As with any other job, there are good and bad parts of the print on demand business. A good thing? Designing is fun. To the extent that I sometimes find myself feeling guilty for goofing off when I’m supposed to be working… except I actually am working. I suppose that guilt is a con, but I’ll probably get over it eventually.
I haven’t invested as much time into Pinterest and Instagram as I maybe should, but so far I haven’t seen signs of the sort of vitriol in either of those places that keeps me off Facebook and Twitter lately. Just a lot of fun and pretty stuff to look at. So those marketing channels seem more good than bad.
The uploading process can get tedious. Exactly how bad depends on the site… and on the design. On Redbubble and Society6, you can upload different files for different products using the same basic design. Which is good for product optimization, but it can take a while to go through and make sure each product is using the optimal design variation.
But at least once that is done, it’s done.
During recent months, I’ve revisited many old designs in order to improve their findability. How? By putting better keywords in titles, tags, and descriptions.
Ideally, I would like each design to use the same title and description across every site. But different demographics visit each marketplace, and they are likely to search for different things. I do keep the titles mostly the same so far, but worry about whether that practice is hurting sales.
Finding tags is just plain hard, largely because I am unsure of my accuracy in defining styles. How would you describe my nested hexagons, for example? That is one of my staple designs at this point, and I don’t even know what to call it.
Finally, we come to descriptions. I have gone back and forth on those a lot. Just describing the pattern pretty easily hits a lot of the tags, which is good for coming up in searches. But then I come across a post from somebody who has apparently had a lot of success. And this person claims that people are losing out on sales with their boring, descriptive descriptions. So I try to write in the suggested style. Then I feel bad because I don’t really believe that a sun sticker or brightly colored curtain is going to significantly improve someone’s drab day.
Someone else recommends writing something like, “Do you love archery? This archery-themed pattern is for you. Or it will make a great gift for the archer in your life, whether it be your father, brother, sister, aunt, friend, or teacher.” I don’t remember the exact example or examples used, but I bookmarked it, came back to consult when writing my next description, and decided against following the advice. It just didn’t sound good.
And then I wondered if I should have gone along with it anyway, because maybe I could come up in more searches with more audience keywords.
Anyway. All this to say that when it comes to writing descriptions, I am probably going to be struggling for a long time to come.