---
title: 'How to Start a Print-on-Demand Business on Etsy: Full A-to-Z Guide'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=BdDjp1s4CcM'
video_id: 'BdDjp1s4CcM'
date: 2026-07-14
duration_sec: 1756
---

# How to Start a Print-on-Demand Business on Etsy: Full A-to-Z Guide

> Source: [How to Start a Print-on-Demand Business on Etsy: Full A-to-Z Guide](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BdDjp1s4CcM)

## Summary

This video provides a complete A-to-Z guide for starting a print-on-demand business, covering niche research, design creation, product listing on Etsy, and social media promotion. The creator shares their personal experience of turning print-on-demand into a full-time income and offers practical strategies for finding profitable niches and creating appealing designs.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to Print-on-Demand** [00:00] — The creator started selling print-on-demand products 4 years ago, which grew from a few hundred dollars a month to a full-time job. Success requires finding products people want, making good designs, and uploading them effectively.
- **Choosing a Product Type** [01:08] — Printify is the manufacturing partner used, offering over 800 product types including mugs, candles, stickers, phone cases, and T-shirts. T-shirts are recommended as the best starting product.
- **Finding a Niche** [02:57] — Avoid broad niches like 'cat mom' or 'teacher' due to high competition. Instead, use research tools like Merch Informer to find trending products, or use the cross-niching guide to find untapped careers like pharmacy technician.
- **Creating a Design with KDP** [08:16] — KDP is a design platform optimized for print-on-demand. The creator uses a template for a nurse/doctor and tweaks it for a pharmacist, adding elements like medicine pills and changing text to 'I can't fix stupid but I can medicate it'.
- **Uploading to Printify** [13:59] — Select the shirt and manufacturing partner (SwiftPOD recommended for low cost and color options). Upload the design, adjust size to fill the canvas, and save the product.
- **Editing the Etsy Listing** [17:22] — After publishing on Printify, edit the listing on Etsy. Focus on the mockup photo as the first image, which is crucial for clicks. Use Placeit for high-quality mockups.
- **SEO Optimization** [21:26] — Use relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags. For a pharmacist shirt, include phrases like 'funny gift for pharmacist', 'pharmacy mom', and 'female pharmacy technician birthday gift'. Use all 13 tag slots.
- **Social Media Promotion** [24:05] — Create niche-specific social media accounts (e.g., for female pharmacists) to target the right audience. Use KDP to design Instagram posts and stories with the mockup photos.

### Conclusion

By following this step-by-step process—from niche research and design creation to listing optimization and social media promotion—anyone can start a successful print-on-demand business on Etsy. The key is to focus on specific, less competitive niches and invest effort in high-quality mockups and SEO.

## Transcript

4 years ago I started selling print on demand products online and really quickly that went from bringing in a couple hundred a month to becoming a fulltime job that I do from home now if you've ever heard anything about selling
hustle this is and it's really true a lot of people like to talk about how it's way too saturated nowadays but you really just need to know how to work the system find products that people actually want make good designs and be
able to upload them in a way that is going to help you get sales now in started I am actually going to walk you through the a toz process of actually
finding a niche in a product that is going to do well actually creating a design for that product uploading it to your manufacturing partner making mockups and even being able to promote that on social media and drive
additional traffic to that listing so I'm not going to waste any more time and you should be able to make and upload your very own products to sell on print on demand now the very first thing I am going to do is pick what type of product
that I want to sell now you've probably heard about selling mugs on print on definitely the most common products but there really are a lot of products that
some people don't even know are available to them to sell now the manufacturing partner that I use to sell my print on demand items is called middleman between you and a site like Etsy so you are going to be creating the
home printify is going to take care of all of that they are the white labeler that has the actual products they're going to store make ship them to all of
your customers so all you have to do is integrate them with your Etsy account now I have a full walkthrough tutorial right here of how to do that if you've never integrated them before but it's really easy and they work seamlessly
products and we're just going to go through these and kind of pick one that's going to be easy for us to create a really good bestselling design for so alternate products like you can sell a print onand candle or a mug stickers
phone cases blankets posters sweatshirts tank tops tapestries so really the sky Etsy or Amazon there a really good chance that printify has something they
have over 800 different product types so really you can find whatever you want but truly the product that has made me the most money in print on demand it's how I really got my start is by selling T-shirts so that is kind of the
quintessential print on demain product you should probably learn first so I'm going to take you through exactly how you do that so I'm going to go with this unisex Jersey short slave tea from Bella and canvas but before we can really get
started with uploading a product like this first we have to figure out what Niche we want to Target now this is the area that a lot of people get really tripped up in especially when they are new sellers it's super tempting to maybe
make designs for things you're really passionate about things that you like or apparel ideas so a lot of times I'll see new sellers making some cute designs but
then the niche is something like cat mom or something like a teacher now those sell really well on print on Dem man but but nowadays it's just way too competitive and saturated to go for something super broad like that so it's
really important that you do your due diligence in either researching a good Niche or finding something that has a lot less competition because it's a little bit more specific now I'm going to teach you a couple ways that you can
do this now the very first way that is really easy to find a bunch of niches is by using some kind of research tool now there's a bunch of them out on the
market but the one that I've really used almost since day one that's helped me really scale my business is called merch Informer now Merchant forer is basing all of its data off of the best selling apparel items on Amazon now since Amazon
is the biggest e-commerce platform typically when something is doing really well there it means that this is going to sell well on almost any platform so this is a great place to find good ideas now I am over on this side here and I
just went to this movers and shakers section now what this section is is basically it's showing you products that were uploaded maybe a while ago they weren't getting sales and then all of the sudden their sales really took off
do well or just this type of design is recently getting popular so we can take a lot of cues from this and find some really good Niche ideas so as you're
note of some things that are doing well now this one immediately catches my eye it's class of 2037 so what a lot of people are doing is they are getting
their kindergarteners a big shirt and then they are putting all of the years that they'll be in different grades and then taking a photo with their kid in could even think about doing for the next couple years so this one for 2037
is trending but pretty soon kids are going to be in the class of 2038 so you instead of exactly copying what this is I might do a little bit of a different
take on it so I might make a pink shirt design that has some like groovy font maybe a little bit like this one right here with some cutesy designs that would be perfect for maybe a little kindergarten girl so that's just one way
that I kind of use this tool but you can kind of keep scrolling and then find some really great niches this way another good Niche that is really taking cheesier and cheesier by the day but truly these are huge money makers people
love doing big Ginger reveals and so they a lot of times will buy shirts for every single person in attendance so this can be a huge Money Maker now again I wouldn't copy this exactly but you can make your own variation of something
like this but this just shows you that these types of designs are trending now the other way that is really easy to find great niches especially if you are trying to Target something on social media and maybe have a niche that has a
bit of a following that you could really count on making some sales in and that is by using my cross niching guide book now if you've never downloaded this before I actually have it linked Down Below in the description along with a
free Workshop that just kind of takes you through exactly how to use this but one way that I like to use it is in finding some really good Niche ideas particularly in the area of hobbies or careers so I'm going to scroll down to
that section so we have careers right here now there are some careers that are mentioned teachers that just has so many people going after it same thing with
something like a nurse there are so many nurse designs that do really well on a compete with that type of career but there are tons of other careers that are
kind of untapped gold mines because they're just maybe not one of the biggest 10 careers but people still really want to represent what they do for work people want to give gifts to people with these careers and jobs so
they can be great ones so something like this could be something like a veterinary technician or a respiratory therapist maybe a auto mechanic or a bus driver those are all great ones but the one that kind of caught my eye that I
think could be really good for what we are doing today is a pharmacy technician or a pharmacist so I think I'm going to go with actually a pharmacist because same amount of attention that someone like a nurse would get but I think that
they still would love similar really cute designs that kind of represent what they do so we are going to actually make a really easy quick design for a pharmacist so when it comes to making print on demand designs you are going to
need some kind of design Suite now there are a number of them out there but definitely my favorite and you guys if you've watched any of my other videos love about K is they're a super versatile design platform but they're
really optimized specifically for print on demand sellers so that means they have a lot of tools that other places don't and they have a library of thousands of different templates that are basically kind of plug inpl so you
then you have a ready to use design that just took a couple minutes to make so we're actually going to try and use one of their templates today now because
that they're necessarily going to have any t-shirt templates for a pharmacist specifically but I think that we could take one for maybe something like a nurse or a doctor and just tweak a few things to make it more specific to a
pharmacist so I'm going to go ahead and look up nurse and see what kind of ever making nurse designs this is kind of the go-to place but let's see here
this could work work really well so I'm going to go ahead and click on this one now I'm going to go ahead and change this something just so I know what it is now a lot of times when I have kind of a niche that I'm going after so in this
case it's a pharmacist sometimes I'll do some preliminary searches to see if there's any trending phrases or ideas that I can get from what's selling well on Amazon or Etsy and for something like this I would even take a look at some of
the phrases that are trending for nurses and doctors and see if I can kind of tweak that to work well for a pharmacist so I saw one that is trending that said something like I can't fix stupid but I can medicate it now anything that is
really snarky or like sassy does super well for print on demand I don't really do something like that for this pharmacist design so before we go ahead
and just change the text out here I'm actually going to get rid of some of these elements so I am just going to right click on this and ungroup going to get rid of this hat here now some of the other stuff we can kind of
leave because it could work for a pharmacist as well maybe I'll get rid of at the end add in some more elements that make it so this definitely looks like a phist shirt not just a nurse one so all I'm going to do is I'm just going
to start changing out the text here so this I'll say I can't fix so let's do that here I can't fix and then that is just a little bit too long so I'm going to go ahead and highlight it and then change the size to 50 here and then we
can go ahead and resize that and all of this we are going to kind of edit the font and the layout once we get everything filled in here but the first working with so this is going to stay stupid and then this I want it to say
but I can and then this to say medicate and we'll make that a little bit longer it's just a bit too long there I'm going to move these hearts and then I think I want it to be in this same kind of font here so I'm just going to go ahead and
copy this text box and then I'm going to go ahead and paste it and we'll just have this say it so now that we have kind of all of our text there we can start kind of playing around with the placement now I think the first thing I
want to do is this I can't fix I want it to also be that cute pink color too just so it is a little bit more cohesive and then for the transformation it's kind of distorted curved up right now but I can go ahead and click click this custom
distort again and I could even kind of bring this down here just kind of play don't have to do exactly that but that's just one way you can distort stuff and then same thing with this buty can right here I think I'm going to do kind of a
custom distort again here but kind of change that all right so it's already looking pretty good but what I want to do is definitely add some elements that are like specific to pharmacists so I'm going to go over here and I'm just going
to look up medicine so we could do something like that ooh I actually I change it to make sure everything looks cohesive this right here and I can even move like these Hearts around if I don't want that in the way and one way you can
make things always look cohesive is just by changing this to the same color that helps a ton let's see I kind of like this one that's like spilling out as well where could we put that maybe down here by the it if we move this a bit
that here again change it to the brown color let's see oh I kind of like this one where it's like a pill kind of opening up so let's make that smaller then I'm just going to adjust everything until I'm really happy with how it looks
and just download this now it's really easy to download things on KD I'm just going to click download here we want it to be a PNG but we don't want the units to be in inches we want that to be pixels and then I like to make sure my
design designs are at least 4500 pixels wide and at least like 5,000 pixels tall so this is going to work really well and it doesn't exactly matter if your pixels are right but you can also go ahead and change that to 300 DPI but as long as
then we're just going to go ahead and remove the background and download that to our computer all right so now the next thing we are going to do is we are going back over to printify to that shirt that we initially picked out now
if you had picked a different product type it would work the exact same way actually upload the design we need to pick which manufacturing partner we want to use so if you just click Start designing it's going to default to the
pry Choice which typically is a really good option but I like to sometimes pick my provider now the one I really like using is going to be swift pod just cuz they have so many colors look at that and then they have really low starting
cost for a lot of their items so it just makes sure that you can make enough just going to click Start designing and now the first thing that I want to do is stand out a little bit there's tons of black and white t-shirts out there but
sometimes can help it really stand out so this just classic pink one is what I'm going for and I'm not even going to sell that on white I think just the pink
looks the best but you definitely can add more colors if you want as well and then I'm going to go ahead and upload that new design so I'm just going to go computer as well now I typically like to make sure to take up as much space as
possible on the design so I'm going to stretch this out until it really fills up most of this canvas so that's looking really good and then we can go ahead and preview it and just make sure that everything is looking nice on here so
click save product now this is where we start to make some initial edits to our listing now because this is already integrated to my Etsy account it's going
to be making all these changes over on Etsy as well so we're going to do some initial editing here but then we're going to go over to our Etsy account and actually do some other adjustments there now I'm going to make my own mockups and
I'll show you exactly how to do that in just a second so I'm going to go ahead and just get rid of all these other mockup views and just have kind of the one standard one I like to keep that so people can get a really good idea of the
exact shade that this is going to be and the exact placement and then just so I know exactly what design this is I'm going to change part of the title and the things that I like to include in the title but I'm just going to go ahead and
description is autof filled in with a lot of the information about this product now when we go over to Etsy we are going to add more to the description
that's going to help with our SEO but I always like to keep this part of the about the product itself so never get rid of that now I'm going to go over to
the pricing section and this is the next thing that I am going to edit so I'm going to select all click edit the price and I'm just going to go ahead and change it to $24.99 now you always want to make sure you're calculating your
prices so that you're making enough profit and typically I will change the price on these items that are bigger sizes just cuz they are a little bit more costly so I might change that to something like 26.99 later all right and
then we're just going to go ahead and push publish all right now that we push publish we can see that over here on our printify account and once it's green and says published here that means it is all ready to be edited on Etsy so I'm going
to head over to my linked Etsy account all right so we can see that right here in my active listings now what I'm going to to do is I'm going to click this gear icon and just click edit now before we worry about the title The keywords all
thinking about is the mockup photo now most of the time when people look up an pharmacist gift they are not reading the title they're not clicking on it and
caring about is the first little photo that is going to show up on on the page when they're scrolling and usually that is pretty tiny so that is really
valuable real estate and we want to make the best first impression because if our initial kind of photo doesn't look very good we are probably not going to get that click so that means we're not going to get people to actually make a sale so
if you really take nothing else from this video one of the things you should effort putting together mockups now it doesn't really have to be tricky and I'm going to head over there right now now I have a account on place it which if
you've never heard of place it before they do a lot more than just mockups you can actually make designs here you can make video mockups you can make logos all sorts of different things you can do but what I really like is their mockups
so I'm going to go over here to the apparel and then t-shirt mockups and then a lot of times what I like to do is I'm going to store by just a woman lot of times I like to sort by popular because these are just the mockups that
different mockups for this so I think the first one I'm going to do is Pur right here and then I'm going to click design and then if you already have used so I'm going to go here in my recently uploaded and then click on that design
now right here we can kind of see a live preview so I'm just going to adjust this until I'm happy with how it looks make it a little bit smaller small all right thing we're going to do is change that shirt color so I'm going to change it to
the pink that looks really similar to that one on printify and once we're happy with it we're going to go ahead and click download now once it's ready we can go ahead and click to download the image as it is so I'm going to do
that because later on when we are making some social media images we are going to use ones that are more landscape like this but for Etsy you're going to want to actually crop it so I'm going to click this crop icon right here all
is adjust the size so it's optimized for an Etsy thumbnail so that's going to be 2700 pixels by 2025 and then I'm just going to zoom in on this until it fills
first get started is they always try to show the model's face but I have found in most other top print on demand sellers also know that you don't really need to show the face of the model it's all about the actual product so once
back over to the mockups and we're just going to make one more mockup that we can use later for social media as well all right I really like her too so I'm going to go ahead and click on her and just put the exact same image on there
so since I just used it it's actually going to default to that same design so all I have to do is change the color to that pink and then download this I'm going to click here to download now we're going to head back over to our
account so we can start editing that listing now all we're going to do is click here to add photos so I'm going to go ahead and add that new mockup photo the primary image and then keep this one as the second image now if you had
multiple different colors you could keep all of those here as well but for this video I'm just doing that initial one and really the first photo is the most important it's what people are going to see so if you're going to put effort in
make sure it's that first photo and you can kind of put a little bit less effort into those other ones for the listing now let's go ahead and start working on our SEO for this so what I'm going to do is think about things that people might
be searching when they are looking for a gift or a shirt for a pharmacist so the first one besides just the title here is I might put some funny gift for pharmacist and then I like to have the text that's actually on the design there
but then I think of other things so like we could do Pharmacy mom and and then like female pharmacy technician birthday gift and then this shirt could also work for maybe a nurse or like a Medtech or something too so I might actually if I
we're initially targeting pharmacists so I could do for Medtech nurse all right so we used about just all of our characters which I highly suggest you do
don't just use those first few this is really valuable real estate and then I'm this here but I'm going to put about two sentences that have to do with the niche or the SEO that I'm trying to Target so I said the best gift for pharmacist mom
grandma Aunt sister kind of trying to think of those words that someone might right and once I'm happy with that we are going to go down here now I already adjusted the pricing on printify and then we can add some tags here now
typically I like to just add the keywords that I think people are most searching for for something like this so we could do something like Pharmacy shirt and female pharmacis and pharmacy tech so I'm going
to add those and you are definitely going to want to use all 13 but for the default your shipping right here but if you do want to offer free shipping or a make sure to have my policy as no returns or exchanges and then if you are
doing Etsy ads you can enroll it here but if you don't want to you would turn click that here now for the renewal options neither one is really a bad choice you can do automatic renewal or manual but a lot of times I'm going to
put manual renewal because if this hasn't sold in a few months I kind of want to evaluate that and see maybe what changes I could make before I pay to actually list it again so once all those settings are done we have our mockup
those changes all right so now we can see that it changed our photo right here and that is looking perfect so now people can find that when they search
thing that can help really Drive traffic to any of your listings especially when you are making new ones and that is by using social media now I have an entire
video about my process to get a lot of traffic through the social media platform at Instagram so I will link that right here and that's going to show you more of the logistics of how to kind of set up an Instagram account if you do
want to use this strategy but the thing that you need to think about when you are maybe wanting to use social media to promote some of your listings is thinking about the audience that you're targeting so I really don't suggest
having just a Facebook page or an Instagram account that's just a generic print on demand store I think it's really valuable if you can pinpoint an audience and make a really Niche specific Instagram page or Facebook page
just for them so like for this product if I had a page that was all just for pharmacists or even more specifically female pharmacists then that is going to following it because it's not just a random hodgepodge of a bunch of
different niches so I am going to be making some social media posts that would be optimized for an account that is really tailored to just pharmacists so I'm actually going to head back over to KD and show you how I would do this
all right so KD actually has has a bunch of really cool social posts already made but one thing that is really cool is they just introduced kind of a multiple artboard feature that you can work on a bunch of different similar things all at
the same time in fact I have a recent video where I show how to do this for multiple designs at once but you can use this for multiple social media posts as well so I think I'm going to use this kind of Instagram template for the posts
I'm going to make for this pharmacist new design that I created so you really template and then the portrait photo for my Instagram so the first thing I'm
going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and upload those two mockup photos that we created so I'm just going to go over here to uploads and then click of those photos right there and then I am going to drag and drop these new ones
for this one all right and I want to use some of the colors that are in this for this design here so I think I'm going to do the background kind of this dark pink
click this background I'm going to go to the layers and then go to right here where it says Instagram portrait and for the new drop I'm going to do the text
this pink color here and then this one I am going to go ahead and change that to that light pink color and then same with all of this I'm going to change that to that light pink color All In at once and I don't really love this font that says
something maybe more bubbly would be really cute okay that's looking good here so I'm just going to go ahead and stretch that out a little bit and then make it smaller and then right here is where I would probably put my name so
rid of these okay so that is looking cute and then I'm going to do the exact same thing here for this story one I'm going to get rid of those change this to that same font color so it looks cohesive I'm going to change this text
color and maybe I'll do a different kind of text for the story like let's try this one it looks cute and change the color of all this and I might even get rid of some of this extra stuff for my story and just have this down here but
I'm going to go ahead and add these photos but I'm going to actually crop them more like the size of the thumbnail we created so that looks good and I'm going to do the exact same thing with this one here just go ahead and crop bit
right around the same area and then stretch that out this one I might need to crop a little bit more all right that is looking good now all we have to do to actually download these is we're going to go down to the downloads and then you
can download all the artboards at the same time but I'm only going to download those two right there and click download and then now those would be actually ready to use on your Instagram account on your Facebook if you ever have wanted
to try running ads this is a perfect template to kind of create an ad and no just kind of what things people are including on this even if you created an idea of what other people are putting on similar stories on similar posts on
similar ads now I hope that helped you guys know exactly how you can come up printify to sell on Etsy and then if you want even make some marketing materials
for that now I'll have all of the resources I used linked down below as checking all of those out and if you haven't signed up for it yet I do highly
suggest signing up for my Niche research Workshop it's totally free it's just going to help you come up with a lot of ideas super easily so I'll link that see you in my next video