Sponsoring Bands: The Secrets To Get Great Advertising For The Oost Of A Few Shirts

My name is Ryan Miller; I’m a 21 year old designer from Read more

How to Sell T-Shirts Using Twitter

Twitter.com has become very popular in today’s internet world. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (behind Facebook and MySpace), puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million. Those are numbers that are hard to ignore and is why it’s a great time to get a foothold in promoting your brand.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other
users updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

If your new to twitter or want to get going on promoting your t-shirts it’s pretty straight forword but there are some choices that will give you better results.

Sign up for a free account at http://www.twitter.com . It’s effortless and takes a couple of seconds.

The username you choose is very important. Everyone will know you by your username. You will be
passing your link around so choose your business or brand name.

Put up a picture or your logo. You’ll have a much better chance of gaining followers than if you use the default picture. I usually use a larger version of my website’s favicon.

Create a profile. Tell people about your brand. I myself don’t follow anyone that doesn’t have some kind of profile.

Put your website’s link in your profile or if your brand has an interesting blog use that URL. After all, what you’re doing here is promoting your brand so you need to make it noticeable. By far most of my twitter traffic comes from people checking my profile and clicking on my link.

Now, tweet something. There is nothing worse than when I check a new person who is following me, to see if I want to follow them back, is when they have no tweets. Why would I follow anyone when there is nothing to follow?

While many twitter users will follow everyone and anyone, you’ll be in a better position to make some
sales if you set it up right from the start.

Now that you have everything set up and ready to go you need some followers to promote your brand to. First thing is to tell your current customers and visitors you are now on twitter and link them to your page there. Put the link up on any social network profiles you have out there like myspace, facebook, etc.

To grow your followers outside of where you are already known there are three methods you can use to do this.

1. Non-Targeted Fast Approach. If you don’t care who’s following you on twitter, go find someone’s twitter list, click on “followers” and click “follow” on every one. The followers are more likely to follow you back because they are already following someone else. While this will build up your followers list you will have many, if not most of the list, not interested in your brand.

2. Semi Targeted Approach. This will give you a little better targeted crowd of followers. Find people that already interested in similar t-shirt brands. Find their twitter accounts, the easiest way it to try http://www.twitter.com/brandname. Since they have a similar style, it’s likely their followers are also going to enjoy your creations. Again, click on their followers and follow every one of those people. While this isn’t a perfect approach it will get you going.
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3. Super Targeted Approach. Use the same steps as number 2 above, but check each profile that your thinking about adding, to double check that they might be interested in your stuff or have similar interests. This one is going to take the longest, but will have a better chance of paying off in the long run.

Now that you are on your way to creating a highly targeted twitter list are need to provide some
maintenance. Twitter has some limits. You can only follow up to 2,000 others until you get 2,000 followers. You need to prune your followers regularly. A few days after you follow a bunch go to your account, click on “Following” and unfollow those who did not follow you back. How can you tell? If it says “direct message” under their name, it means they are following you. If not, click “remove”. Do the same for each page till you reach the end.

As your following grows, the more new people you’ll get following you. In reality you could stop doing the work and they will come to you. It also seems to help if you get and stay on twitter users who have bigfollowings.

Now, you have your account set up, profile in place and are getting others to follow you. This is when the fun starts. You have 140 characters to get your messages across about your brand. Send direct
Messages to those that follow you thanking them, mentioning your website and maybe offering a coupon code. You can post updates to all your followers about sales, giveaways, contests, new products and so on. Make sure not to bombard your list with only sales messages. Let them also know about cool things you come across and let your own personality show through which will build a more loyal following.

Anthony Marsh is the owner of Popular Threadz and Crack Smoking Shirts. He runs the online resource TeeBiz.com and the t-shirt community TeeBurb.com.

Get Attention For Your T-Shirt Designs With A Blog

The Internet has made it extremely easy for anybody who is willing to start a blog and use it to garner attention for what they are selling. From teenagers to Fortune 500 companies, many have come to the realization that writing a blog can attract attention and generate a consistent readership and following. Blogs have become excellent vehicles for communicating news, keeping in touch with a large number of fans and customers simultaneously, highlighting expertise, presenting an introduction to a line of products, and delivering fresh content for the search engines.

If you’ve never actually published a blog, you will be amazed at how easy it is to get up and running. There are many blogging platforms available like wordpress.com or blogger.com. These resources allow you to set up an account without cost and be live in a short period of time. These providers offer design templates that you simply choose by clicking on your favorite. You get an administration panel that makes it easy to add features or remove them.

A blog is really one of the simplest ways to start getting a web presence that is available to everyone completely free. You’re not required to pay for the account, the storage, or anything else. In return, the site might include some advertising on your blog, but once you get a feel of things, you can pay a small fee to get this removed. Or, if you have a little bit of technical skills and have a domain name and hosting you can install a blog using wordpress or one of the many other available scripts. Most times the control panel of your web hosting services will allow you to install wordpress with a single click. If not, you can download it at wordpress.org and with a little FTP knowledge, install it in 5 minutes or so. It’s really that easy.

Don’t allow yourself to be intimidated by a lack of knowledge of computers or the Internet. There is no need to be technically talented at all to start a blog. As you continue to use the blog, you may want to include pictures and videos which may take some learning, but it still is nothing to be intimidated by.

Deliver The Goods

In the begining, all you will need to do to start getting visitors is to make sure that you deliver something that is interesting on your blog. If you’re serious in establishing a web presence you’ll want to have a minimum of two blogs. One that shares news specifically about your company, brand and designs. You’ll also want a second one that covers the t-shirt industry and culture with a few plugs and links here and there about your own products, along with some affiliate links to other t-shirt sites.

Many first-time bloggers make the mistake of creating a blog that serves as a personal diary, with random posts on a wide variety subjects. While this may be interesting to a small segment of people, it’s not the best choice to bring visitors from the major search engines who prefer targeted content. So, stick with the subject of t-shirts, and develop your content around that niche. You could offer reviews on specific designs and brands, report sales and coupon codes, offer designing tips and tutorials or an endless choice of content. Use your imagination and you’ll come up with a unique vision for your blog that will get the attention you are seeking for your designs and brand.

Try to review your posts before publishing to make sure they are relatively free of misspellings and grammatical errors. Try to include titles, subheadings, bulleted lists, and white space to make the copy easy on the eye. Many readers do not want to come into a blog and see a single paragraph written in poor English, no matter how interesting the subject. It’s just too hard to read.

Anthony Marsh is the owner of Popular Threadz and Crack Smoking Shirts. He runs the online resource TeeBiz.com and the t-shirt community TeeBurb.com.