Pick your poster niche
So, you are ready to start selling posters. Great! Now, the blessing and curse with selling posters is that there are infinite possibilities regarding what you can sell. So, it can easily be 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). So, log on to Etsy and simply type in ‘poster’ in the search bar. Get ready to write a massive list of the broad categories and type of posters that people are selling.
If you do not have more than 50 categories written down by the end, you are doing something wrong. There are seriously an infinite amount of posters! For example, here are some popular ones to get you started:
Star sign posters, Kitchen posters, World map posters, Custom Dog Portrait posters, Music posters, Movie posters, Fine art posters, Skiing posters, Girl Power posters and Football posters.
Here are a few examples from just typing in ‘Posters’ on Etsy. As you can see, there is a wide range of options you can go for! The bottom right one is an excellent example that you really don’t need to be excellent at graphic design to do Print on Demand.
Now, you have a huge list of potential products to sell. What next? There are a few important things you need to bear in mind when picking your niche:
Does this interest me?
Don’t make the mistake of going down a niche that didn’t actually interest you just because it would probably be a money maker. Before you know it, what can be a very fun process of making designs can become incredibly monotonous, and feel like a chore. You need to bear in mind that 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! As well, creativity will flow far better if it is something you are interested in, which at the end of the day will lead to better designs that are more likely to be purchased by customers.
Is this within my design range?
Don’t let this put you off too much. We will go through how to get started on design later on in this guide. However, it is important to note that the plain truth of it is that some niches and designs are a hell of a lot more complicated than others. For example, quote posters can essentially be designed by anyone when you learn about how to put nice fonts together in a good color scheme.
On the other hand, some posters you see may have been designed with complex illustrations in a program like Illustrator. To start with, it may be better to pick a niche that seems a bit more simple to get into, as you can always expand your range with other stores further down the line. A good way of evaluating the design complexity is by identifying if this poster is a lot of elements put together or is a lot of elements created by the designer themselves. Design can in a lot of cases be like a jigsaw - putting colours, shapes and text together to create an image. This will be a lot easier to start with and can be learnt by anyone, compared to complex drawings and illustrations.
Is this niche subject to copyright issues?
Time to delve deep into good old copyright. Now, when you go through Etsy, you will without a doubt see hundreds of sellers selling music album posters, car posters, movie posters and more. Obviously, these posters contain the property of musicians, companies and more and are therefore copyrighted. The annoying thing is - these are a complete cash cow. If you go down the music poster route, I will honestly be surprised if you don’t make thousands. However it is only a matter of time before the copyright strikes start rolling in and you eventually get banned from Etsy.
So I would highly recommend not making this mistake. Etsy is an incredible platform for selling posters, and it is a hell of a lot easier to make sales on there compared to advertising your own website. And, you >chance on Etsy. Once you have been banned once, you are not allowed to sign up again (and they do ID checks - so you won’t be able to rejoin again under your own name).
So, don’t be shortsighted when it comes to entering Print on Demand. If you keep your designs legitimate, they will last you a lifetime and you will then later be able to crosspost them to other platforms, again without the worry of ever getting shut down.
