Whether you have an Instagram account, run your own YouTube channel, or just stream for some extra cash on Twitch, you can easily double your income by selling merch. Reading the literature and data, you’ll find out that it is literally one of the easiest ways of influencers to make extra money, and thankfully, eCommerce websites are relatively easy to set up and operate.
You’ll only need a few days to create your very own merch, and this article will give you a few strategies you can use to make sure it is successful and brings you a lot of income:
#1. Make Your Merch Meaningful and Unique
It isn’t enough to just create a store and put a few generic items there thinking they’ll sell. This will most likely turn out to be a flop – you’ll be one of tens of thousands of influencers providing generic merch, who cares? Providing unique merch will be the bedrock of your eCommerce platform’s growth:
- Coming up with unique products isn’t an easy task by any stretch of the imagination – you’ll need to spend considerable time thinking about each aspect of your merch and try to come up with something that might attract the attention of your followers. If you can’t think of something, don’t hesitate to contact creative agencies, especially at the beginning.
- You must be intimately familiar with your followers. How old are they? What are their hobbies? Their household income is above average? If you want to put out meaningful merch, you need to know what your followers will be interested in. That’s why market research is a necessary component of launching your eCommerce platform.
- Utilizing things related to your platform and brand is more successful than the alternative. A lot of successful merch selling campaigns involved merch that featured inside jokes and references. These can be meaningful to your followers who invest a lot of time in you, as it allows them to have physical products that symbolize the relationship between you and them.
#2. Make Sure Your Followers Know About Your eCommerce Platform
A lot of influencers create an eCommerce platform, offer a few items, do a couple of shout outs to advertise for their platform, and then radio silence – they don’t do any more shoutouts and adverts to ensure their eCommerce platform keeps growing. After seeing a discouraging number of sales during the first few months, they’ll care even less about it, and eventually, the eCommerce platform gets completely abandoned. That’s why you need to follow a few strategies to keep it relevant and growing:
- Incentivize people to check out your eCommerce platform by providing time-limited merch from time to time. This is a strategy that makes it more interesting when you advertise for your platform to your followers and generate more clicks.
- Try to optimize your eCommerce platform and use the best-practices out of digital marketing to structure it in a way that would increase repeat customers. You can contact a digital marketing agency to help you.
- Don’t shy away from mentioning your platform in your Instagram posts, YouTube videos, Twitch streams, etc. The more you mention it, the more your followers will want to give it a look. Thinking about creative and funny ways of advertising for it will go a long way too.
#3. Use Innovative Platforms and Tools to Woo Your Followers
If anyone has closely followed the Twitch scene, they might remember this game-changing transformation that changed the scene forever: some twitch channels discovered that making a text-to-voice software read donation messages out loud doubled streamers’ income overnight. It was a simple change that no one expected to have such a transformative effect. Analysts and market researcher afterward realized what made it so effective: it was a way to get the influencer to react to something you wrote. It seems a lot of followers would pay a hefty price to get a reaction out of the influencer.
The point of this story was to illustrate the importance of small tools and unique platforms in your strategy. A small text-to-speech software was able to transform the whole Twitch platform. You should look for eCommerce platforms that are unique and let you interact with your users more directly. Although these tools are still rare, a hot startup is already in works that will be able to facilitate communication with your followers: fourthwall.com
