Did you know? PewDiePie makes approximately $6,834,645 every month just by selling his merchandise. Uh, Yeah, We know. That is why if you have reached a good amount of subscribers and have a fan following, it is time to learn how to make merch for YouTube and market it to generate another source of magnificent income. We know YouTube has its amazing rewards, but it doesn’t hurt to create more streams of income with your YouTube fame. Many YouTubers have now become sensations and are brilliantly profiting from their merchandise sales. And hence, today, we are going to tell you how to make merch for YouTube and market it.
How To Make Merch For YouTube?
Selecting The Best Accessories And Designs
So the first step in making the best merch for your YouTube audience is to create accessories and designs that align best with your channel’s aura. For example, if you choose to make t-shirts, you can use a tagline that you use the most in your YouTube videos, or you can include a reference to one of your most popular videos, the various characters and artefacts you use in your videos and so on. It is also essential that you maintain originality and stay true to your videos while choosing the accessories and designs of your merchandise.
Maintain the Quality of your Merchandise
Quality beats quantity any day. It doesn’t matter how many designs and ranges of merch you have to offer; if their quality is not up to the mark, they won’t sell. As a YouTuber, you create your own brand, and you need to ensure the quality of your merchandise lives up to it. The quality of the products you sell to your customers directly represents your brand and channel. Hence, you need to ensure using the best quality raw materials and designs for your merch.
Picking the best shipping partner.
Again the shipping partner you choose to sell your products needs to be efficient. Selecting the right shipping partner would mean that you will have to measure the quality of their service, how they treat their customers, their reputation in the market, and, most importantly, how they handle the products and accessories they ship. Here you need to research a little bit. However, if you choose conglomerates like Amazon and FedEx, you won’t have to worry about shipping very much. Still, you do need to remember whatever the shipping company you hire does, is a direct reflection of you, and you wouldn’t want it to be a bad one.
How to Set Up The YouTube Merch Shelf?
Here are the steps to set up your Merchandise Shelf on YouTube:
- Click on your channel icon in the top right corner.
- Now click on ”YouTube Studio (beta).”
- You will be redirected to the page shown below, where you have to click on monetization on the left.
- Now click on “ Merchandise.”
- Click on “Organise” in the status bar.
- Here you can add up to 12 products on your YouTube merch Shelf and start selling your merchandise on YouTube.
- Though you can add up to 12 products on your merch shelf, it is important to keep in mind that viewers would only be able to see the first few products based on the devices they are using. The rest of the products are visible to the users once they start interacting with the YouTube merchandise shelf.
However, if you can’t see the merchandise option on the 4th step, it is probably because you are not eligible for selling merch on YouTube. So let us tell you more about the eligibility criteria you need to meet to sell your merch on YouTube.
Eligibility for Selling Merchandise on YouTube
Though you can sell merchandise by linking your audience to your eCommerce websites, you can also sell merchandise directly on YouTube with their Merch Shelf. Under this, channels can showcase their official branded merchandise to the audience. However, to be eligible for the merchandise-related features on YouTube, you will have to fulfil a few conditions. Let’s see the eligibility criteria for selling merchandise on YouTube:
- First, your channel needs to be monetized.
- It shouldn’t have received any hate speech strikes.
- Your videos haven’t violated YouTube’s channel monetization policies.
- If your channel is a music channel, it has to be an official artist channel
- If your channel isn’t a music channel, it has to have at least 10,000 subscribers
- You need to be operating from a country where the YouTube Partner Program is available.
- Only the audience of a few countries are able to see the merch shelf, so if your audience is from one of the countries that do not have the merch shelf feature yet, they won’t be able to view your merch shelf.
Below are the countries eligible to access the merch shelf and related features
How to Market Your YouTube Merchandise?
Create Videos about your Merch
Whenever you are about to launch your merch, you need to create a youtube video dedicated to it. You can point out the exciting things about the upcoming merch, where you are going to launch it, how you are going to launch it, et cetera, et cetera, to make sure your audience is waiting for your merchandise even before it releases. You can also host a live countdown for your merch to keep the audience interested and engaged.
Giveaways, Discounts, and Coupons
You can host giveaways for your audience and encourage them to engage more, hold competitions for discounts and coupons, give the first 20 or 50 customers special discounts, and do anything else you can come up with. The end goal is to engage the audience more, make your merch visible and sell more.
Social Media Marketing
Well, just blast your merch and its links everywhere on social media. Ask your fans and followers to do the same. You can always resort to social media to market anything and everything. When it comes to your YouTube merch, it is a brilliant way to reach more people with effective and inexpensive social media advertising.
Here we are again. With all the knowledge and ideas in this blog, you can now go right ahead and start earning through YouTube Merchandise. I hope your merch collection reaches the right audience and is largely accepted by them. For the Top YouTube Merch Ideas for your channel, click here.