Trying Redbubble
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Now I have a tendency to try too many things at once so I have to really focus myself this time. The idea of passive income is, of course, the most attractive to me. Passive income meaning that you put in the work once and then it continually makes money for you. Ideas along this line include investing in stocks or real estate, writing a book or and e-book, advertising on your car (yes, that’s a thing), and the one that caught my eye was e-commerce. More specifically, creating designs for print on demand services for stickers, t-shirts and home items. In comes RedBubble.
I’ve been in a real slump in being focused enough to write blog posts. My OCD and ADD takes over and I think about 50 different topics to write about. But when it comes time to actually write the post I have nothing to say.
Pinterest is my biggest distraction. Once I get on there and start searching for ideas, I fall into this rabbit hole of ideas, then, memes, then cat videos, and so on. So while I was digging in the rabbit hole, I noticed a few posts about different income streams. And that piqued my interest.
What to do about it.
My daughter had started her own Redbubble store a few months ago and didn’t really put much work into it. I think she only has 9 designs available but she has made a few sales. Her designs are digital drawings of popular characters from movies and tv. They took some time to design but the look great. (Check them out here)
I personally am somewhat artistic, but my creative juices have long run dry. I’ve been slowly working on exercising that part of my brain again through different outlets like scrapbooking and drawing. It has proven difficult, but I feel like my creativeness is expanding.
Once I did a little bit of research about Redbubble and designs that are popular and sell as either shirts or stickers, I realized that many times, not a lot of artistic ability is required. Creativity on the other hand really does help a lot.
Resources to help
But there are great apps out there to help with the design process. YouTube is a great resource to find people who have been successful at e-commerce and you can get some fantastic ideas on how to start. One of the best apps for design is called Canva. It has a free option that you can use to get your initial designs up and running, but then the Pro edition is vital for using the extras to make your design professional looking.
What should I make?
Anyway, back to RedBubble. I noticed that a large percentage of the designs available are mostly word based. Funny sayings, holidays like Christmas or Birthdays, and even simple quotes. Some of them have really fancy fonts and some are just simple text. With that in mind I decided to give it a try myself.
So far I have 36 designs and they range from movies quotes, to photography, ➡➡➡
to some digital art that I’ve been dabbling in. I try to create things that I love and would personally buy, but I also try to include items that I think might be trending in the near future.
For example, today is March 1, and I just created a design for Cinco de Mayo. It’s actually really cute and I wouldn’t mind having it on a pillow or a mug. So in face I still stuck to the idea that it should be something that I would buy for myself.
Passive Income
The great thing about Redbubble is that once you upload your design and set all the products and pricing parameters, your work is done. Redbubble is a huge site that does all of it’s own marketing and often appears at the top of google searches. As long as you can tag your products with relevant words and phrases, and focus on certain niches that don’t have too much competition, you should get noticed.
I’ve had my shop open since Feb 19th, so it’s only been about 10 days and although I haven’t received any sales yet, my items have been “favorited” 17 times. I plan on adding at least 2 new designs every day or an average of 50-60 per month. I figure that the more options I have available, the bigger the chance of getting some traffic and hopefully some sales.
I’ll check back in about a month* to let you know how it’s going. Fingers crossed.
Check out my shop here* and let me know what your favourite design is or if you have any design ideas that I could include.
*Updated April 15/21 – I have left Redbubble to try selling on my own site. Check out why here.
