Second Attempt to Make Money with T-shirts: Day 7

At the same time I came out with the Gluten Free T-shirt idea as part of my attempt to earn $10,000 in my spare time using the T-shirt platforms Teechip and Teespring, I also came up with a T-shirt for stand up paddleboarders. I’m not sure exactly how I got to paddleboarding (I was searching all kinds of ideas and made my way to surfing, which eventually led me to paddleboarding), but I ended up seeing the quote, “Paddleboarders are stand up people.”

I decided to make it gender specific with the idea if it work with men, I could easily create another one specifically for women. I had Joseph M (another graphic design artists I hired off of Craigslist – his site and Facebook page) create the following “I’m a stand up type of a guy” T-shirt:

After uploading the design to Teechip, I again had high hopes the T-shirt would do well. I placed an ad up on Facebook with a $10.00 budget with the hope I could get my first sale(s). Once again, I was disappointed. These are the stats I saw in the morning:

The click through rate was far too low (under 1%) and the cost per click far too high ($0.48) for me to feel this would be a success. I stopped the campaign after only spending $1.90. I probably should have let it go a bit longer, but those stats were so much lower than the gluten free T-shirt stats, which I also stopped, that I couldn’t justify continuing it.

One main failure with this campaign was choosing a topic which I wasn’t extremely knowledgeable about. I’ve been paddleboarding before, but only a few times. I think taking chances on new areas like this makes sense, but it makes sense when I have a better marketing foundation with which to promote it. What I really should have done is spent some time talking to some friends who paddleboard a lot more than I do to get their opinion of what would have made a good T-shirt. Again, this isn’t to say this wouldn’t have worked, I think I simply jumped the gun in picking a topic I wasn’t as familiar with as I should have been.

What I did learn from the first two campaigns is I’m paying too much for each click with Facebook ads at the moment. I need to figure out a way to decrease this amount. I would ideally like to get clicks to a maximum of $0.10 a click, and preferably much lower. I think this will be the sweet spot to get 2 or more T-shirt sales for $10.

The failure to make any sales on my second attempt puts me further into the negative.

Amount spent: $11.90 ($1.90 ad buy and $10 T-shirt design)
Amount made: $0.00

Current total: -$26.70