How To Sell 100 Merch by Amazon Shirts A Day Using Reddit

What if I told you that you could sell an extra 100 shirts every single day through Merch by Amazon? Sounds a bit far fetched I know. The great thing about understanding marketing though is that this is VERY achievable if you know what you are doing.

Most people rely on organic traffic through Amazon to sell their shirts. This is great and something I love doing myself. Amazon seems to have an almost endless amount of organic traffic that will shop and buy products all day long. If you rely on that traffic only, you are doing yourself a disservice. You are fighting for that organic traffic that EVERYONE else is fighting for when getting ahead of the game is so crazy easy if you just put a little bit of effort in.

Selling 100 more shirts a day will not only boost your BSR and position in Amazon, it will ensure you get even MORE organic traffic. If you price anywhere where I do generally ($16.99 as of writing this), that is over $400 extra a day. That is an extra $12k a month in royalties. This is on top of all the organic sales you are already getting!

Even better than an extra $400 a day is making all this money from 100% FREE traffic.

All you need to do to find out the secret is…buy my course! (just kidding of course).

Use Reddit!

Yep, that is the secret. You can use Reddit to sell an extra 100 shirts a day pretty easily if you are familiar with the platform.

You see, Reddit is a social platform that is a lot different than almost all other platforms. This is where I get the vast majority of my news and entertainment. I do not own a TV and do not watch the news. Maybe it is because of my generation that Reddit comes so naturally, but a lot of people I have talked to have either never heard of the platform, or found it very confusing to navigate.

I want to try and cut through some of that confusion today and go through a method that has worked time and time again for me. The method is even more simple than you may thing.

Give people exactly what they ask for, and they will pay you for it.

Sounds simple right? It is, and it can make you a LOT of money if done right. Remember to sign up for a 3 day free trial of Merch Informer so you can find some HOT niches that this method will work wonders on.

Reddit Explained

Before we get into the method though, you will need to understand a little bit about Reddit and how it works. What “reddiquette” is, and why it is important to your success.

Reddit is the “Front Page of the Internet” and that is pretty much how it is used every single day. It is a massive updated list of links, commentary, news, entertainment, politics, and computer jargon all updating daily from user submissions. Sounds like one of the best spots to promote any kind of shirt, and that is because it is!

To start off with, think of Reddit as a forum. Each forum is broken down into smaller chunks called “sub forums”. In the case of this platform, they are called “sub reddits” and there is one for ANYTHING you could think of. There is even one for Merch by Amazon: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonMerch/ (I run it).

Each of these sub reddits follow the same structure. They look like this: reddit.com/r/topichere.

This is not an exaustive list, but here are some communities on Reddit that have over 50,000 people in them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/wiki/listofsubreddits

If you want to stand a chance of selling shirts in these groups, you need to make sure you are posting in the right one. Otherwise your submissions will quickly get “down voted”.

When you first get started using the platform, you can sign up for an account in the upper right hand corner. You do not even need to verify your email address. If you really want to continue using the system though, you will want to verify it so you can keep track of comments and build up “Karma”. Karma is imaginary internet points on the platform and serve to show what your standing is in the community based on links/submissions and comments you have made. This will not help your posts show up any higher or help you make more sales, but they do help display you are an active member of the community if anyone checks out your profile.


This is what a profile looks like above. Make sure to pick a decent and appropriate username that would not have a negative outlook on your company. This profile is going to be associated with every single link you submit or comment you make.

You get Karma and comment Karma from either commenting or posting links. Other users of the site then either upvote or downvote them based on if they like the content in individual sub reddits (sub forums).

Finally, the Reddit demographic is interesting and they are VERY quick to call people out who they sense are marketing themselves or some product. The users are male, middle aged, with about 25k-50k per year in earnings and have a bachelor’s degree or some college education. The VAST majority of the users are from the USA.

Getting Started

So now that you understand what Reddit is, and sort of how it works, you need to get involved. If you are still confused, do not worry. I will walk you though exactly how to get started right now.

Step 1

The first thing you should do before you even sign up to Reddit is download RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite). This is simply going to make the experience of going through the social platform a lot easier.

You can find RES here: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

Simply download the plugin and install it.

Step 2

The second step is going to Reddit.com and signing up for an account in the upper right hand corner.

Step 3

You want to pick out some sub reddits (sub forums) to join. You can either troll through this list to find things that interest you: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/wiki/listofsubreddits or you can simply use the search feature on Reddit. I also will a lot of the times Google what I am interested in. It looks something like this.

In the right hand corner of these subreddits, you will see something that looks like this:

You will want to subscribe to the that sub Reddit. This will show you new submissions in your home feed when you go to “reddit.com” and are logged into your account.

Step 4

Get involved! You cannot just expect to show up in someone’s house or place they hang out and expect them to start buying things from you. Getting involved is the MOST important step. You need to actually answer questions, post interesting links in sub reddits you are a fan of. Help people out, give them value. Without this step you will fail.

A good place to get involved is in a massive subreddit that lots of people are interested in to “build up your account”. I like to point people towards https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/ because most people are passionate about this subject. When you head to that subreddit, it will look like this:

The numbers on the left hand side are the amount of upvotes the submission has. You can vote on the submissions youself by clicking on the up and down arrows. You will see the name of the submission, and you can click the links to read the articles.

Below the articles, you will see who submitted the post (their Reddit username), and below that, you will see the amount of comments they have.

The comments are where people argue, share more information, make people laugh, and the engagement happens. The comments are VERY important and is where you should be getting involved.

Some people even create accounts to just engage in the comments. This is one of my favorite examples: https://www.reddit.com/user/Shitty_Watercolour

Spend some time going through his post history. All the guy does is draw watercolor drawings for other people in the comments of reddit submissions. (If this guy were to get on Merch by Amazon he could make SO MUCH MONEY).

The 100 Shirt Method

Now, do not do this right away. I have warned you. Get involved with some sub reddits first and provide value. Give good links, engage in discussion. Help people!

Once you have done that for a while, it is time to start making some money.

Remember how I said above that people on the platform are very quick to call out people that are trying to market to them?

What if you were providing that person EXACTLY what they asked for? That would work a lot better, and that is exactly how this method works. We are going to create shirts for people that ask for them. That way we do not get called out, they get what they want, and we get what we want (merch sales!).

This is how it works.

Step 1

Have an engaged Reddit account. By this point, you should already have one of those. You should also have a good understanding of how Reddit works and join up some of the communities that are thriving in discussion (politics, music, news, entrepreneur).

Step 2

Sign up for a free account here: https://www.trackreddit.com.

It will look like this:

What this is going to allow you to do is track a keyword or phrase in submissions (links) AND Comments in real time.

Do you get it yet? This is pretty special.

Step 3

Click on Tracking on the right hand side of the screen and bring your attention to this box:

For example purposes, I am going to fill this out with a political example.

Click on start tracking.

Almost immediately, the left hand side of the screen starts going off with the results from the tracking we are doing.

If you want a few more minutes, the list keeps growing. Keep in mind that these are real time comments that are being tracked for a specific keyword.

Step 4

Take advantage of this tracking system. If you are not seeing the power of how this would work by now, let me just come out and say it. You can track when people comment that they want a shirt or a design on a shirt!

If someone sees something they like and comment “I wish that was a shirt”, wouldn’t it be great if all of a sudden you showed up with a link to Amazon with that exact shirt they want that you put up on Merch?

Need an example? How about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/28f2kl/i_want_this_shirt/.

With 1200 upvotes, this was VERY popular 3 years ago.

If you look in the side bar, you will notice this:

If you were there 3 years ago (and trust me, people want new types of shirts EVERYDAY), you could have simply shown up and said “hey guys, I found that shirt on Amazon!” and given a link. 480,000 people would have seen your design. How many sales do you think you would have gotten that day?

Hundreds of thousands of people putting their eyes on a shirt they would be interested in means a lot more than 100 sales a day, I can promise that.

Wrapping It Up

So the way you make this method work is you set up the tracker to track certain phrases such as “want that shirt”, “need that shirt”, “where can I find this shirt” and similar phrases on Reddit. Then when people say they want/need a shirt, you simply give them what they wanted. You provide them value, and they provide you money. The most simple transaction there is!

It really does not get any better than that. Super simple to make sales with MASSIVE traffic being driven on Reddit every single day. There is a piece of the pie for everyone.

And who knows, maybe you will start getting some of your news from Reddit instead of CNN or your Facebook feed!

Comments
  • I think this will only work if you have a very fast designer. Front page changes every day, and one day too late and you will miss out on a lot of views.

  • I can’t thank you enough for these posts! With your help, I grew my business from $23 to over $900 in one month. I’m so grateful for all of the tips and guidance!

  • so are you saying have it search for “want this shirt” in specific subreddits? as opposed to it searching the phrase for all of reddit? or even using a keyword for a shirt you already have along with “Need this shirt” or whatever.

  • You could also come up with ideas for merch using Reddit ( looking how many upvotes a comment has)

  • Neil, Are you saying you’re regularly selling 100 tee shirts a day via this method alone, or are you saying it should be theoretically possible to do so? If the latter, what would the daily average (Mode) be, via this method, over the last month?

  • Like one of the earlier commenters said, you need to be quick on this. MBA approval times can be lengthy. POD sites such as redbubble would be more approriate as a tee would be live (more or less) immediately.

  • Wow! That’s some great advice! Is there any way I could follow your blog? I got this from a link.
    Thanks

  • I need some helps Please @@!
    Hey I posted key words “Want this shirt” in search box from Trackreddit.com as you recommended but it turns out there is no matches with what I typed in. And then I tried several times and received a message like “you reach the maximum amount of trackers…”. Did I do something wrong and Can I just track a few times on trackreddit or somethings? I’m new to Reddit, sorry if I asked silly :(. Anyway, thanks so much for reading my comment, Neil

    • You can only track 2 different phrases at the same time with that tool but you will need to play around with different combinations of words in order to find something that works well.

      • Oops, but I mean at least it should give some reasons, like something including the word “shirts” for example. It turns out nothing and I’m really confused. Thanks for replying ^ ^

  • Hi Neil! thanks for this info! so if a blogger mentioned “wants this shirt,” do you go and start designing and making that shirt on a website ?

    • Reddit is a kind of social media forum site. So if they mention they want a shirt, then yes, I will create that shirt and post a link there. This can work almost anywhere that some says they want something.

      • Once you have identified a shirt that is wanted, how long does it take you to turn around with a finish product to sell?

        • Depends if its something trending I usually get my designer to do it on the same day for evergreen stuff I dont rush him so much so it could be a few days.

  • Neil this is really cool, my biggest concern is turnaround time on designs, right now from concept to live on Amazon we’re at 24 hours if we’re lucky because we’re working with a designer. Do you have similar issues, or are you making it work with a 1-2 day response time?

    • It can work at longer than 24 hours, but that part is really dependent on Amazon. Sometimes designs go live in 30 minutes while others take a day. Really just luck of the draw!

    • In generally only takes a while at the lower tiers. I would say at tier 500 and above they go through in as quick as 15-30 minutes.

  • Thank you so much for the valuable piece of info. Being super new to MBA all the great advice, suggestions, tutorials have been golden and so appreciated. Thank you!!!

    • It basically saves you a TON of time by not needing to click on links to see images. It does a bunch of other cool things, but it allows you to see the content of image links directly on Reddit without needing to open them in another tab.

  • Hi Neil,
    Is this method still working well for you?
    Any suggestions on the type of subreddits to go for? I was contemplating ‘Formula 1’ as it is one of my passions and has 300k+ people in it but was thinking that with that niche t-shirt requests may be a bit brand related (drivers and teams) and be a no go on the copyright front. Would love to get your thoughts?
    Many Thanks.

    • It still works! I would not not even risk anything formula 1 especially if it comes to names of famous drivers.

      • Thanks Neil, good to know.
        Intrigued as to the timescale of this method and actual fruition?
        With just 2 phrases to track what would be the best way to utilize? Focus on one niche and just let them run?…and with that, how many opportunities on average do you think emerge per month?
        Thanks.

        • Don’t track niches but phrases that will get picked up daily like “want that shirt” or something like that. You can generally start pretty quickly as Reddit is a big place.

  • Anyone else having any issues with gettting a No results feedback on the TrackReddit site. I even tried searching for “Lebron” on the r/sports subreddit and got nothing back? Am i doing something wrong?

  • how many times u can search/ and how/? is there a limit every day? or if i take the most expenssive month payment i can search so many times as i can?

  • Give me one reason at least to choose to promote my shirts on that particular forum rather than other forums directly related to my niche topic

  • Thank you for this valuable and wonderful information. For me my application was approved at the Merch by Amazon and I am a designer and photographer. I have signed up with Merch Informer. Can I upload my design directly from this site to Amazon? Thank you Mr. Neil

    • You can yes, but you should have an audience for those before you upload them. Straight photograph shirts do not seem to sell very well on the platform unless you have buyers already lined up.

  • How would you do this with already designed shirts? I am only allowed 10 designs on Amazon at moment and my own designs fill those spots.

  • THIS IS AMAZING! Thank you! At the risk of sounding like a dumb newbie…I’m gonna sound like a dumb newbie! LOL! How do you design that shirt and post it so fast?

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