How I Made $3616 with Zero Ads Spend Using POD Sites Printful on Shopify within 2 Months

Hi everyone, in this blog post. I want to share my personal experiences making $3616 revenue organically using Printful on Shopify within 2 months. By using this strategy, I was able to earn $3616 in sales revenue without having to spend any money on ads.

Have you ever asking this question yourself. Is there a way to make sales from Shopify dropshipping without spending money on Facebook ads or Google ads upfront?

The answer is YES!!

If you’re struggling to make money on your Shopify dropshipping journey. This blog post can give you some different views that you can implement to make money without paying for expensive Facebook ads or Google ads.

This method is a friendly beginner for anyone who just wants to start Shopify dropshipping. I myself have tested it, and it works to make money. There is no risk of losing money on ads since this method requires you to spend time and energy to execute.

You may be curious about what kind of strategies I am using to earn those sales within two months with zero ads.

Let me give you some spoilers. I didn’t use Google SEO or growing Instagram account organically to drive sales. Those two strategies will require a long time before you can start to monetize.

Is it also not about growing the Youtube channel and sell the merch, also not about growing your Pinterest account to get sales. The strategy that I will share with you even can drive free traffic faster.

So, what strategy that am I using?

It was a collaboration strategy with an independent artist. In order to execute this strategy, you will need Shopify with Printful app.

I collaborate with a creative artist who creates beautiful or unique art on Instagram. The idea is we as Shopify store owners providing them offer to sell POD merch from Printful using their artwork. Then, the artist will promote the merch to their audiences to drive free traffic and sales.

Hence, you will need to use Shopify with Printful app. The great thing about my strategies was that I even didn’t make any good design or pay a freelancer to create merch design and free traffic. Collaborating with an artist allows me to leverage the artist’s creative artwork design and sell that design in the form of print on demand merch to the artist’s followers.

What is POD Print On Demand?

Print On Demand is a printing activity on the single merch when the order is received. The Print on Demand allows you to print on a single item without having a minimum print requirement. Hence, when selling Print On Demand merch, your design will be printed when the order is received. In this case, we will use Printful as a POD company.

Printful Shopify App

Before we jump into the strategy part, if you haven’t heard about Printful. It’s a print-on-demand company that offers dropshipping services to sell custom print products such as T-shirts, hoodies, beanies, dad hats, phone cases, stickers, pillowcases, tote bags, etc.

Printful also provides custom branding on your package and on the merch, so you can brand your Print On Demand Shopify store to enhance the customer experience when you received the products. It can help to boost your retention rate.

How about Printful Shopify Shipping Time?

When you use Printful as POD sites to fulfill your dropship order, you can fulfill the order from the United States, Japan, Europe, or Australia. Hence, you don’t have to worry about long shipping time from China anymore.

How come the artist wants to collaborate with me?

Okay, let’s back to the main topic. You have known that we will collaborate with the artist. The question comes to your mind, how come the artist wants to collaborate with us if they already have their store?

Even some artists already have their merch store selling their artwork on Redbubble, Society6, and Teepublic. It doesn’t mean the opportunity is closed to collaborate with them because Redbubble, Society6, and Teepublic don’t have a beanie.

It means we can offer beanie collaboration to those artists to sell it to their raving fans.

You can offer a beanie from Printful for collaboration which can’t be found on Redbubble. You may be asking does it means I can only offering a beanie to collaborate with the artist?  In my case, I can collaborate with the artist with a mix of products like t-shirts, hoodies, beanies, socks, flip flops, etc. Here see the screenshot below of my Printful order.

Note: I hide the design name to protect my dropshipping store.

How come it’s possible? It’s simply because several artists still don’t know how to monetize their artwork yet. They don’t know about Shopify and Printful. Or even they don’t have time to learn that stuff due to their busy schedule.

In other cases, I have also collaborated with an artist that is selling their merch on Teespring, but I could still collaborate with the artist by offering other merch options that the artist hasn’t listed yet.

On the other hand, you will find several artists who haven’t monetize their work yet to their audiences. They don’t have time to learn about Shopify and Printful or even don’t know about it. This will be a great opportunity for you!

The Step by Step Collaboration Strategy

Now, let’s back to the main topic. Here I will break down the step-by-step collaboration strategy that you can follow to make your first free Shopify sales using this strategy.

STEP1: Start your Shopify store

The first step is creating your Shopify store and design it to look professional. Hence, the artist will see a personalized store focusing only on selling creative merch from talented artists.

Let’s take a look at other Shopify stores focusing on selling merchants by collaborating with artists. You can see how the Senpai Market website looks personalized for recruiting the artist.

You can create even a simple website but looks similar to Senpai Market. Don’t be overwhelmed with the User Interface of the Senpai Market site. When you just started, you just need to focus on your about us section, banner on the home page, and collection page. It’s actually enough to entice the artist to trust your site.

Start your Shopify store (14-day free trial) and design your website to be looked good in the eye of the artists,

STEP 2: Connect Printful to Shopify

After you have started your Shopify store, the second step will be installing the Printful app to your Shopify store.

IF you have installed Printful to your Shopify store, it will automatically sync to your Shopify store when you add a new product from Printful. Hence, when a customer places an order on your Shopify store. Printful will automatically fulfill it.

STEP 3: Find Independent Artist on Instagram to Collaborate

You can find an artist by jumping into Instagram. You can start seeing the competitor website, which collaborated with the artist, such as Senpai Market, and then finding the other artists using the suggested section on the artist’s Instagram profile. Let’s see an example of an Instagram artist account @lovepieces7. You can find other artists by pressing the small arrow button next to the follow button, as shown in the picture below.

Finding the other artist will become easier once you have found one artist account.

STEP 4: Crop Good Design and Create Mockup

The next step is to choose the good design from the artist’s Instagram post that you want to crop and create a mockup from it. Let’s see for the Instagram account @lovepieces7 post below. We will crop the two couple character that wearing war uniforms with a weapon

If you don’t have a snipping tool to crop the image, you can download the Instagram post picture first with downloadgram. And then, you will need to remove the background, whether using Photoshop or Vectorizer.io.

The PNG file you have generated containing the two characters will be uploaded on the Printful mockup generator to generate the merch mockup. Let’s say we will generate a t-shirt mockup using that crop design.

STEP 5: Send Collaboration Email to Artist and Make A Deal

The mockup file which already generated will be used to grab the artist’s attention on your pitching email. You will need to send email as many as you can to increase the probability of getting a deal with the artist. It’s about the number of games.

You don’t need to analyze the Instagram account engagement, just contact the artists directly through their email. If the artists don’t share their email, you can reach them through Instagram DM.

When the artists open your invitation email to collab, the artists will be interested in seeing their artwork put in the merch. It brings excitement for the artists.

Once the artist interested in your offer, you will need to explain how the collaboration work. The idea is you provide them store set up and merch while the artist provides the design and promotes the merch to their audiences.

You will need to explain the revenue sharing model you want to pursue, whether using the % sales commission or flat rate commission. You can use Shopify apps such as Affiliatly, which provide a 90-day free trial. It can help the artist track the visitors and sales through their affiliate link. I use Affiliatly to give information to the artist on how many visitors and sales they have gained. It’s helped me a lot since Affiliatly provides a 90-day free trial.

Another alternative if you don’t want to use an affiliate tracking app to keep your cost low. You can manually calculate how many items are sold by providing the screenshot of your Shopify order to the artist through email as proof.

It doesn’t mean that if you don’t use an affiliate tracking app, you can’t entice the artist to collaborate with you. Other top Shopify store, such as KROMA, don’t use any affiliate tracking app as we can see that the artist’s collection page doesn’t have any referral code on the URL collection page.

You can check on the artist Instagram page @meyoco bio link. There is a link to the “KROMA Phone Case Collaboration.” When you click that, it will divert you directly to the Meyoco collection page without having any affiliate tracking.

In my case, I will create a specific collection page for each artist who collaborates with me so that the artist will send all the traffic to their collection page.

You will request the artist the design choice that they want to put on the merch. Once you got the final design from the artist and uploaded the product on the collection page. Then, the most exciting part comes. It’s time to promote the merch!

Step 6: Promote merch and CHA-CHING!

The last step will be asking the artist when the merch will be announced. The artist will create an Instagram post, stories highlight, and put it on their bio link for the collaboration merch. Let’s take a look at another Shopify store Citycaps which only focusing on selling dad hats and beanies by collaborating with the artist.

Well done, you have got the big picture of how this strategy work by collaborating with the artist. If you’re interested to learn more in detail. I have a free 4-day email free course on how I generated that amount of revenue by collaborating with artists from Youtube. I will share how I found the artist on Instagram and Youtube, negotiating with the artist, and pitching them with my offer.

In my experiences, I got better results by collaborating with artists from Youtube since the video format content can be discovered on the Youtube search engine and can keep bringing longer traffic to your Shopify store.

If you want to learn more in deep detail all the best strategies, step-by-step guide, tips, and tricks base on my experience. I highly recommend you to grab this super affordable ebook “Untapped FREE Traffic Method Shopify Dropshipping POD Collaboration with Artists“.

>> Grab Your Copy Today! <<

In the ebook, I share how my hybrid Shopify Dropshipping store selling AliExpress and POD products can gain artists’ trust. I also share valuable lessons learned from my past mistake so you can avoid those mistakes and recruit more artists. The BONUS section of the ebook will give you 30 list of artists each on Instagram and Youtube. Also, EXTRA BONUS 71 lists different artist categories to expand your recruitment. You will have better ideas about what kind of artist you can approach.

In Summary

This strategy will be suitable for you if you don’t have any budget to spend on expensive Facebook ads and Google ads. You can kickstart your initial capital by earning organic sales by using this method. You can even scale this strategy by recruiting more artists.

It will be great if the artists willing to put the merch collaboration link on every new video they uploaded on their Youtube channel. That will be the greatest traffic exposure to your Shopify store and bring more sales. If you want to start using this method, I highly recommend you start your Shopify store and executing this strategy. Let me know if you have any question in your mind.

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Another Related Article:
–How I made $1676 using Shopify and Printful Collaboration with Artist Using Affiliate Marketing