tionallyDid 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 many 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 become sensations and are brilliantly profiting from their merchandise sales. And hence, today, we will tell you how to make merch for YouTube and market it.
Why Is Selling Merch a Must for YouTubers?
Here are the reasons why YouTubers must sell merch:
- Selling merch can be a source of additional income apart from Ad revenue, diversifying their monetization opportunities.
- It helps to strengthen their personal brand and allows the YouTuber to become more recognizable and famous through its merchandise.
- It opens up marketing opportunities to collaborate with other YouTubers and designers to team up with them for new designs and product lines.
- Custom merch allows the YouTubers to create a unique identity for themselves through slogans, exclusive logos, etc, to build a loyal community.
- Fans can support their favorite creators while receiving a tangible product in return.
How To Make Merch For YouTube?
Follow these guidelines to make YouTube Merch:
Have a Plan Ready
One of the first requirements for launching your own merch on YouTube is having a plan ready. This includes making a detailed strategy for your plan to come to fruition. Asking yourself some essential questions will be helpful to plan:
- Who is your intended audience?
- What is your budget and marketing plan?
- On which platforms will you market?
Select and Set up a Store
Once you have a strategy in place, the next thing you must think about is setting up a store. Various platforms help you sell your merch. Platforms like Shopify offer different services and benefits to quickly sell the merchandise.
With Shopify, you can create dedicated pages to tell your brand story, a place to say to your fans about the merchandise part from your YouTube page. It also allows you to customize the website with logos, branding, and other information about the merchandise.
Selecting The Best Accessories And Designs
So, the next 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 artifacts you use in your videos, and so on. You must also 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 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 must use your merch’s best raw materials and designs.
Picking the best shipping partner
Again, the shipping partner you choose to sell your products must 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 do a little research. However, if you choose conglomerates like Amazon and FedEx, you won’t have to worry much about shipping. Still, you need to remember that whatever the shipping company you hire does is a direct reflection of you, and you wouldn’t want it to be bad.
How Much Money Do YouTubers Make From Selling Merch?
The income from merch sales varies based on audience size, engagement, and pricing. Some YouTubers make a few hundred dollars per month, while others generate thousands. Popular creators with a dedicated fan base can earn a significant portion of their revenue through merchandise sales.
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, you must fulfill a few conditions to be eligible for the merchandise-related features on YouTube. 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 must operate from a country where the YouTube Partner Program is available.
- Only the audience of a few countries can 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.
If your channel isn’t monetized yet, you can fulfill the monetization requirements faster if you promote the video on YouTube.
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 will launch it, how you will launch it, et cetera, et cetera, to make sure your audience is waiting for your merchandise even before it releases. Additionally, you can also host a live countdown for your merch to keep the audience interested and engaged.
You can buy YouTube views to increase the discoverability of your videos and eventually amplify the exposure of your merchs.
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 deals, and do anything else you can come up with. The goal is to engage the audience, 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. Regarding your YouTube merch, it is a brilliant way to reach more people with practical and inexpensive social media advertising.
Conclusion
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 YouTube merch ideas and collection reach the right audience and are primarily accepted by them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What do YouTubers use to make merch?
Many YouTubers have been utilizing print-on-demand services like:
- Teespring
- Printful
- Merch by Amazon
Apart from these services, many YouTube creators also use softwares like Adobe and Photoshop to create personalized merch products for their brands.
Q2. How much does it cost to make YouTube merch?
The cost of YouTube merch depends on various factors:
- Firstly, it depends on the product and the merch type. For example, a basic t-shirt costs significantly less than a tote bag or a cap.
- Second is the design concept. The cost will be higher if the designs are more intricate and require different colors.
- Moreover, when the merch is ordered in small batches or quantities, the per-item cost of the products will increase.
Q3. How many subscribers should you have to make merch?
More than subscribers, we would stress on average likes. If your videos get even 500 to 1000 likes regularly, you have already formed a small yet strong community and can consider selling merchs.
Q4. What website do YouTubers use to sell merch?
YouTubers sell their merch on several platforms, such as:
- Amazon
- Printful
- Spreadshop
- Redbubble
- TeeSpring