How to Pick Your Poster Niche
So, you are ready to start selling posters. Great! The blessing and the curse of selling posters is that there are infinite possibilities regarding what you can sell. It can easily feel quite overwhelming at first.
The first thing I would recommend doing is having a look at what others are selling. Etsy is a wonderful place for this (and will likely be a key part of your poster-selling journey). Log on to Etsy and simply type ‘poster’ into the search bar. Get ready to write a massive list of the broad categories and types of posters people are selling.
If you do not have more than 50 categories written down by the end, you are doing something wrong! To get you started, here are some popular ones:
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Star sign posters
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Kitchen art
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World maps
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Custom dog portraits
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Music and movie posters
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Fine art prints
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Skiing and sports posters
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Quote-based posters
Now that you have a huge list of potential products, how do you narrow it down? Here are three vital things to bear in mind:
1. Does this interest me?
Don’t make the mistake of going down a niche that doesn’t actually interest you just because it looks like a "money maker." Before you know it, the fun process of making designs becomes monotonous and feels like a chore. You will be spending a lot of time creating designs—if it is something you are interested in, you are much less likely to get burnt out, and your creativity will flow much better!
2. Is this within my design range?
Some niches are a lot more complicated than others. For example, quote posters can be designed by almost anyone once you learn how to pair nice fonts with a good color scheme.
On the other hand, some posters require complex illustrations in programs like Illustrator or Photoshop. To start with, it may be better to pick a niche that is "a jigsaw"—putting colors, shapes, and text together to create an image—rather than drawing complex characters from scratch.
3. Is this niche subject to copyright issues?
When you browse Etsy, you will see hundreds of sellers selling music albums, cars, and movie posters. These are a complete cash cow, but they are also copyrighted.
I highly recommend not making this mistake. Etsy is an incredible platform, but they have a "one strike" policy for copyright. Once you are banned, you are usually banned for life, and they perform ID checks to ensure you don't rejoin. If you keep your designs legitimate, your business will last a lifetime and you can crosspost your work to other platforms without the worry of getting shut down.
