12 Sites to Make Money Through Print on Demand
Publish Or Print On Demand
Whether you have a book idea or some other art and crafty design to show off, there are various sites that which do some of these or only one aspect of a creative process like that.
And so here are 12 of the best sites that I could find that incorporate a bit of the print on demand phenomenon that has spread the Internet for many crafty design types who want to earn some money for their work, the sites are not in order of best or importance, I've just published them as I've found them over the years and a couple of them are not that old either.
The first one I should mention is my favourite one for art as the creation process is simple to upload your designs and there is a wealth of support on the site and an active community of artists and designers too Zazzle is a place that you can have your very own online gallery with your designs on many print on demand gifts and merchandise such as T-shirts, Mugs, Buttons and shoes to name a few products and once someone buys something then you get payment based on how much you marked your royalty percentage up,
Also with Zazzle you can earn from other artists too in the Zazzle marketplace by the affiliate program and there are some good tools to use to help with your referral quest, you can add Myspace merch widgets and other javascript gallery widgets to your blogs and anywhere else that will accept that form of code, plus there is a tool that can create an affiliate link from any page on Zazzle to help with your affiliate promotions.
Zazzle really is the market leader at the moment, but once upon a time Cafepress was, which leads us to our second print on demand site, when I first joined Cafepress back in 2006, I thought the idea was ace, upload your carefully sized designs onto t-shirts and other funky merchandise and start earning yeah! At least that's what happened for awhile anyway, until they migrated their in house affiliate program to commission junction and changed the spirit of the site to some kind of soulless place that suddenly left me with not much earnings ever since, a lot of people have abandoned Cafepress in favour of Zazzle and I don't blame them.
I remember Cafepress used to be such a fun place and I hope they do something about it in the future, because I had fond memories of creating lots of free basic stores there with all of my demon designs when I first started trying to sell my art online, I hope to do something with Cafepress in he future but only when I can be bothered if they can be.
This is one usually for the ladies, who like to do designs for fabrics and that sort of thing, well this is a print on demand fabric design store where you upload your designs to the set specifications of the Spoonflower site and you can choose to repeat the design or display it how you want on a well established fabric that is apparently the best in the business.
Now I've never seen this one before, but I guess because it's relatively new, but it seems like a great site and a brilliant idea for a small business to come up with something so niche specific as this, there is an introduction video when you arrive on the site which tells you some things you may need to know and the great thing about sites like these is that they'll only get better with more improvements and additions to the sites resources.
This is an old one, but more recently has expanded it's art prints to other print on demand products like other places, with mugs and magnets and all manner of great stuff to get people to buy with your designs on them, this was a site that I joined way back again in 2006 to promote my cafepress stores, but I really need to head on over back there and update my pages.
It's one of the most established art sites on the internet and you could do well by networking over there if you haven't already, as there are some fantastic artists and designers and even photographers too, although I never sold anything on that site I know full well if I got my marketing plan in motion I would shift some of my artwork with some prints or magnets at least.
This one sounded very interesting to me, as the premise of this one is to design a board game with artwork and some basic instructions and the website will create the game in yet another print on demand type situation and already there are some great board games I've seen on their own marketplace that look totally original, just think of the possibilities of other print on demand products.
As with any of these, you set the price and collect the royalties that are above the mark up, but really take a look at the basic boards games that everyone knows and get inspired by them and create something original, who knows it could be a bestseller.
This for authors and writers as you can get your books pod'd and out there online to sell to others, the possibilities are endless with what books you can create, like photo books, children's books, art focused books, history books or even your own autobiography.
I think we'll be seeing more and more of the types of sites in the future as print on demand is set to grow and the self publishing industry is a huge part of that.
At Lulu you can do ebooks, actual books, calendars, cook books, photo books, cd's and DVD's which all sound like a fantastic way of getting your product out there in either digital format or in good old fashioned published on demand print.
I'm going to be publishing one of my ebooks over there, once I complete it that is, with Lulu you can build an online storefront and also have access to other marketing tools for free.
Spreadshirt primarily focuses on t-shirts, but they do offer aprons, bags and some other things like thongs (waheeey!) and the print on demand feature is much similar to Cafepress and Zazzle so you'll feel much more comfortable using the design tools, although slightly awkward but hey, I haven't used this one for awhile so things may have changed, hopefully so.
Imagekind is spin-off site from Cafepress that deals with specialist art prints such as fine art prints, canvas prints and photography prints, so as to focus on the main area of getting peoples art out to people who want to buy it, which is much more easier than having to upload your art designs to fit lots of other different product types.
I'm liking Imagekind a lot more as it provides a focus for art prints and there is an affiliate program too and that is handled at the moment through Shareasale.com which is a great affiliate network to be a part of, selling your art through Imagekind is another to add to your art site portfolio.
This is another in a long line of good new quality print on demand stores and it's all free as it should be, don't know much about it as yet, but what I do know is that it has the flexibility to create a brand-able online presence with customizable CSS layout which can far surpass the likes of Zazzle and Cafepress (Hey Cafepress still charge for customization, the gits!!)
Other valuable features of pikistore are visitor statistics, Domain mapping which sounds like a great idea and a special online t-shirt designer which customers can use to create their own designs whilst visiting on anyone's site, this is the one to watch as far as I'm concerned, as I opened up an account last week and the overall ease and smooth design of the dashboard layout is far superior looking it must have had a super team of programmers on the case day and night to achieve all this.
This one is slightly different as you can create almost anything with your designs or get someone else to make your product, it could be a sculpture, a piece of art or something in furniture line, see the showroom to see what I mean, you can create infinite products if you know you can design them right or get someone else to do them.
This sites not for me, but there maybe some of you creative types who enjoy making things, s why not check it out.
This one is something similar to Ponoko in that you can create 3D designs that will be turned into jewelry and other unique products for sale, again not my type of site, but it just goes to show you what's out there in terms of print on demand websites that are there to elp you get noticed as an artist or an author.
Print On Demand 12 Sites To Think About
This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.
