On the Road to $1,000 with Etsy and Print on Demand Day 2
Get ready for some interesting surprises
Hey everyone,
I am back as promised for day two of updates on my Etsy and print on demand experiment.
Today is not going to be as long of a post, but if you missed yesterday about what the experiment is, and how I intend to try to make a grand this week, you can check it out here, and you can find the original how to set all of this up in my feed here on Medium.
What happened in less than one day?
So here is the thing. I was so busy with other projects today that I did not realize that my experiment blew up in a very good way overnight since I started with yesterday’s post.
If you recall, yesterday I was sitting at around 168 visits to my new https://coffeexcameras.etsy.com site, and today I am sitting at a whopping 235 visits.
This means that I got 67 new visitors overnight while I was sleeping, and while I was doing other things. Nice!
I have not seen any new sales trickle in just yet, but as I mentioned yesterday, I don’t know if this will be a quick way to start generating revenue. I still feel strongly that in somewhere around 3–6 months when I get a substantial number of products in the store that it will be when I start to see some things happen.
And here’s the deal. They say that 80% of your profits come from 20% of the items that you have in your store, so the real thing that I am interested in trying is to get around 1600 items in my shop. This means that around 320 of them would be hits and sell according to guestimated statistics.
The reason that I want around 1600 items in my shop also is that if I only put say 100 items in my shop, that means that only 20 of my shirts or whatever I choose to add additionally would be selling. The lower the number of sellers that you have, the less return that you get.
And realistically that might make me somewhere around $50-$100 per month if I only loaded 100 shirts, but today I decided that this is going to be more of a long term project.
How long does it take to get 1600 items in the shop?
Here’s the deal. I did my designs according to Wholesale TED’s strategy that I mentioned on YouTube yesterday, and I was able to get five done today. Yep, a whopping five…
However, I think that they are really great designs, and they are actually things that I myself as a photographer laugh at and would wear. Usually if I feel it, most other people feel it too. If I don’t, I hear crickets. So, I am feeling pretty good about today’s design run.
Yet, with only five designs getting done per day while I am juggling other work, at this rate if I take 1600 and minus the 16 items that I have in my shop right now, and then divide that number by the 5 designs that I kicked out today and got into the shop, it would take me a whopping 316.8 days to get to my goal of 1600 designs in my shop.
So yeah, a little longer than I would like, yet on a plus, all of that time could be used to build and promote daily on my other blogs and drive some serious traffic. Look at just one days effort with 67 new visitors that are mainly direct traffic that I aimed at my site from posting. If I could scale that, I might be onto something there.
And I honestly thought about jumping over to Fiverr to see if there was a graphic designer that is similar to my style and skills whom I could hire to knock out 1600 designs while I do other things, but honestly, the cheapest one that was decent was $90 for five designs. If you do the math there, for 1600 designs it would cost me $144,000. Not happening. I want to MAKE that amount of money, not spend that amount.
Some challenges I am facing as of today
So like any project, all projects are never perfect. Each has their unique ups and downs, and this one is no different.
Today, I was playing with Dall-E further to see what I could churn out for the five that I was working on.
I am very happy with the results. Yet, with any AI, it is not a mind reader and it does not know you. So the bulk of my time today was revising prompts to get it to do what I wanted it to do.
Luckily, I was able to multi-task while I was waiting for generations to happen. I am working on a different side project where I am writing lofi instrumental hiphop music and getting back into some of my former music days as well. So instead of dropping F-bombs at ChatGPT and Dall-E, as it rendered, I was able to create a small series of riffs that I will record and produce soon to put over on Spotify where I already released two new singles under this project before the holidays low key.
I can definitely solve some of my time issues if I make just normal graphic tees over in Canva Pro. I ended up having to do that for a prompt that Dall-E and ChatGPT kept saying “went against the policy guidelines.” And before you think the worst, I was not generating violence, nudity, or anything that was above PG-13. In fact, if you want to see what I made, you can click here.
Yet, the other designs that I made today I found myself doing a lot of clean up on in Photoshop after Dall-E got me into the ballpark with the rendering, but I had to change it and finish it the way that I wanted. So in reality, AI is not perfect.
What did I create today?
Thanks for asking! I will share the shirts that I made today here as daily progress for this project. They come in many different colors also, so if you like the idea, yet want one in a different color, follow the links over to Etsy, and you can choose the colors that you like. That is one of the things that took me the longest is knock outs to put things on transparent backgrounds to make these more versatile. Yet, here is what I made:
Funny “Ninja Photographer: Now You See Me, and My Huge Lens’ T-shirt!” classic tee available here.

Funny Photography “Photographers Do It In Manual” classic tee available here

Funny Photography “Lens Addict” classic tee available here

Funny photography “It’s Not Out of Focus, It’s My Style” classic tee available here

Funny photography “I Get the Picture” classic tee available here

So you can see here that it was a pretty productive day in these designs being I was able to get one more accomplished than I had hoped in addition to writing music and doing normal stats checking, emails, etc.
Conclusion
I am not going to lie, Etsy’s search engine system seems very slow to pick up on organic traffic. Maybe if I searched for better keywords and such I could get more of their traffic to pick up quicker, but for now I am seeing the best results on my first day of this by driving direct traffic from my other sites.
If you missed yesterday, I talked about how my .com sites aggregate to as many sources that will let me that I can find online. This drives a substantial amount of traffic to my sites. I am working on how I can drive more traffic to the Etsy shop. Yesterday, I even went as far to start posting things on socials directly with links to the shop. It seems my social traffic picked up a bit.
This proves a good point too. A while back I saw a lot of Medium writers that were “leaving” because they did not get any traction here. The thing is that you have to come up with a promotion strategy, and you have to be willing to stick with it for at least 6 months to a year to make something happen.
If you don’t promote at all, it is clear why you are not getting traffic. No one magically searches you and cares. You have to put your work in front of your audience, and you have to give them things that they are interested in also.
I learned this with Coffee x Cameras last year. I was writing about random things that I felt. I got some traffic. Yet, when I started a series on going back to basics of photography, and I even went as far to coordinate a strategy for my posts based off of a YouTube video that I made here, my traffic started to spike and jump steadily exponentially through the week.
I am currently on to my second week of my new YouTube things for 2024 also, and I just dropped a video on what is important for websites in 2024 being I build those for people as well. My website video is even doing better than my photo basics video. Hence, it is because I sought out ideas of what my audience wants, and I know where to share things so that they see them.
Thanks for following along with this experiment with me if you are reading this. I have not found myself wanting to post on Medium for a while honestly, but I know that a lot of you enjoy posts about how to make money online, so let’s experiment and grow together.
And if you want to support me and my project as well, you’re welcome to get any of the new shirts at the links above, or you can see more at https://coffeexcameras.etsy.com. You can also support and join my mailing list here on Medium to stay updated on this project, or if you want more help and things to help you, you can join my main list over on https://www.coffeexcameras.com where you can get books, photo lessons, coffee, website designs for your website, and much more.
Thanks for being here, thanks for your support, and I will post again soon with more updates from this experiment.
P.S. As a side note, all links are directly to my projects and none are affiliate links. If you do check out some of my projects, I greatly appreciate it. :)
Charlie https://www.coffeexcameras.com
