Ugly Shirts Fortune Lesson 1 Select Your Niche Markets

Passionate men and women are the perfect group of people to sell t-shirts to. Here is my winning formula: make a shirt for passionate people.

The design on the shirt isn’t really that crucial to our success. We can have an ugly design and still sell a lot of shirts. The key is to make a shirt with a message that resonates with them.

People are passionate in areas like their occupations, hobbies, pets, sports, religion, etc. Many people are passionate about what they do and are proud of it.

Yet, there isn’t really a place where they can buy shirts that express their feelings. For example, it’s not easy to find a scuba diving themed t-shirt in any neighborhood even if you look hard for one.

That’s where we come in. We will make shirts for them, we will buy ads to reach out to them when they are on Facebook, and then we will sell them those shirts.

We, as t-shirt marketers, will become very successful when we can make people’s dreams come true to own the shirt they have been looking for and wear it proudly to show off to their circle. This is key.

A very good example is when I designed a shirt with a quote which resonated very well with US veterans.

Even though it’s just text based and not very well designed, the message on the shirt resonated so deeply with the veterans; they were so proud to wear it. I even had veterans messaging me on Facebook, thanking me for putting down their thoughts onto cloth.

One liked the quote on the shirt so much that he bought a tee plus a hoodie just so he could wear it during winter. That shows just how those few lines captured the hearts of those Vets.

So, how do you select your niche market?

Follow this 3-step process:

 

Step #1: Look for what people are passionate about

Here are some resources to help you if you have no idea where to start.

Hobby list: http://discoverahobby.com/listofhobbies

Sport list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports

Occupation list: http://www.careerprofiles.info/careers.html

 

Step #2: Verify your niche markets

How to verify your niche market is easy?

If there are shirts for your niche on Teespring, eBay, Amazon or Cafepress.com it shows there is a market for t-shirts in your niche. It only takes less than a minute to verify.

 

Step #3: Find out if your target audience is on Facebook

Once you know there is a market for your niche, you want to find out if your target audience is on Facebook.

To find out whether people in a specific niche are on Facebook, you just want to check to see if there are Facebook pages relevant to your audience. If you can find lots of these pages, you know these people are there hanging around on the pages. You can buy ads to reach them later.

Makes sense? Awesome!

This is how we will do it. Let’s login to our Facebook account.

Next, we will click the magnifier icon at the top left corner; it’s just next to the Facebook logo if you are using a computer.

Upon clicking the magnifier, a search field will open up that looks like the screen capture below.

Next, we will enter our niche into the “Search Facebook” field.

Let’s say we want to find out if firefighters are on Facebook; we will enter “firefighter” into the search field, then select “search for
firefighter’’ from the drop down menu as suggested by Facebook.

Next, we will select “Pages” on the left menu to filter out the search results, as we only want to look at firefighter related pages on Facebook:

Once you have done that, we will see a bunch of pages related to firefighters:

Scroll down the search results to see if you can spot some pages with lots of likes.

In our case, there are lots of popular firefighter related pages:

-Firefighter 10K likes

-Fire Fighter Industry 12K likes

-FirefighterToolbox 169K likes

-TACFIT Firefighter 11K likes

There are so many firefighters hanging around on these Facebook pages.

Verified! The firefighter niche is a go.

That’s the process of how you take a niche market and verify if you can reach out to these people on Facebook. The ability for you to reach a target audience on Facebook is important, as you will be running ads to show them your shirts.

Repeat the process I have just shown you on all the niches you are interested in selling tees to.

There are so many professions out there. Being a firefighter is just one of them.

What about professionals like aircraft mechanics and submarine crews? These are low competition niches that few are running ads to.

These people may not have ever seen a t-shirt custom-made for their profession. Yet, these people are proud of their jobs. As such, you have very low competition compared to obvious niches like engineers, teachers, hair dressers, farmers, war veterans, etc. Run ads to them and sell shirts!

And what about hobbyists? Gamers, hikers, campers, scuba divers, golfers, anglers, drinkers (my drinker friend insists it’s a hobby). The opportunities are endless.

Keep researching other niches. Make a list of possible ideas. This way, you will never run out of niches to launch new campaigns for.

Once you have a list of niche markets you’d like to sell tees to, you want to brainstorm your t-shirt design ideas.

In the next lesson, I’ll show you how to pick up great t-shirt design ideas for your shirts.

I’ll see you there.