 Hello everybody! Welcome to Friday! Man, I missed you guys. I haven't been around lately. I've been a little busy, but we're getting back on schedule now. What a beautiful day we're having here in Texas. It's going to be a nice, I think, 104 degrees today. And Monday is going to be like 106, so we're staying warm. I will tell you that. That's not a problem. I want to welcome everybody here, and I want to invite you to become part of the conversation. And that means that you put your comments in that chat section there. Ask me questions, anything you want. Tell me where you're at. I don't want to tell me what your favorite food is. I don't care. Say something in that chat section. And speaking of favorite food, and this is a totally off subject, but a baked potato is like one of the best things in the world if it's done right. And I have another channel, and it's called Restaurant Quality Recipes, and there's going to be a video going up there in a few days. And it's how to make a perfect baked potato, so make sure you check that out. But right now, we're going to talk about making money. We're going to talk about print-on-demand. But more importantly, we're going to talk about the things that people screw up on print-on-demand. The thing that costs money. The thing that prevents them from making money. And I've got a whole list of them. I want to share them with you guys today. Don't forget to subscribe. Hit that subscribe button. Turn it from red to gray. And don't forget to ring the bell. That's a lot of rings, isn't it? Ring the bell, which means turn on all your bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. Important stuff. Man, we're going to have a good time today. We really are. We don't have much time. We're only going to have probably less than 30 minutes. But in that 30 minutes, you're going to get a lot of good content. I can promise you that because I've been doing a lot of research and I've done print-on-demand. So I want to share with you guys all the stuff that screws people up. I want to look at the common mistakes that beginners make when starting print-on-demand. Better yet, I'm going to put together an actionable step-by-step guide today to help you avoid making those mistakes altogether. So you don't have to go through the pain. I mean, why go through the pain if somebody else already did it? Let them go through the pain. All right. So number one, and you're welcome, like I said, during all of this session to ask any questions you want. It could be on this topic. It could be on something else. It could be, I don't care where I'm going for lunch today, which I haven't quite decided yet. We're kind of working on that. If you don't know and you haven't been around me for a while, every Friday, my wife and I go to lunch. We try to pick a different spot. Fortunately, we live here in Austin area, we're north of Austin, and there's thousands of restaurants. So I think we're good there. All right, but let's get back to the subject matter. First things first, guys, if you're going to do print-on-demand, do extensive research. This is going to save you so much time and money. I mean, I see so many people go out there and do stuff. They didn't do any research and they're just wasting their money. Building a profitable store is going to take you time. Between actually working on your creative skills and marketing strategies and all that, this industry is not for everybody. And I'm going to say that right up front. This is not for everybody. Luckily, we have so much information out there now on starting print-on-demand type stores. And it starts everywhere from the basics to the advanced, but this video today is going to help you get through all of those mistakes. So do some research. The next thing I'm going to tell you is pick a specific niche. You know, everybody thinks, gosh, if I had all kinds of products that fit all kinds of people that I'll make more money. No, you will not because you won't stand out. Nobody's going to go to your store and buy anything. The e-commerce industry is very saturated. That doesn't mean you can't make money, but you've got to stand out. That's why it's so important to base your store or whatever you're doing on a particular niche. With that said, niche marketing can sometimes be easier because you can tailor it to the message to a specific audience. So it's really important that you pick a niche. Like, I've got a few. This channel here is how to start running Grow Online Businesses, but I also have one that's survival food. It's all about survival. So pick a niche and stick with it. Learn an art program. This is really important. I know you say, well, I don't want to do that. I'm not good at that. Do it anyhow. Before you get ready to launch your online store, be sure to learn the ins and outs of the art program you intend to use before you invest money into this idea. There are plenty of programs that you can use. Some are a bit pricey, but others are free. You can use one like GIMP. It's a free one, G-I-M-P. You can search that one that you can use to get started. As you continue to develop your skills, you can look into the more comprehensive programs such as Photoshop or Illustrator, stuff like that. So check those out. You want to prepare for the holidays. Holidays is a huge marketing opportunity. It's never too early to start preparing for the holiday season. You know what I know. You go into stores now, and it's like in the middle of summertime, and they've got, I don't know, Halloween stuff out or Thanksgiving stuff out. They start soon because they know they can sell more that way. November and December are critical months for the gift industry. Preparing for the holidays a couple months prior will most certainly not have the same effect as someone who starts preparing six months in advance. Even that may be too late. I really can't stress the importance of planning early for major holidays. And don't forget to pick out the ones like Black Friday's a big one, Cyber Monday's a good one. You know, look at some holiday guides. Look at some national holidays and see what they are and gear a lot of your marketing and your advertising towards that. And guys, don't forget, use this chat box. Say hello. I want to talk to you. I know you sit there. I know you're listening. And I'm talking to you, okay? Make sure you say something in that chat box. The more you communicate, the more you participate, the more you're going to bank. That's how it works. The next thing I'm going to tell you is provide great customer service. And it's funny the other day, you know, I always go with my wife to Chick-fil-A. She loves Chick-fil-A. That's one of her favorite restaurants. And I got to tell you, they're so organized. I mean, you go up to a Chick-fil-A first off and there's so many cars around the building now. Every since the world illness, you know, they've just boomed. And the thing about Chick-fil-A is they're consistent. They have a good product. Their customer service is amazing. And that's what I want to talk about. And that's providing great customer service. But anything you want there, they take care of you. They're very polite to you. I went into a chicken place the other day and I'll call it out. It was called Zaxby's. And I just wanted to get some chicken. Okay, that's all I wanted. I think I got some wings or something like that. And I told them I wanted to get the Zaxby sauce. Not a problem. I could get the Zaxby sauce. You're allowed to have a sauce with it. And so I wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. Excuse me. First one out. And this lady comes out and she says, it's going to be another four minutes. And I was already waiting like 18, 20 minutes. Another four minutes. Okay, no problem. Alicia, you let me know. I thank you for that. So my food finally comes out and I wanted it for dine in and they packaged it to go. So that was a little irritating, but anyhow, I grabbed it and I said, is the Zaxby sauce in there? She says, no, we put ranch in there. I said, well, I wanted to get Zaxby sauce. She says, well, that'll be 39 cents more. Now I knew that they had screwed up. I knew they put the wrong sauce in there. And I just looked at her and I said, and she looked at me and says, I don't make the rules. I thought, wow, how is that to talk to a customer? And then I think back at Chick-fil-A and Chick-fil-A will give you all the sauces you want. They don't charge you 39 cents. And I was just so frustrated. I looked at her and I said, just forget it. Forget it. It was a little bit of the food. It wasn't very good. The sauce I did get, the ranch was not very good. And I can tell you something. I will never, ever, ever go back to that restaurant because of the terrible customer service. Because they're going to charge me for a sauce, which they screwed up and they gave me the wrong one. And I didn't want to explain all that to the lady. So I just left. Guys, you've got to have good customer service. You've got to take care of your customers. At Survival K Food, if there's a problem, we always take care of the customer. We always err on the side of generosity. And you know what? That's kept us in business for 12 years now. Very importantly, take care of the customer. The next thing I'm going to tell you is set clear expectations. Print on demand products usually take longer to be delivered in comparison to Amazon. Amazon, I can buy something in like 10 minutes and set my doors. That's crazy. But when the products are shipped, it generally is going to take longer and the customer needs to know about that with print on demand. It's different. Be transparent. Tell them, say, this is a custom item, guys. You're not going to get this tomorrow. It may be two weeks or three weeks or whatever it is. But if you let them know upfront, you're fine. And a lot of people will say, well, I don't want to let them know upfront. If I tell them it's going to be two weeks or three weeks, they're not going to buy from me. Ah, but here's the important thing. Those people that won't buy from you would cancel the order if they ordered from you and thought you were going to get it in a couple of days and they didn't. So you haven't gained anything. All you've done is upset some people. So don't do that. Next thing I'm going to tell you is invest in marketing. Guys, guys, guys, I know you want to have, like, a website and you want to SEO it and you want to get all this free traffic and never spend money, but it's unrealistic in today's market. There's too many people competing with you. What kind of relationship do you have with marketing? If you don't know marketing, go through my channels and watch some more videos on marketing. I've got hundreds and hundreds of them. I've got like 1,300 videos on this channel, guys. Marketing is too often looked at as a one-time expense and it's not. It's consistently doing marketing and then when you find something that works, it's going to die out after a while. You've got to try something else. Marketing is a must spend. You've got to do some marketing. You've got to spend money on this. Now, with that being said, I'm a real proponent of learn everything, learn everything. However, I will say this, you want to outsource your weaknesses. Entrepreneurs wear a lot of hats and I get that. And it's very tempting to be responsible for everything that comes with owning a business. However, when you outsource, many positive things happen. For example, you'll have time to create again. You'll have time to come up with new ideas. Next thing I'll tell you is own up to your mistakes. You will most likely make mistakes. I know I do every single day. I've been doing this for over a decade. And there's more things to screw up than you can possibly believe. No one in the history of entrepreneurship has made it to the top without some major setbacks. Everybody does. Don't be afraid of those. You know, I was talking to my wife in the kitchen last night and I was talking about all the times I could have quit up to this point. All the things that went wrong. All the things that got screwed up. All the times we were almost out of money. And a lot of people would have quit. They would have got a job. I didn't do that. Okay. Because I just won't quit. Let your customers know if you're in the wrong. If you made a mistake, we've done that before. Work as fast as you can to fix problems. If the problem is more substantial, keep your customers updated until it's resolved. Like right now we have some shortages on some of our proteins at our survival food company. And we send them emails. We say, hey, this thing is not going to be ready in time. If you want, we can switch it out with this other item. I can give you a coupon. I can refund your money. I can do whatever it takes to make you happy. That's what we want to do. Here's the next thing I'm going to tell you because we're starting another brand too real soon. Get familiar with copyrights and trademarks. Guys, this is so important. Do not current designs that you found on Google without asking for permission to do so. And it's a whole lot better just to create your own. It is illegal and it can get you into trouble with the law. You aren't allowed to use any brand slogans and logos to create spinoff designs. Custom cat doesn't assume liability. Okay. So that's one of the sites that I use. Custom cat. They don't assume it. And a lot of these other sites don't assume it either. Consulting a copyright attorney is always the best action if you have questions about certain products. That's something you want to do. And make sure you get your stuff trademarked. There's actually a government site you can go to and put in any name you want. You can find the trademarks and see if somebody else has already done that. Understand art files. Next thing I want to tell you, understand art files. It's super important that you do this. We're okay on time. We're doing great on time. And don't forget, ask questions. Say hello. Tell me where you're at. Use that chat box. Also, you guys who are not watching this live, use the comments section below. Okay. Put your questions in there. Put your comments in there. All right. So one way to avoid submitting low resolution files is to review your design guidelines properly. Ask for help if there's anything that needs to be clarified. Learn how to do prints that have the wow factor. Okay. You can do this on some of the sites. They had the guidelines. They have all the specifics. Make sure you follow those guys. Next thing I'm going to tell you is identify your target audience. This has to be done in any kind of business, but especially for print on demand. Failing to identify your target audience can result in your business never taking off. Nobody ever buying anything from you. To properly understand your customers once you must conduct research and align your brand with their needs. You've got to understand who you're selling to guys. It only makes sense. Oh, my next one. My next one I got on my list is bad grammar. Where are you see? Huh. I don't know what you mean. They're fancy emperors. What is where are you see? Where can we sell our POD products? Oh my gosh. You can sell them anywhere. I would recommend, and let me put some of these comments up there. And I appreciate you put these comments in here, guys. Okay. Let's put her on there. And this is fans and press. This is what our regular is good to see you too. Always a pleasure. I like Shopify. I like Shopify a lot. But you could do this on a WordPress website. Now, if you're talking about sites that actually, I don't know, get traffic. I mean, you could sell stuff on Amazon. You could sell stuff on YouTube. I mean, you could sell stuff on Amazon. You could sell stuff on eBay. I like Etsy a lot for print on demand because people go to Etsy for print on demand. So that's a good place to do it too. Bob says T-shirt pictures or words. Yes. The answer is yes. If you're asking about copyrights and all those things, it's yes on all those things. You know, and you don't just have to do T-shirts or pictures. You can do it. You can do mugs. You can do shower curtains. You can do blankets. You can do throws. You could do all kinds of different stuff. And guys, let me know how the sound is today because I got rid of my sound. They're basically packing blankets, but we put these curtains all the way around in the office now. And I want to see if that's improved the sound of this. And thank you, Bob. Thank you for that question there. Hi, sir. 13 minutes late. Late? Oh, no. We're going to take away points from you, Cameron. You're late. You can't do that. I'm just kidding, of course. Hey, man, Mohammed, what's going on, Mohammed? Good to see you here. Thank you so much for being here. We do appreciate you. He says, I have sent you a message in DM. Can you please reply to me? Not sure where you sent it to. If you sent it to Facebook, I don't have access on this computer. Let me see here. Messenger DM. I don't have anything from you and DM in Facebook, unfortunately. Okay. I don't have anything. Not quite sure where you sent it, but feel free to send it here if you want or send me an email afterwards. Profit margin per shirt. Here's a funny thing, Bob, about this. First off, let me say, yeah. I mean, we would like to have margins of like 30 to 50%. That would be great. Okay. We sell survival food. And our survival food, when you get into the bigger packages, the profit margin goes down. And I've had people like retailers sell our products. Okay. So we have all these retailers out there. They sell our products. And some of them will say, well, JR, I sold $1,000 worth of this product. I only made 10%. That's ridiculous. And I'm like, you know, I get what you're saying. You made $100. You sold $1,000 worth of this stuff. However, you normally sell $40 items, right? And you normally make, you know, $15 on those items. But this one here, this $1,000 item, you made $100 on it. You've got to look at the fact that you didn't have to put any more work into this $1,000 item than you did the $40 item. And look how much more money you made. So when you get into a bigger priced item, you're going to see that your profit margins are going to go down. They're just going to. And guys, give me a thumbs up too. If everybody doesn't mind, just real quick, hit that thumbs up button. I would really appreciate it. Let's see. Got another comment right here. A camera. I prefer picture. Okay. Well, that's cool. That's the sound guy. Somebody put in there on the sound. Since I have these new curtains up here, let me know if the sound is good. Let's see here. Muhammad sent me another message. What has he got to say? I have sent it on your Facebook page. Maybe you have received it in your messages, requests and inbox. Okay. If you didn't send it to my personal one, I had not logged into my other Facebook one right now, Muhammad. I don't have access to that, but I will check it out afterwards. Unless you just want to post the question right here and you're welcome to do so. And I can answer it right now. I'll be happy to do that. What's the best way to sell online, man? By the way. Well, you know, there's a lot of different ways. I have a Magento website. I've got a WordPress website. We have some stuff on Amazon. I have retailers that sell my stuff. Really, you just got to figure out what works for you and what's happening for you. It's all different. And you know what? I think a lot of people say, well, I want to find the one thing that works really good and that's the thing I want to do. And that's okay. But why not do all these other things if they're going to bring you some extra money? You know, maybe one platform, maybe your WordPress site is bringing you, you know, I don't know, really good returns. But you also have an Etsy account and you have some products there and they're bringing you some money too. Why not use all these things? Why not, you know, I certainly want people to do that. Why don't you use all these things that can bring you money? And the same thing with social media. You know, use as many as you can. I don't use that many. I'm not a big social media person. I put a lot of my efforts into YouTube. I like YouTube. I like talking to you guys. I like getting the feedback from you guys. You guys are a lot of fun. And I appreciate these comments. Guys, you're flooding me with comments. I really appreciate that. Keep those coming. Even if you're not watching live, even if you're not watching live, you can certainly put something in the comment section. All right, so the next thing I'm going to tell you, this is a big one too, is grammar. Make sure you have good grammar guys. Grammar is so very important. I had somebody working on my site the other day and they sent me some blogs over and they didn't even make sense. They didn't even make sense. Guys, if you don't understand the language when you're dealing in a country, hire somebody that does understand the language. But don't just do bad stuff. Just don't do that. Next thing I would say is get familiar with design placement. Where is it going to end up on that print-on-demand thing? How is it going to look? Certain things look good on certain products and certain things do not. So you got to kind of look at it and say, is that a good print-on-demand product or not? Understand that guys. So, so important you do that. And next thing I'll tell you is have a solid marketing plan. Not having a marketing strategy really makes achieving your business goals significantly more difficult. To come up with a solid marketing plan you must first learn about the industry. Analyze the competition. You know, set a budget. Know what you're going to do. Very important you do that. Next up, and I have a lot of people say, do I need a website? You absolutely do not need a website. However, you absolutely should have a website because it's going to help you so much. It lets people go and learn a little bit more about you. Designing a website with customers' needs in mind is so important. A website should clearly answer basic questions that customers might have regarding your business. So make sure you do have a website. Include high converting mock-ups. When I say a mock-up, you know, there's a lot of sites out there that you can use. You can actually put your design on that site on a model. You know, like if you're doing t-shirts, you can put the design on that person and you can see it. I don't have the name of the site right now. There's a lot of sites like that. You can Google it and you'll find it. Those mock-ups matter a lot. I also have an email marketing strategy. I use Kartra. Kartra is one of the best email marketing companies I think there is out there. I've used a whole lot of different ones. I've used Aweber, Constant Contact, MailChimp, Infusionsoft, which is now key. I've used all these things. And yet, Kartra is the best. I will have a link in the description on this video once it's up on YouTube. So you can check a link for that. You can watch a video on Kartra. You can see how it works. If you're interested, you can get it through a trial of $1, just $1. So you want to have email marketing. That's where a lot of my money comes from is email marketing. And the last thing I'm going to tell you is add social proof. Wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. Another comment here. I got to stick on. I'm not doing what I should be doing here. Okay. It says here, so niche in one topic selling a variety of items or sell one type of item or niche market. I recommend finding a really excuse me, segmented niche. Okay. So like we sell survival food. Okay. So our niche is survival people. So in that niche, I can sell courses. I can sell my canned meats. We're going to be coming out for freeze-dried foods. You know, there's a lot of things I can sell in that niche. So I would say what you want to do is pick a niche, a topic and have a variety of different items you can sell within that. And that's a great question, too. Fancy and first. That's a really good one. I really appreciate that. Hey, guys, if you want to connect with me more, go over to Facebook, find my profile, my personal one, friend me on there. Every Friday we go out and have a nice lunch. I take some pictures. I'm going to share with you guys. So if you want to see some restaurants, literally from around the world, because we've been around the world right now, we're in Austin area. So we're doing a lot here. However, when we travel again, I'll be doing more pictures of that. So if that's the thing that interests you, make sure you do that. And what is my last one here? What is my last one? I got a last one. Social proof. Guys, guys, social proof is so important. People are so much more likely to buy from you if some stranger recommends you. I know that's crazy, right? Some stranger. But they trust that social proof. And for the most part, people are not going to give you reviews unless they're bad. So how do you get them? You ask them to. You could even bribe them. You could say, hey, if you go on Google, and matter of fact, I'll ask you guys to do that right now. And I'll send you a free e-book if you do it. But go on to Google, search by name JR Fisher, put a review there, send me a link to the review, and email me at training at JRFisher.com, training at JRFisher.com. And when you do that, I'm going to send you a free e-book on how to make money online, which is pretty cool. So go do that. See, I'm doing it right now. But you're going to be more likely to do that. Even if you love my channel, even if you love me and everything I do, you're probably not going to do a review, because it's a review. Why would I do it? It takes time out of my day. Well, now it's valuable. Okay, I'm going to give you a free e-book, and it's going to make you money. So go there and do that. Give me that free, give me free, get that free e-book, and give me a review. We got a couple more seconds here. If you guys want to ask any more questions, if you have any questions about starting running and growing online businesses, pop it in that chat section right now, and I'll go ahead and hit those real quick before I get out of here. I'm down to two restaurants today. I'm trying to figure out the two restaurants I want to go to. And then once I do that, we'll be able to go to lunch today. We've had a great crowd today, guys. I will be back on Monday. So make sure you're here on Monday. I have, what is it I'm going to talk about on Monday? Let me find it here real quick so that you guys know, and I already have it planned out, guaranteed success. If you want to know about guaranteed success, yeah, you want to show up on Monday, because that's what I'm going to talk about, is guaranteed success. Now, once again, before I get out of here, any more questions, pop them in there. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up, okay? Please, please, please do that. As silly as that sounds, that matters a lot to the YouTube algorithm. That thumbs up matters a whole lot. So please, please, please do that. Don't forget to subscribe also. Take that red button down there. Turn it to gray. The only thing you got to do to turn it to gray is click it. That's it. That's all you have to do. And ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live, or if I upload a video. So make sure you do that. Guys, what a good session today, man. Are you guys excited about today? Tell me if you're excited about today. You're alive. You know, I look every day. I got up today and James Kahn passed away. You know, 82 years old, great actor. I really loved a lot of the movies. He's gone. The ex-prime minister of Japan was assassinated. You know, that person is gone. He was a good person. Everybody respected him. I had an article two days ago here in the newspaper in Austin. And in Austin, we have these big overpasses, and they just, they seem scary. They're like, oh my God, I wonder if you can go over the edge. Well, it happened. A dump truck actually went off one of these overpasses and over the edge and the guy died. None of those people I just mentioned has today, which you guys have today. And as far as motivation goes and your attitude goes, it's really how you react to situations. How are you going to react to today? You know, you've got another day that a lot of people don't have. A lot of people are gone. A lot of people passed away yesterday. They don't have today, but you do. So be happy about it. Enjoy it. Make it useful. Do something with it. Challenge yourself. If you're thinking about, you know, doing some of the things I'm talking about, like starting maybe a drop shipping business, get going. Okay. If you want to do a print on demand thing, now's the time to do it. There's never a perfect time to do this stuff, guys. The perfect time is always right now. Now is the time. And the next best time is right after now. Okay. But, you know, don't wait for everything to line up. You know, I remember when I started my business many years ago, 2009, going on 13 years now, I was a single father working six, seven days a week. I had two little kids. I had no money. I had a lot of debt. And I started my business. It wasn't a good time. Okay. There's never going to be a good time to start a business. It's just the way it is. Okay. If everything's lined up in your life and everything's running perfectly, you probably don't even want to start a business, do you? Well, do it now. Do it now. Do it now. That's all I can tell you. Guys, I really appreciate each and every one of you. If you want to send me messages, excuse me. I'll try to clear my throat. You can send me emails at training at jrfisher.com. That's training at jrfisher.com. Once again, ring the bell, subscribe, thumbs up, all that good stuff. Thank you so much. I'll see you Monday morning. We're going to talk about success. You guys have a great day, and I'll see you real soon.