Building Facebook Pages for T-Shirts Sales: Day 9

As I went back to study up on marketing Teespring and Teechip T-shirts to help me reach my goal of making $10,000 in my spare time, I realized that one way to better your chances of success with T-shirts is to have a large and active Facebook fan page on a topic. This will allow you to post different T-shirt designs to it on a regular basis. This makes even more sense if you are going to primarily do your advertising for the T-shirts through Facebook ads.

When you put together a Facebook ad, you have to choose a Facebook page to sponsor the ad. This means if you don’t have one which accurately reflects the T-shirt design you want to promote, you have to create a new one. When I created the gluten free T-shirt, I didn’t have a page that fit well, so I created a Gluten Free Families Facebook page. When I made the Hello Knitty T-shirt, I created a Hello Kitty Fanatics Facebook page.

As part of the Facebook ads, there is a button on the advertisement to “like” the page sponsoring the ad in the top right corner:

While the gluten free page only received a few likes, the Hello Kitty page received 19 likes. My guess, and what I am hoping to show during this challenge, is that in addition to selling T-shirts, you can also begin to build communities where you can sell other T-shirts down the line. This process will likely take more time than I have for this challenge, but for those who are selling, this is a good to keep in mind. If you find a T-shirt design which sells, there’s a good chance you will have the opportunity to build a thriving Facebook page without spending any money to do it, since the T-shirt sales are covering the costs. On the other side of the coin, even if your T-shirt fails, you still will gain a small benefit for the money you spent by helping to build the fan page.

I think this would actually have been the best way to begin with T-shirts. As the Hello Knitty campaign showed, pitching to a community which already has a high interest in the topic makes it a lot easier to sell. If you create the pages about themes you’re already interested in, they should be easy and enjoyable to maintain while creating a community you can sell to down the road.

One of the things that I have started doing is filling in the new pages I create with some content so they don’t look like they were just created. An convenient tool to do this with is called Instapost (use access code “teespy” to get it for free). This quickly pulls up a popular image on whatever topic you input so you don’t have to spend a lot of time researching. If you want three or four great images, just hit the “generate post” button a few times. This will make the new fan page look more active to attract even more people to like it.