How To Be Successful On Merch By Amazon ( Run A Successful T-Shirt Business Tutorial)
About this video
RJ Martinez gives a beginner-to-intermediate overview of succeeding on Merch by Amazon, claiming he has done over $150k in royalties in three and a half years on the platform. His first advice is mindset and workflow: identify your strength — his is research, keywords and SEO, not drawing — lean into it, and outsource the rest as soon as possible. He explains the model: research demand first, create a design, place it on products like t-shirts, sweatshirts and PopSockets, and Amazon handles customer service, shipping and returns while the seller collects a royalty. He says acceptance is invitation-only and can take from a few days to, in his framing, three months to a year (his own took about three months), advises filling out every part of the application, and notes a rumored plus of having an FBA account. Success, he argues, comes from understanding how customers search — keyword research before design, using phrases like ‘dabbing English bulldog shirt’ — preferring evergreen niches over short-lived trends, finding low-competition phrases, checking trademarks at the USPTO before designing, and optimizing listings with brand and title as the most important fields, followed by bullet points. Start with text-based designs, move to illustrations to differentiate, and never copy others.
Key takeaways
- Build a workflow around your strength — his is research and SEO, so he outsources design — rather than trying to master everything at once.
- Research keywords and demand before designing; a specific searched phrase with little competition is what gets the first sale.
- Fill out the application completely; he says acceptance is invitation-only and his own approval took about three months.
- Sequence every design as research, trademark check (USPTO), then design, to avoid rejections and worthless designs at the start.
- Optimize brand and title first, then bullet points, with tightly targeted keywords — keyword stuffing unrelated terms pushes listings from page one to page three or beyond, in his account.
Episode details: published August 26, 2020 · 14:45 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are RJ Martinez’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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