Learn how to create merchandise. Whether you are in a band, have written a book, produced a movie or video, this site is for you. Learn how to merchandise your products and make money doing it. The best part is that it is all ONLINE, you don’t even have to touch the product. Its not merchandise, its MITCHendise!

Don’t think you have the chops to create a video?  Think again my friend.  I have seen videos on there that are clearly not the best quality.  If you have a story line, a camera or web-cam, and some time then you can create a video for YouTube.  Best of all, you can then grab the code from YouTube and imbed it in your site. 

Not really into creating video?  No problem there either since there are already several million videos on YouTube, you can search for something that is relavent to your content and grab the code for it.  This not only adds value for your readers (they don’t have to search the millions to find this great piece that will be interesting to them), but it also adds some visual elements that many could be yearning for.  While many of us would prefer to read the content (because it doesn’t require speakers or interrupting anyone else w/in ear shot), others are the opposite and would prefer to sit and watch. Read More

Stuffy Front Cover

Distribution is the name of the game on the internet.  It is the same as location in real estate.  The more distribution channels you have, the better odds you have at making sales.  The same goes for where your distribution channels are.  That is one of the reasons Google Adwords is making the company oodles of money – a ton of people want their advertisements on the largest volume internet search engine.

There is more to life than Google Adwords though.  There are plenty of distribution channels that don’t cost anything and bring in a lot of targeted users.  For instance:

Books:

• Scribd - you can upload your books, magazines, etc. and even sell them through their marketplace.  I have loaded the Stuffy book there as well to show you how it looks.  It took me about 10 minutes to sign up and load it.
• Lulu – upload and sell your book.  There are a lot more options here.

Video:

• Vimeo
• YouTube
• Funny or Die

You get the idea.  Search for popular distribution outlets for your particular product (video, music, poetry, books, etc.) and upload it.  The more outlets you have the bigger audience you reach. 

BE SURE TO FILL OUT YOUR PROFILE!  If people like your stuff, they will want to know where to get more, or even check out your website.  So be sure to include your website in your profile, and maybe even upload a logo. 

Do you have any other suggested sites?

Mitch
Its not Merchandise, its Mitchendise!

Who's the Leader?

Marketing 101 here.  Virtually every month there is some sort of occasion for which someone will buy a gift for someone else.  Why can’t that gift be a Stuffy Book, or a T-shirt from your shop?   Don’t believe me? 

Here is a list of occasions by month:

January – New Years
February – Presidents Day, Valentines Day
March – St. Patrick’s Day
April – Easter (99% of the time)
May – Cinco de Mayo, May Day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day
June – Father’s Day
July – 4th of July
August – start of School / getting ready for school
September – Labor Day
October – Halloween
November – Thanksgiving
December – Pick a religion, and they have something going on in December. Read More

Well, writing good content is a subjective practice.  Depending upon what you want as the desired affect, it could mean writing short posts about the latest news or what was on Conan O’Brien last night, etc.  Do you just want eyeballs to see your wares, or do you want a more targeted message.  If you want your post to be on Digg, then in general it is going to have to have a mass-market appeal since Digg is based on crowd sourcing.  A post about your specific topic is probably not going to rank very well in Digg, so for now just focus on writing about your product / subject and building your history for the search engines. 

I am assuming you have already started a blog and are commenting on sites that are in your target market.  If that is case, then you will want to provide them with good information if you want them to come back or hold their attention for more than a minute.  It does little good to post comments on other sites and get traffic only to have that traffic look at your site and say “What they hey?  This isn’t what I thought it would be.”  They will be looking for content that is similar in subject to the places you posted.  Read More

So, you have tried commenting on forums and other websites that are involved in your niche, but for some reason the folks there have either deleted your comments or scolded you for marketing your website/products.  Well, if you basically interrupted their conversation with a “Hello, I think I have a product that you might be interested in, check out my new book at…”  Then being banned from those sites or having your comments deleted or being scolded by the moderator are all things that could happen.  The purpose of comments and forums is for people to share information about a specific subject.  If you walk into a conversation and try to market your product directly you are no better than the commercials on the TV that interrupt the programs.  There is a reason people tape or DVR programs – so they can fast forward through all the interruptions.  On the internet, they have much more control and can directly scold you for interrupting. 

So if I can’t say “come look at my book…”, how do I get my message across? Read More

Stuffy Shirt

Where else can you market your merchandise?  Find other websites that are in a similar niche as your product.  So if you are a band, find other band or music websites that allow you to place a comment on their posts.  If you are an author, find other sites that deal with the subject matter of your book(s).  For instance, my Stuffy book is kind of heavily laden with sarcasm.  I would thus go to the 5 sites on the internet that are also related to sarcasm and join the conversations.  Not sure how to comment?  Relax, I have made a post on the Blogmaster General site teaching you how to comment on websites.

There is also a list of items you can do to market your blog on a later post on Blogmaster General.  Marketing your products is going to be one of the more difficult parts of these projects.  Mainly because most of us do not have a couple hundred thousand to flop down on a huge marketing campaign that includes TV and radio and print ads.  If you think TV is dead, then you have been reading the dead newspapers too long.  TV, although not raking in as much money as they used to, is still a giant medium in which to get a message in front of thousands of people.  The decrease in ad sales for TV has for some reason been inversely proportional to the number of reality shows on. Read More

Stuffy Shirt

If you don’t already have a website, create one.  The internet is a huge traffic and sales machine.  I have given you easy steps to follow to get your own blog installed over at Blogmaster General. 

Load your site up with your Mitchendise.  As I have only created the book and the shirt so far, I have only placed the shirt here.  But, as you can see placing some of your Mitchendise within your posts and on your site will put it in front of your fans more often.  You have a much better shot at selling Mitchendise if your fans actually know it is available. 

The From Pink Slip site is starting on how to start a Zazzle shop, so go there and learn the shop setup and load your images into Zazzle instead of paying for a premium CafePress.  Most likely you are going to be your biggest salesman anyway, so it shouldn’t matter which of these you use, but on the off chance someone is looking for your product in the respective marketplace, or due to coding by CafePress gets counted as a marketplace user, you will get screwed on the commission.  Whereas if you point everyone to your Zazzle shop, not only is it free, but you get the commission you set. Read More

Stuffy Front Cover

CafePress allows you to have a single product in a Free Shop.  You can not do customization or anything like that with the layout, but you can create 1 of each product.  You can put a single design on all products or different designs on different products, but bottom line is that you only get to use one product one time.

So instead of paying the Premium shop fees, here is a work around – Start a free shop using the name of your book or some other identifier.  Load your book, load a picture of the main character.  Follow the instructions on From Pink Slip to create the shop and load pictures and create merchandise.  Put the picture of the main character on all of the merchandise.  With your next book, you will do the same thing – start another free shop and load the book and the main character picture.  You will then have several free shops for your book and a main character Mitchendise to be sold / displayed.

What about those of us who didn’t write a book and want lots of Mitchendise?  What about those of us who have lots of characters? Read More

If you are still drawing the cover art like I am (I don’t want to rush you, and I want to make sure mine looks good), then this will give you an extra week to review it, make any tweeks, etc.  If you have already finished your book cover, here are some steps for the back cover that you might want to look at.

Remember clear back when you first started reading the blog and I told you it would be nice to have several other endeavours (books, videos, etc.) done as well so you could use the same promotion to get all three Mitchendised?  No?  Well consider yourself reminded.  On the back of the book, you can write testimonials, put a picture of yourself, write a little bio, include the names of your other books, etc.  This is a good spot to promote your works.  Read More