Where would a T-shirt printing business be if it didn’t have any customers? Nowhere, is the answer. Without selling your products, you won’t be getting anywhere too soon. So where can you focus your marketing to increase sales?

Following the boom of user generated content, MySpace has developed in to a hot spot of niche business activity. A brief search will provide dozens of T-shirt trading businesses, all seeking to gain the attention of a growing audience.

You can look at this in two ways. Either it’s a saturated market and already exploited, or it’s offering something rewarding and exists for a reason.

EBay, on the other hand, does just that. By creating a store on the world’s number one auction site, you can plunge yourself straight in to a market where you KNOW that customers are visiting with the mind to part with their hard earned cash. Be prepared to face competition – and eBay charges. There is a cost to advertise your products and a commission to eBay when each T-shirt is sold.

You can alternatively build your own commerce store. This provides full creative license to present your product as you wish, but it also involves a greater depth of involvement on the site maintenance side.

Sell to friends. Hey, if they’re your friends, they better like you enough to get your aspiring enterprise off the ground!

Not every sales transaction has to be initiated by the customer. If you’re absolutely certain that your T-shirt design is a success story waiting to happen, don’t dwell on it. Approach a proper retail outlet and pitch the idea of selling them your product. In most cases, this will lead to rejection – although not necessarily down to lack of quality. Try to find an outlet which specialises in the field that your T-shirt is catered to. Maybe you could even design a shirt with a company in mind?

Don’t rule out the wonderfully profitable business of acting as a provider to T-shirt requests. It’s the one area when you can really inflate your prices and make maximum gain. The explosion of Stag and Hen nights and weekends has created a huge demand for customised and personalised T-shirts.

Protecting Your T-shirt Design So you’ve perfected your latest T-shirt through painstaking hours of endless adjustments…and somebody’s stolen it. That can’t be fair, can it? No, it can’t be.

Protecting your work is one of those steps which many businesses will completely ignore through inconvenience. But those very same businesses could eventually be left to resent the decision. How do you protect your designs?

It’s possible to trademark your designs, but ultimately, a huge deficit in your budget. A more viable option is to copyright them. If you notice anybody stealing your work – most commonly practiced on sites such as CafePress where they don’t have to own their own equipment – it’s possible to send a C&D (Cease and Desist) to the support team of the website. This should invite an investigation in to the activity and providing that you can prove that the design has been unlawfully stolen, you’ll be entitled to every last penny back.

Copywriting is protective in the sense that it stops people taking your work and re-distributing it directly. But it can’t be relied on for issues where somebody has modified it significantly.

These are murky waters for your T-shirt design business, but the lenience is partly down to the fact that many designs are unknowingly similar. We all take inspiration from somewhere, and unless a design is clearly and obviously stolen, it can be very hard to prove in the legal sense – and expensive too.

Getting advice for your T-shirt Design Business It’s a lonely world when you start up a business and can’t get it up and running. That’s why the Internet can be so beneficial for getting useful insight from the people who are already successful.

Be sure to check out T-ShirtForums.com for an active range of tips, support and general advice.

Conclusion Running any business, through commercial or hobbyist intentions, is going to take a lot of hard work and a lengthy display of commitment.

If you’re setting out on the road to become the next T-shirt printing guru, have a look around at what your rivals are producing. Use your creative talents and ask yourself how you can do it better. With the inspiration driving you on and the determination to make a success of your hard work, there’s no reason why this writer can’t be wearing your first T-shirt sometime soon. Good luck!

If you have found this installment useful and are interested in T-Shirt Printing or if you are simply looking for blank wholesale T-Shirts then make sure you visit www.polo-shirts.co.uk.