4 months in…what I’ve learned · Poster Print on Demand

4 months in…what I’ve learned

So it’s around about the 4 month mark since setting up my shop. He’s how it’s been going:

Started in April. I have now made 96 sales and now sell between 1-5 posters a day. I have made a total of £1696 in revenue. I have around 200 posters listed and I run Etsy ads at $3 a day (for a select few listings). I am however considering increasing my ad budget but slightly scared I’ll have a drop in sales. Any advice on that front would be helpful, I’m half tempted to leave the ad budget as it is because it seems to be working pretty well so far. I earned my star seller badge exactly 3 months after my first sale, after having my account put into a payment reserve (profit prison). I have a review rate of about 9%, with 5 stars across the board.

I will say it did take a little while to really pick up but I have roughly doubled my sales and revenue each month since I started. In the past 18 days since the beginning of August, I have made £700 in revenue, I reckon I’m on track to reach around £1,000 in revenue this month.

Some things I’ve learned along the way -

You do get out what you put in. I am planning on adding more posters to my shop. My success has largely been due to one of my poster designs hitting it off.
2. Make variations of the posters that sell. I have made about 20 variations of my most popular poster. The niche that I am in makes it quite easy to pump out almost infinite variations of the same poster. I’d say about 90% of my sales come from some variation of my most popular poster.
3.i personally started taking commissions to do personalisations on certain posters. This does obviously require a certain skill level in art although this is mainly done through AI with my own personal touches added manually. This is also obviously more time consuming and isn’t suitable for everyone, but it generates a bit of extra income for me and is quite a popular choice, plus I can afford the time and effort it takes me.

I would say to anyone starting out that it’s definitely possible to earn some decent money from doing this and I am very grateful that I stumbled across toms TikTok account and decided to take the plunge to learn how to get started. It came at a pretty good time in my life where I had to take a step back from my regular job (as a nurse) because I was burnt out. Art used to be my main hobby growing up but I fell out of love with it. It’s nice to get back in it and I can genuinely say I really enjoy my little poster business.

This group has also helped me tonnes, I check it most days 🤣 looking forward to the Xmas period too although I reckon I’d have to pause custom orders around that time in case it gets overwhelming 😅 anyway thanks for reading if you got this far :) hoping for many more good months to come!

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