If you have images of a scientist, deep in the recesses of his lab, piecing together parts of dead people, then good. Get a brain from a man named Abby Normal and you have the makings of a great plan. Truthfully, you can only regret the chances not taken when it comes to a business like Print on Demand publishing. For the most part, you have no overhead except your time, so once you have a site or store up and running, you have time to be creative. I mean this one more than one front.

Be creative in your endeavor with graphic design. Try new things and techniques. When it doubt, search it out. I primarily use Paint.Net for my design, although I recently received a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements. It’s going to take me some time to adjust so I keep plugging away with what works. After all, Paint.Net is free and there is a plethora of plugins available to mimic the effects of a real graphic designer’s abilities. Go to a book store, grab a cup of coffee and settle into an overstuffed chair with a couple of books on design and look for stuff that interests you.

Experimenting with design is one aspect. Experimenting with subject matter opens a whole new ball field to play on for designs. Tackle new subjects and take a walk on the wild side of self expression. Do you have a political voice? Express it and you’ll be surprised who will buy it. If your integrity and moral compass can take it, design for opposing viewpoints to maximize your chance of sales. Before the whole Guantanamo Bay Waterboarding news broke I had never heard of that kind of torture. It sounded like something you did at the beach, like body surfing or boogie boarding. So, I thought it would be funny to lampoon the idea that it was a sport and made a “Property Of” style shirt for the Guantanamo Bay Waterboarding Team. It was purely a joke aimed at the imagery in my head of someone surfing off the coast of Cuba. Little did I know it would become my biggest seller.

While I admit that I am no big red state conservative, nor bleeding heart liberal, I do lean to the left in most cases. The design wasn’t intended to speak to one side of the political aisle or the other, but I’m pretty sure I can figure out which way the majority of people who bought lean towards. It doesn’t bother me. It’s your right to have an opinion and I’m willing to make a dollar off of it for better or worse. Do understand that you should be socially responsible and stick to terms of service when it comes to political messages just like anything else. CaféPress has removed designs centered around Psalm 109.8 and I’m sure other sites will as well. Regardless of the intention behind the designs it paves the way for interpretation that could be considered violent, illegal, and downright treasonous. I don’t always agree with how the POD sites conduct their removal of content, for whatever infringement, but in this case I think it was the right choice.

In terms of experimenting in other ways, do some homegrown marketing for your site. Put up flyers at the grocery store. Buy some of your own stuff and take it flea markets or put it up on eBay. If you have the time and patience, use your online site to run a brick and mortar style business. Create customized order forms and offer to do work on a local basis. CafePress and Zazzle both have products like cards and posters. Offer up your talents to local groups to do shirts for their sports teams, family reunions, and other events. A lot of sites offer bulk discounts for multiple orders of the same product. Have you ever seen families at amusement parks wearing the same shirt? There you go. Some people need the service but don’t have the time to do it themselves. Look online for design contests and try your hand at sites like Fark and Flickr. If you are a good photographer, sites like Flickr can be an outlet to share your portfolio and offer links to products sporting your photos.

While no one wants to send people away from their site, not everyone will like your products. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money offering to show someone the door. CafePress and Zazzle offer affiliate programs that can generate you referral credits and income by linking to their store with a unique identifier. If they purchase something from the site after going to it from your affiliate link, you get paid. Established sites like T-Shirt Hell and Busted Tees offer affiliate programs as well. Yes, all of those links are affiliate links from my accounts. At least I was honest about it.

So, fire up the Jacob's Ladder travelling arc, get your parts together and make some mad doctor success.

For a self proclaimed graphic designer, which I use that term loosely I am a horrible artist. I cannot draw to save my life and using a computer to do it is even worse. Because I haven’t spent an exorbitant amount of time or money on products and training to hone these skills I have mainly stuck to faking it. I use tricks and effects built into paint programs or grab an image from the Internet for reference and then use the line tools and paint buckets to try and recreate it from scratch. My biggest friend is the curved line tool in Paint.Net. It allows me to draw a line and then curve it at certain points to mimic the curves on what I am recreating.

However, Print On Demand sites aren’t just about funny shirts and drawings. Let’s say you are a good photographer. You probably don’t want to focus on creating a lot of shirts in your store. You probably want to focus on prints, cards, posters, and other paper or home products. On CaféPress you could even publish your own book of Photography or Art CD-Rom for companies to use in their marketing. Are you a fledgling writer or musician. You can publish your own books and Music CDs with CaféPress. Explore how you can take your skills and turn them into profit.

My Mother-In-Law has a few paintings up in her home that I absolutely love. I tell my wife that I want them when they get rid of them. What I didn’t know is that her mom actually painted them. Now, this year hasn’t been the best for my in-laws. Besides being a 12 year survivor of Stage IV renal cell cancer, my Mother-in-Law ended up having to have a tumor removed from her brain this Spring and another from her abdomen this Summer. She’s been undergoing chemo the past 18 weeks and on top of all this, she lost her job due redundancy in the workplace and her home was flooded during the heavy rains we had in June. They’ve had to dip into their savings, post retirement, to replace her car and do reclamation on areas of their house as well as pay for treatments and medicines.

I put forth this proposition to her. I can take and convert her artwork into digital format and by using Zazzle and CaféPress, I can turn them into stamps or greeting cards or whatever. I offered her the opportunity to have all profit derived from sales of her work. Instead of creating a whole new site on CaféPress and having to charge another $60 for it I can just carve out a section on my site and host her designs. If there is a huge response maybe she can take up painting again in her retirement and make some extra income. That’s playing to her strengths.

Me, I have a lot of weaknesses, like I said. I can’t draw. But I’ve learned to do a lot of cool things by looking up tips and tricks on the Internet and reading up on how to create effects like gradients and feathering. The more you learn, the better a designer you can be and the more successful your shop can be. And don’t pigeonhole yourself into one program. I know I am a die hard Paint.Net disciple but I only use it for the images and graphics. Nine times out of ten I use good old Microsoft Word for text. Word Art is my favorite go to place in order to create shadow effects, shapes with words, and 3D renderings of words. Using these two programs together has had a definite impact in my sales as my top two selling designs would not have been possible without using Word Art in Microsoft Word.

In summary, start looking at the world around you and see how you can use your Print On Demand business to make money not just with funny shirts. Don’t think you can’t learn new tricks and technology. Go out and be successful.