Affiliate Tips: Self-Promote Your Storefront [TeeHunter Guest Post]

This week we're bringing you tips on how to best promote your merch store from TeeHunter, one of our top partners! Check out what they have to say below:

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It’s no secret: self-promotion and sharing your work is super important in gaining exposure for your storefront. You need to get your designs in front of the biggest audience as possible. More exposure means more traffic and sales.

Consider Your Storefront a Brand

Start by considering your storefront a brand rather than just the place your t-shirts are displayed. Think of a brand as the style, or  “feel” that hits home with your target audience. As the most simple guide to developing your brand, try doing these things:

Choose a Target Audience

Jot down a list of characteristics of the people most likely to relate to or like your designs. (ie. age, interests, hobbies, passions). Keep these people in mind when making decisions about your designs and store

Consider that Audience, Always

When making any decisions about the look of your Storefront, consider your target audience. Choose high quality feature images that coordinate with each other and that audience. Use colors that speak to them as well.

Use Social Media to the Fullest

In reaching your target audience, you should use social platforms to hang out where they hang out. Follow these tips and tricks to further your social media promotion. Pinterest and Facebook are two of our favorite social media platforms.

Share Your Designs

Start by sharing your designs to social media channels. Check out this article and read how to share your designs: https://www.teepublic.com/blog/how-to-share-your-designs-on-social-media

Harness the Power of Pinterest

Pinterest is proven to drive more sales than any other social media outlet.

The goal is to allow your designs to be seen by your target audience alongside things that they already love and are familiar with. Here’s a good place to start:

• Create a Pinterest account for your Brand.
• Create five “boards” that would appeal to your target audience. Base them around related interests and hobbies, not just “tshirts”
• Add pins to your boards naturally with topics on theme and that relate to your audience. Try a few pins a few times a day. (note: Pinterest limits the number of pins you can post a day and will quickly flag spamming)
• Include pins of your t-shirts mixed into the other related pins.
• Make it a habit to occasionally and organically add to your Pinterest boards.

Use Facebook Better

Facebook can be used to reach very specific interest groups. Try reaching your target audience by following these tips and pointers:

• Create a Facebook page specifically for your Storefront, or brand.
• Use captivating images that relate to your audience and maintain your consistent brand image.
• Use it as a place to share new designs and connect with the community
• Create benefit for your target audience through Facebook. Sharing interesting/ funny posts or relatable how-to’s. Strive to be a go-to destination for entertainment, resource, etc.

QUICK TIPS for Increasing your Audience and Engagement:

• Create and share posts that relate to your audience’s interest, not just “hey, buy my tshirt” posts.
• Find articles and videos on the web and post them to your page.
• Post at least 3x a day
• Videos get more engagement.
• Videos shared that are already hosted elsewhere on Facebook get the most reach.
• You can share the link to your designs directly in a post.
• You can share a photo of your design with the link to your store front in the description and it will reach an even bigger audience
• You can join Interest groups with your personal Facebook and share your page to those groups
• Scheduling posts ahead of time is a great idea
• Sharing other people’s posts and helping them gain exposure will help you gain trust and exposure
• Build others up
• Engage with your audience with comments and quick responses
• Always Tag @TeePublic in your posts

Connect to T-Shirt Blogs

There are a lot of t-shirt blogs that exist for the sole purpose of promoting great t-shirt designs. A quick internet search will uncover all kinds of unique sites.

Explore and Connect

Explore popular t-shirt blogs and forums and get familiar with how they source the designs that they promote. Often these sites will have clear insight and directions on how to gain exposure via their site.

Consider the fact that all of these websites are in some way, run by people. Don’t be afraid to reach out to the humans behind the scenes and simply ask how to go about promoting your designs. Chances are, you won’t always get a response but when you do, you’ll gain valuable insight on how to promote.

Upload and Promote

The more places online, linked to your storefront, the better. TeeHunter.com is a great example of a t-shirt blog where you can directly promote your designs. It is a t-shirt search engine that exists to help people discover their next favorite t-shirt.

Create an account and upload your designs to the site. See a collection your shirt should be in? Reach out with the contact form and ask to be included in the collection (be sure to include the shirt!).

Play to Your Strengths

People often try to improve by putting time and effort into their weakest areas when such efforts might be better used on their strengths. Consider the second best violin player in the world, who happens to be bad at math. If the violinist focused on getting better at math, they probably would and they would still be a great violinist. However if the violinist focused that same effort on improving their violin-playing… they might just become the best.

Find Your Traffic Strengths

Teepublic is integrated with Google Analytics. You can read all about it here https://www.teepublic.com/blog/google-analytics-101. Google Analytics, when connected to your storefront can show you exactly where your store traffic is coming from. Use Google Analytics to determine the source of traffic for your storefront.

Play up that Source

Now that you can see where exactly most of your traffic is coming from, you can cater to that strength. Check out the source of the traffic and consider the characteristics of the traffic. Where is it coming from and what type of audience is it?  Ask yourself how you can improve this traffic source even more?  

For example. If Facebook is your biggest traffic source and you are posting 3 times a day, what would happen if you posted 5 times a day? If a certain TeePublic search word is your biggest source of traffic, what would happen if you created more designs that catered to that same search word?

 

Self-promotion takes time and energy. That said, your designs did to. Consider marketing and self-promotion as an investment in the time and energy you’ve already taken to create your designs. Your audience and buyers will act as a natural guide to what sells best and what you should create next. Continue promoting and don’t be afraid to be creative.