords that you can use here, so make them count.

I prefer to let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting on this instead of going through keyword generation sites, or researching most popular keywords honestly. You can technically use something like Google Trends to see what is popular as a quick way to manually generate these, but ultimately you would want to survey about 50 products that are top sellers, and find the common ground in a spreadsheet, which can take a very long time to do. So ChatGPT it is for me:

We’ll grab the keywords that ChatGPT generated from the basis of the earlier information we created about this shirt in our prompt window, and we will paste them onto Printful like so:

Right below this box, I always make sure to check the “unisex” check radial option so that the shirt is searchable as a viable option for both women and men. You don’t want to limit your sales options here by checking one or the other.

Now that this is all done, we will hit the red continue button at the bottom right of the screen, which will take us to our pricing page.

Before we get too far into pricing, I will share that there is a free Printful Etsy pricing calculator here:

https://www.printful.com/etsy-calculator#etsy-calculator

You’re welcome!

This will save you a LOT of time, errors, headaches, etc on trying to figure out what to charge for your merchandise.

By default Printful will add around a 30% markup to this shirt. I always prefer to check the “Free shipping” option at the top which adds the $4.69 cent shipping charge to the total of the shirt instead of popping up as an extra charge.

It may sound like a trick, but in reality this allows you to accurately calculate your per unit retail price much more accurately.

Whatever the total comes out to also, I start with a 50% markup per unit which leaves me room for promos, bundle sales, and other marketing of my products down the road. In this case, the base profit on a shirt is around $7, so we will set ours to $14 by adding another $7 at the top of the pricing window like this:

You can see here that I also played with the price calculator to get a rough estimate of what my margins are if I were to sell 100 shirts:

You can see from the above price calculator that with a sale of 100 shirts that it will give me a return of $1,812.42. This is technically more than $1000 to sell 100 shirts per month. This leaves me at a whopping 101.46% Net profit. Not bad eh?

Now, the next question you ask is how the hell you sell 100 shirts, right? I am going to side table that question for just a moment to show you how to submit your design to Etsy to wrap this up.

In Printful on the bottom right hand corner of the pricing window, you are going to click “Submit to store.” This will submit to your Printful shop (which is basically just for designing and print on demand services), and it will also place your product in the Etsy store under your shop that you created earlier.

Also, on the materials section of the Etsy listing, I like to add in what the shirt is made out of:

The really cool thing about setting up everything in Printful before you get it over to Etsy is that you get all of the Etsy fields populated mostly so that it saves you a ton of typing and work.

Once you finish these options, click “publish” on the bottom right to list your listing on Etsy:

And BAM, you now have a shirt on Etsy for sale just like me! Congratulations!

Now, I am not going to lie. The work does not stop here. If you create something and you post it online and no one knows about it, it is not going to sell its self.

So…

Here is what we do to sell our creation that we made today.

First of all, I would like to take a moment to say thank you for dropping by my Medium page if you are here. Your readership is important to me, and helps me to grow as a writer, photographer, and artist.

If you enjoyed this tutorial today and are excited to make and sell shirts like I am, I am going to ask you a couple simple favors, please.

1. Please visit my Etsy listing that we just made together and pick up a shirt for yourself here:

By doing so, it helps to support me and my family so that I can create other awesome tutorials just like this one that will help you support your family as well with your side hustles.

Not to mention, it will look very slick on you! And you will always remember how you learned how to win with this tutorial to sustain yourself by making money on the internet from my short class today every time that you wear this class.

When you finish with your purchase of the Fountain Pen x Camera classic tee, check out below. And Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your purchase and for helping support me in the goal to save to get my family home safely from Colombia to the United States. It means the world to me.

Next:

2. Please take a moment to also visit https://www.coffeexcameras.com and join my mailing list on the main page. You’ll get a FREE copy of the January Blues challenge guide just for signing up, and that is where I also drop other tutorials, guides, challenges, classes, and great Colombian coffee to inspire your journey.

And last but not least:

3. If you enjoyed this, and you enjoy your new shirt, please consider checking out other things that I teach and create for creators just like you over on https://www.coffeexcameras.com. Any purchase that you make is much appreciated, and supports me and my family.

The Home Stretch of How to Sell Your New Shirt Online

Now, as promised here are some tips to sell your new T-shirt that you created today online so that you can make your $1000 this month too.

I am not like those other tutorial folks out there that tell you how to list something on Etsy and then forget the most important part of the tutorial which is how to market and sell the product.

So, here we go.

First and foremost if you created a product today that is in your niche, you know a lot about who to sell this shirt to already. You are your own best research.

You see, what I did today is to make a shirt that “I” love and that “I” would actually wear. And I do a lot of learning and research on both fountain pens and cameras already. So it is natural for me to tell my friends in Facebook Groups, forums, text, email, etc about my new creation today because I make friends that like the same things that I do.

This goes into what is called community building.

Let me be honest, you will never sell anything if you blanket the internet with your creations and do a ritual to the internet god’s hoping and praying that someone will magically buy your product. It does not work like that.

You will win though if you organically build customer relationships.

How do you do this you ask?

Well, its pretty easy actually.

I myself have my website Coffee x Cameras. That is hub number one to sell what I create and to teach my students through mentorship. Yet, you don’t need a fancy website to get started. You can get started for FREE today.

You probably already have the resources at your fingertips in fact.

Everyone and their Uncle has some form of social media accounts these days, right? And a lot of people complain that the “algorithm” holds them back. It is not the algorithm honestly, it is you that is holding yourself back.

Let me explain.

Let’s say I have an Instagram account. Instagram is very visual with photos, videos, stories, and things of the like.

I am not going to give a full blown lecture on how to use Instagram today, but what I am going to teach you is how to train your social media to win in what you want to sell.

For example.

If you want to sell your new t-shirt, but you post nothing but your breakfast, your gym images of your fitness progress, pretty landscapes, etc, the algorithm is confused. You are essentially poisoning your Instagram by posting all of the extra stuff.

Yet, if you open a business that sells t-shirts, keep your page dedicated to just that, your business.

Let me break it down.

You generally want to post around 40% of your product in action, 30% of inspiration to buy your product, and 10–20% of you as a human making what you make or doing normal human things on your socials.

For a t-shirt, people want to see that shirt being used on other humans. They want to see it in places that they resonate with. They want to see inspirational things that make them want to open their wallet and buy THAT shirt, and not the other similar one that we based our design off of today.

And let’s be honest. Most people care about what you and that product can do for them than they actually care about you and that you created something. It is a fact of life and it is real sadly to say.

So if you can use that 40/30/20 guideline for your social posts and create things that you would want to see done with the shirt that you created, other people just like you are going to find it and want to be a part of it too.

Yet, it does not stop just there.

You have to actively train your social medias.

Quit liking the photos of the models, the celebrities, the influencers, or other things that are NOT your product or about your selling goals.

Why? Because the algorithm puts you in an echo chamber based on your “likes.” It traps you there, and other people that are like you and your shirt will never see your content if you don’t break out of the chamber.

How do you do this? Easy.

Find other creators that are just like you. Follow them. Engage with their posts. Leave meaningful comments when you are inspired or floored with what they are doing. Build connections and relationships with them.

Also repeat this with posts and content that are all about what you do.

Say you create an outdoors shirt for example. You will want to find sports and outdoors folks on Instagram and engage with their accounts and their posts. This will train the algorithm again to serve the right content to the right people.

And when you engage these people for the shirt that you created about the outdoors they might think it is pretty cool when they browse your page to find out why you are liking and commenting on their posts and be one of the 100 people that you need to make your $1000 this month.

It is that simple. Find people that are like you and your product and engage.

The same thing goes for other socials like TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Interested is interesting.

I will say also that on Facebook there are tons of groups that are niche specific. Try joining some and then contribute your thoughts to a lot of questions and posts there. You’ll organically build friends in time there that will eventually ask you what you do. And then you can naturally tell them that you have a great shirt company and show them what you have with your Etsy store link.

They will also have trust in you because they have seen you around the group for a while also. This leads to sales.

One day, I will finish the social media marketing guides that I plan to finish this year (this is also why you may enjoy being on my mailing list to learn more when I finish them). And when I do, I will target each specific social media and its modern nuances for the sake of people like you that want to sell your creative products.

So, what are you waiting for? Now that you created an awesome shirt today, get out there and start telling the world about it!

And oh yeah, posting articles about things on Medium helps also. It is a great way to talk about what you are passionate about, just like I am passionate about teaching you how to do all of this.

Last but not least, if you still have not done so yet, please take a moment to go purchase a shirt that we created together today:

It really does help me out to support my family as we are trying our best to save to get out of Colombia and to get back to the United States. And remember, it looks awesome on you, and you will always remember this moment when you learned how to create and sell a product that works.

If you enjoyed this article and learning also, you can also learn more by jumping on my mailing list over at https://www.coffeexcameras.com where I share tutorials, challenges, guides, books, and other resources. I also have mentorship opportunities there if you need help one on one at any point to do anything you have learned today or otherwise. I jump on Zoom with you anywhere in the world that you are, and I can get you all squared away.

Thank you again for dropping by and learning with me today! I hope that you make a million selling shirts, and that you and your family are safe and well also!

Until next time,

Charlie Naebeck Coffee x Cameras https://www.coffeexcameras.com

P.S. You are welcome to follow me on socials below also:

P.S.S. As a bonus, let me just mention that once you get done posting your shirt on your Etsy store, you can also import it very easily to your Shopify, Wordpress, etc, so that you can sell it in multiple stores like this with one of mine: