Hey everyone. I’ve just added a new category to my blog named “Affiliate Marketing“. I’ve talked about what affiliate marketing is and why it’s my favorite source to make money online.
While I’ve been doing a lot of stuff ranking websites and building Facebook Fan Pages in the past, I think it’s the right time to add a new category and explain how I make money from almost any website or traffic source I can find, and the quick answer is Affiliate and CPA marketing.
2 Weeks ago I published a guide to making money with Google Adsense and viral posts on Social Media sites like Facebook. The process is really straight forward and there’s no magic formula behind it. However, it takes some budget to get started, creativity, and a lot of patience to get started.
But there’s nothing new there. The process to build a website/blog and monetize it with CPC/CPM Ads like many of us have done before is the same. The only thing that changes is that we’re getting massive traffic from Facebook instead of getting organic traffic from search engines.
What is CPA Marketing?
CPA means Cost Per Action, and it’s the basis of any affiliate marketing program out there. Where Adsense or many other programs pay you for ad impressions or clicks, CPA Marketing pays you per action. Because of this, it’s also called performance-based marketing.
There are some key pros and cons if you compare it to traditional CPM/CPC methods.
Pros
- The offers pay more. Sometimes a lot more.
- You can get quick payments (weekly or every 15 days) if you earn a good chunk of money. Daily payments are available too.
- If you have targeted traffic, you can earn a lot more from affiliate marketing than with Adsense or other competitors.
- You can buy paid traffic for instant profits instead of waiting for Google to rank your website
Types of CPA offers:
- CPS: Cost per Sale (Amazon Affiliate or Teespring)
- CPL: Cost per lead (can be single or double opt-in)
- CPI: Cost per install (a mobile app, a toolbar, a game or anything else)
- etc.
Cons
- Since it’s performance-based, if you receive 1 thousand visits but nobody does an action, you earn $0
- There are a lot of offers and networks to test. You need to find the best networks.
- You need to create your campaigns and split test the whole time
- You probably need a tracker and redirect scripts
- You need a budget to get started
Of course, you can do a mix of both, and promote CPA campaigns with organic traffic to make profits with massive ROI, but I’ll cover that in a future article next week.
Today, we’re focusing on selling T-Shirts with Facebook Fan Pages and/or Facebook Ads.
There are 2 ways of doing this. The slow/steady and easy way, and the fast but not so easy way.
- The steady but good way to do this is by setting up a new Fan Page and grow it by buying Facebook Ads for likes.
- The fast but more difficult way is trough Facebook Ads for Website clicks and conversions.
I’ve done both, and I’ve made both work. I’ve made more money with Facebook Ads for clicks and conversions but also spent more money. So it’s up to you if you want to build a large audience, engage with them and make sales, or if you just want to sell them cold straight in their Newsfeed. If you want to learn more about this you can check my CPA Marketing blog.
Let’s focus on likes first.
$350 with Facebook Fan Pages
The trick here is to build a big Fan Page on a niche you like, or a niche you think many people will love. For example, I built a few pages based on some TV characters I love from some very famous TV series in the USA.
I grew them to 2-5k likes to start and then I created a T-shirt design and published it on Teespring.
Creating a campaign on Teespring is quite easy. Just sign up and create your account here: Teespring
Now click on the “launch a campaign” button at the top of your dashboard and a simple T-shirt model will appear. Add some text or load up an image (PNG or JPEG files are fine) as you desire for your audience.
Teespring will show how much the base price is. It should be something between $9 and $15, depending on your design. Try not to use too many colors and difficult figures to print, so your shirt is less expensive and you can make more money per shirt sold.
I’d price it anything between $19.99-$24.99 depending on the T-shirt and the audience.
Finally, select your colors and other T-shirts available if you want (e.g. a Hoodie can be a good idea) and launch your campaign. Teespring will give you a URL so you can promote it with Facebook.
How would you promote it?
I guess that’s the question everyone is going to ask. Here are some examples I’ve done in the past. This was done with a Fan Page with 9,000 likes or more if I remember correctly.
As you can see, I just grabbed the link and let Facebook generate the preview image on this one. I got 67 likes and 11 shares and reached around 1,400 people. I sold 2-3 shirts from that post alone (around $20 revenue).
Make sure you try different angles and colors. 2 days after that, I tried the same T-Shirt in green. Here are my results:
As you can see, this time I got 167 likes and 35 shares. I changed my text so that everyone knew the shirt was priced at $19, and they shouldn’t miss the chance to buy it. I made around 5-6 extra sales from that post alone, so around $30 more in revenue.
Of course, I posted the same shirt once or twice more during that week and made some extra sales, but make sure you still post some content and engage with your fans or they’ll think you’re just there to sell. I was posting 2-3 funny images from the TV series per day (schedule your posts with FPTraffic) and I posted a link to the shirt 2-3 times per week.
$500 per day with Facebook Ads
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Overall, I made around $350 and sold almost 40 units from posting shirts for 1 month in 3 Facebook Fan Pages. You can request your Teespring payment right after your campaign ends, which is really cool. They usually take 1-6 days to send your payment (PayPal is my favorite method) depending on the day of the week.
Of course, the big problem most people seem to get when they start using Teespring is that you need to reach a 10 sales goal before the campaign is actually completed. For starters, selling 10 shirts might be difficult (update 2019: Teespring has reduced this goal to 3 so now it’s easier to get started!). Especially if your Fan Page has less than 5,000 fans. However, there are many good alternatives out there like Sunfrog Shirts, which pays you per every shirt you sell no matter if it’s just 1 or 4 or anything below 10.
Some of their features are:
I tried Sunfrog at first when I was first growing my Fan Pages and I had 2,000 fans or less and still got a few sales. Sunfrog allows you to sell other designs so you don’t need to create your own.
Here’s an updated list with the best print on demand websites to start selling custom clothing and more.
Overall, I feel like Teespring converts better than Sunfrog, and the website has a better design, but it’s still a good choice for starters who can’t sell more than 10 T-shirts.
I received a few payments like this back in January-March. Just keep in mind they pay on a NET 30 basis. So everything you earn this month will be in your account at the end of the next month, whereas Teespring pays right after your campaign’s end:
$800 with Facebook Ads
There are a lot of people promoting T-Shirts from Teespring right from Facebook Ads in the Newsfeed. In fact, there was a time a few months ago where 50% or more of my Ads where Teespring T-Shirts calling out names, football teams, year of birth, and similar. Nowadays those niches are banned from Facebook and they might shut down your ads account. However, there’s plenty of money to be made with Teespring if you’re creative. Some niches where selling shirts can work quite well are:
- Beauty niche
- Travel niche
- Lifestyle niche
- Pets niche
- etc.
Pretty much any niche where you can create and resonate with passionated audiences.
I launched a few more campaigns and promoted them via Facebook Ads without having big Fan Pages and still made some great profit.
Not all of my campaigns were profitable, of course. I launched 15-20 campaigns between April and June, but only 3-4 of them were profitable. It was an interesting experiment anyway.
One of my campaigns was targeted to a field study (e.g. computer programmers or marine biologists) thanks to Facebook’s advanced targeting and I got an ROI of %110.
I spent over $300 on that campaign alone but ended up making more than $620 back in just 5 days. That’s why many people love Facebook Ads. Because once you hit a jackpot, you can scale it super fast and end up selling a lot of shirts. Some guys earn more than $30,000 per month with Teespring alone and they don’t build Fan Pages for that.
They just sell the shirts plain cold right in your newsfeed, but thanks to Facebook’s targeting option, you can narrow your audience to something very specific and get them to buy your product.
Overall, I made around $1,200 with Teespring in 2 months and a half. I’d love to launch more campaigns, but I’m focusing all my time on doing SEO, launching new websites, and learning Mobile traffic at this point. Also, to be honest, I’m not a really good designer and I’m sure many people have more original/cool ideas for T-shirts than me. It’s basically an excuse, but at the same time, it means you can probably do a lot better than me.
Building your list on steroids with Facebook
I’ll publish a separate case study on how I built a 700 subscribers list in 2 days with Facebook using a Teespring campaign and Convertkit and got some of that money back just 3 days later. That case study will probably be published this Friday or the next Wednesday. However, here’s how it works:
As you can see, I used a T-Shirt design on Teespring to create a giveaway in one of my Fan Pages. Instead of asking them to buy the T-Shirt from my link, I prepared a landing page so that they could win one shirt if they subscribed to my email list. I got 700 subscribers in just 2 days, and when the campaign tipped, I contacted a random winner so I could buy the shirt for him and send him to his address.
It’s a very interesting way to build a list in any niche, and the conversion rate was super high on my Landing page (more than 90% conversion rate).
Stay safe and let me know if you have questions below in the comments 🙂
hey… are you available for hire 🙂 i need some help building out facebook tshirt campaigns? id love to hire someone like you who really has a handle on it and help me skip the learning curve and mistakes in setting it up myself thanks!
Hi Joseph.
No, I’m not available for hire but here’s an article you might be interested in.
Hi. What do you mean about “those niches” are not allowed on FB any longer and you can get shut down? Are you saying that you can no longer sell a Teespring shirt on FB? I’m trying to learn what I can because I have a 2020 campaign shirt on Teespring that I want to test and I thought FB would be best. Right now, the shirt has no traffic even on Teespring. I thought I could search it on Teespring but it is only showing in my listings. Thanks
Hi Ramsey.
No, selling t-shirts on FB is still allowed but as I said in the article, calling names, football teams, year of birth and similar is not allowed on FB anymore so make sure you read the guidelines first 🙂
Here’s where I’m confused how many designs how many niches ? 100? All same niche? ..site concentrate on canvas ? Products biggest margin ?
We used to test as many designs and niches as we wanted. The more we tested, the more profitable campaigns we found to scale.
It all depends on you and your budget, your design skills and available time.
Margins on shirts were always lower than hoodies but hoodies.
Awesome article. I would love to introduce you to ThreadMeUp and have you give us a try on your next launch. It’s really fun reading your case study. I’ll try it when I have more time. I’m too busy with niche site stuffs.
I’m getting my feet wet with TeeSpring and Sunfrog for nearly 2 weeks. It’s so fun.
Any Facebook UID scraper still working?
Thank you ^^
Not really. I wouldn’t use a scraper unless you want to risk a ban.
And you’re right, this is quite fun!
Hi!!!
Greetings from Central America!! I have been researching the POD business for like the past 4 months now, and I honestly have like a million questions cause I really want to this right. I’ll try to keep it short for you!:)
1. How much money do I need to start running some ads????
2. REALLY IMPORTANT TO ME RIGHT NOW. What type of ad should I start with if I just want to promote my facebook page so I get more fans (meaning I can then post some merch on that page)? What type of ad should I start with if I just want to put my ad on people’s newsfeed cause I targeted them (without a page)?
I know you are very busy so tks for taking the time to see all these comments! I am really appreciated.
Hello Sebastian. Nice to meet you.
You might be interested in one of my latest articles about POD as well. it’s right in the homepage.
As for your questions:
1. Each product requires usually between $5 to $20 USD for testing purposes, so I recommend having around $1,000 per month to run ads initially.
2. If you want to grow ads you should buy page like ads, but I don’t recommend doing this anymore. I think it’s better to focus on conversions and pay for sales ads straight to your offers.
From the above example, for a fanpage with 9000 likes/followers, to make a post and get 1400-2000 organic reach, it’s very good. Nowadays, I do not get such high % organic reach. Just this morning 1 march, my organic reach is even lower by at least 4-6 times. For example for a fanpage with 300k likes, video post used to have 20-40K organic reach, from this morning it’s just down to 500-2000+ organic reach. Same for posts with link url (leading outside of FB). Pure photo posts still doing okay but organic reach is also generally lower.
Yeah, organic reach is definitely down and every year it becomes worse, at least for external links.
It’s getting harder and harder to work with FB unless you go with paid ads all the way.
So to make a fb fanpage post with a teespring link nowadays would have very few reach right?
Is there a way around this? are we able to list the t-shirts in the shop section of the fanpage and let our fans purchase within facebook?
I am from central America, every time I read things related to selling via Internet, I notice no one talks about income taxes one should pay according to profits made, so, ¿why don´t you explain us how that works?
Thanks Servando
Because you need to talk to your accountant for that stuff. This is a marketing blog 🙂
Also, the laws change a lot from country to country, so talking about it wouldn’t make sense unless my viewers were from the same place mostly.
As a rule of thumb, when you want to learn about taxes you should always hire an accountant!
Hello Silva, if I should publish a design on teespring and promote it, maybe people wanna buy it, will I been the one to send the shirt to the buyers or teespring will send the shirt?
Teespring prints and ships all the products directly without you having to interact with any of them.
Your main concern should be marketing and sales. Not fulfilment and production 🙂
Hi, just found your site and thanks for the info. I recently was let go from my company and am looking for ideas. I am a trained and experienced artist, so I’m hoping to make some money. My question is this: I had an online t-shirt company that was quite successful before FB existed – and I still have some inventory (so it wouldn’t be Teespring or anything at this point) – do you suggest I try and sell them via Facebook, make a page and just put them out there? Any help you can give me is greatly appreciated and thank you for your time in helping the rest of us out here!
PS: I also plan on making new designs and may try Teespring in the near future.
Hi Keltoid.
Maybe even before trying to sell them on FB with ads, you could test selling them in the FB marketplace or other free services like ebay/amazon or whatever is available in your country.
If you can’t sell them that way tetsing ads could be a secondary alternative but would probably reduce your profit a lot.
Hi, great article! In my niche I have a Facebook page associated to my store. Do you suggest that I make a separate FB group to promote the niche or invest the time in the FB page?
If you can find time to have content and promote it to the group it could be a viable option. If it’s store focused only I’d rather work on your fan page.
Hi. Thanks for article. Many things changed still you wrote it. Facebook pages organic traffic is not actual anymore. And in my opinion, the only way for beginner to have stabile daily sales is to pay for Facebook posts.
I just started to try selling T-shirts , and in a week I sold just one )
I have one main questions.
What is the minimum Facebook ad budget at which you can hope to sell something at least ?
Now I am running 1 ~ 2 day long promotions with 5$ ~ 10$ daily budget without any success (for US users only).
Thanks!
Hello.
The budget should be around 2-3x your profit. So for example if you make $10 per each T shirt sale you can start with $20-30 per day for testing.
Consider focusing your ads on conversions and you can now track every step of the sales process with Teespring like Checkouts, sales or add to carts.
How can i collect email adress of intrested people for selling tshirts…..pls ans
You can use a service like convertkit and build a landing page to get emails.
Great post. I plan to sell t shirts through tsprings very soon. I believe an email list would be the easiest and cheapest way to make alot more selling shirts than using face ads. That is if one already has an email list just send them t shirts related to your niche and they will surely be interestes. Just a tip.
Hi, Servando. I tried some teespring campaigns doing by myself to earn on Facebook, but zero profit. I have 1mln fans on Facebook.
May we be partners?
So you will create a design for teespring goods which my fans WANTS to buy and I will generate a traffic from my Pages? Profit 50/50.
How many campaigns did you try?
I’m not looking for partners, sorry.
Hey Andrew we can become Partners! I have Amazon Merch Account and Cool Designs ready to publish! Email me!
Andrew I’ve got something for you, email me please
Hi, I want to say thank you first
My As is how to use a Facebook ads of T shirts without getting my Facebook account blocked ?
Is it by shorting the direct links of the products or by something else !?
Why would they block your account? If you’re playing it by the rules they won’t block your t shirt ads.
I got blocked as well 🙁
Better look for another advertising platform
WOW! good work you did there, the last thing you did was super amazing because you will have a lot of emails for interested people who will probably buy your shirts in the future, it’s really important to do this step to grow your online business FREE traffic for life and you don’t have to pay for ads again.
Hey, I run a Facebook page about Art and anime related stuff after a month and a week I am now at 11k followers with a very well engaged audience, I make about 1.5k followers a week is this a great growth rate? And when do you think is a great moment to start selling a product?
The growth is made without paying any advertisement*
It’s a good growth rate for the size. Keep working on it 🙂
I think above 10k fans is good to start testing the waters and selling or sending traffic.
I have so much to ask you hahaha, what do you mean by sending traffic?
Sending traffic from your fan page to a website related to your niche.
Ques1 : How do ideas come to put a logo or writing in a shirt?
Ques2 : How to spy on successful campaigns ?
Ques3 : Can i copy and paste the same successful campaigns for short time and quick profit?
This is great. We have a business page that we’ve slowly built over a year and a half. I’ve tested the waters with a few teaser posts with my hats. Lots of feedback and people messaging me for info on them. We have a very loyal following in agriculture and seem to be growing steadily at 50-100 a week now. We are trying to brand our logo and business better and its working. We’ve created 3 t shirt designs that we are ready to launch. Do you feel that Teespring would be better at this or the traditional custominc, stock our own inventory and ship out ourselves? We plan on doing our hats as well for now and may expand from there. We have plenty of ad money and are willing to inventory if necessary. Thanks
Teespring has a good conversion rate and it’s great for testing the waters.
After that, if you have a proven audience and products that sell, move over to shopify and sell your own custom apparel and you’ll make more money.
Hello,
Superb post for SEO ecommerce website information.
voxpop.com my website please suggest me.
Suggest what? do you have any question in particular?
Hi,
Nice post, just want an quick suggestion.
I have an website in birthday quotes niche(1k organic visitors) and having facebook page with 33K fans.
Which type of tshirt design ideas you would you recommend to share with my FB fans/website?
Well, unfortunately the ideas about birthdays are bad for Facebook because affiliates took advantage from it a few years ago.
Try checking what’s available in teespring or other platforms and mimic it.
Thanks for the great article. I’m growing a Facebook page now and my niche seems to have been a good choice. I’m currently 2.5 weeks in with 4.5k likes and growing by about 400 likes per day. I should reach 5k tomorrow and 10k within 2 weeks, possibly considerably sooner with the exponential growth pattern I’ve been seeing. My posts generally range from 100 to 1k reactions and 10 to 100 comments.
When would be an appropriate time to start selling shirts with my stats?
If shirts do well within the page, should I try also selling them through FB’s advertising?
Are there any general tips you can give me with the information I’ve provided?
Thanks for your time.
Hello John.
That’s great. You’re getting a good quantity of fans. Is this in the USA?
I like promoting things after reaching 10,000 fans or more (t shirts, sending traffic to website, etc). Since you’re going to reach that in a matter of 10 days I’d say be patient and keep engaging with people for now.
Yes, if shirts sell (even if it’s just a couple) organically you should definitely try FB Ads. That’s how you’re going to scale and reach your audience to sell more 🙂
Around 65% of those following my page are from the US. Most of the rest is a mix of the UK and Australia. They’re also almost entirely women in their 20s and 30s.
I’ll take your advice and wait. I think I knew it’s what I should be doing but I needed to hear it. Thanks for taking the time to reply and thanks for all the advice.
Great. Those countries have great quality so it’s just a matter of time to see your first sales 🙂
Great article Servando! Things on facebook have changed. unless your paying for advertising good luck trying to get traffic.
Yeah, it’s true.
While you can still get some decent organic traffic from Facebook, you need a super engaged audience for that and the easiest way to build that audience is by buying likes or boosting posts.
As for external traffic, it’s pretty much a pay to play game now with Facebook.
Hi, great article!
I have a fb page with more than 50k likes, close to 60k. The subject is US politics. On average each post makes between 2 and 10k reach. I am wondering will Teespring work for me? I was thinking of selling t-shirts and mugs on the page. My concerns are that my fans are 45-70 years old and also I am afraid of a fb ban.
Also I have a 30k Instagram acc in the pet niche. Perhaps its better to try teespring with IG?
Thanks in advance!
You should try both.
Why would they ban you? As long as you keep it safe and read the rules there shouldn’t be a problem.
Its very interesting article, thanks we liked it.
Hey!
I really appreciate the information you have laid out for us here! This is very helpful and I am confident I can incorporate this into my own campaign. I recently made a t-shirt design for a tv show that has come back more recently and I wanted to promote it to my fan page. I am currently only around 1,250 followers on FB. Would you say its too early to promote the new design?
if you want to see the design, its here:
Thanks for your awesome info and feedback!
Hello Eddie.
I deleted your Teespring link so you don’t reveal your campaign to other people.
Yes, it’s too early to promote. Wait until you have around 10,000 followers or more. At the very least you want 5,000 followers but 10,000 would be a lot better for sure.
Thank you so much for the feedback!!
Hi Servando. As regards your campaigns, what targeted country was very successful for you?
USA was my main target. I have heard a lot of people having success in Europe and Canada. Some even in latin America or Asia but not with Teespring (they use Shopify like explained in my latest articles).
Hello Servando,
I see these pages ALOT and always wonder… isn’t all of this illegal?
There are tons of “fan pages” selling merchandise of TV shows and characters without actually contacting the trademark owners..
How do you get away with it?
Regards
It’s illegal if you do it illegal. you can’t use trademarked things, logos, etc. but you can still keep it legal using your own creatives without breaking any rights and sell a ton of stuff.
Have you had any luck with ur shirts ?
Have u tried it ? If so what were your results ?
Hello.
Nothing is free.
If you have big pages, instagram accounts or pinterests accounts, you must have got them somehow, either by buying them, or growing the over time (time = money).
You can pay for shoutouts in big pages and test your shirts, as I don’t think the owners will do it for free.
The CTR rule doesn’t apply in that case since you’re just using Facebook organic reach instead of paying for ads using the Facebook algorithm.