Thankfully, entrepreneurship is not dead (yet), so today, we’re going to provide you with two more places to sell your t-shirts. Fortunately, unlike other sites you may have dealt with in the past, these sites have a pretty solid foundation.

Spreadshirt

Spreadshirt has the basics down-pat for making your own t-shirt store. Referring to them as “shops”, the program is based on uploading your own designs, displaying them on your very own customizable website, and then self-promoting your products – just like a legitimate business.

Although Spreadshirt offers a snazzy premium service, its free option still gets the job done. With a free account, you can set up a shop, customize the HTML header and CSS, and even redirect the URL to the domain of your choosing. Even if you don’t know how to pull off code, everything is still customizable including colors, fonts, and even header graphics. Another one of the nice features it offers is its discount system, so you can occasionally send out codes to your best shoppers who might want to cut a little off their next purchase.

Furthermore, Spreadshirt offers an iFrame code which allows you to just embed your shop within whatever website you are using. Personally, I think this would work well with blogs or simple web pages. However, you could always just insert images of your products on your website and link them to their unique buy pages on your Spreadshirt store.

In addition to Spreadshirt’s ability to sell t-shirts on your own site with whatever mark-up that you desire, the website allows you to sell designs that other stores (and Spreadshirt itself) can use for their own items. Basically, when a shirt is sold with the design that you have placed in the public marketplace, you will be paid on commission. Beyond that, if you include Spreadshirt’s t-shirt customizer on your own shop, you will earn a percentage of each shirt sold.

As I mentioned before, Spreadshirt allows users to become a premium member through a monthly subscription (topping out at $100 a year). Besides its many other features, the upgrade allows you to have three shops under one account, removes all Spreadshirt-themed advertising from your site, and places your own custom logo on all invoices.

RedBubble

RedBubble is mainly for the artistic types, and its products are a little more expensive than the Five Dollar Deal shirt you picked up at that one flea market while visiting your family down in Alabama.  The quality is posh, but if you think you can keep up with the big dogs on this site, then go for it.

RedBubble places you in a vast community of masterful artists who love sharing their work, so you will never be short of inspiration if you want to make an artsy tee. With that in mind, this might not be the best place to sell your “World’s #1 Mee-Maw” t-shirt concept.

A minor downside for some users might be the fact that RedBubble does not offer you a way to set up a shop like Spreadshirt, for it presents itself in a style that could be best described as being an upper-scale DeviantArt. However, much like how you could sell prints on DA, you can sell shirts on RedBubble (in addition to various other wares).

Shirt design in RedBubble is a little different than Spreadshirt. Right off the bat, you are asked to download a template so that you can use the proper pixel dimensions. The template offers you a wide range of space to work in, so don’t worry about it limiting your creativity. Speaking of creativity, RedBubble respects your own, so it allows you to place either watermarks or even transparent overlays on your images so that other users cannot steal your work.

Marketing your work on this site is going to be a little like going to a craft fair. People who show up are likely selling their own creations in the same place, but the community-nature of the site is sure to find you some supporters. However, if you feel like selling off-site, I would suggest using the same method that I offered with Spreadshirt by linking images to the buy page.

There are several sub-communities throughout RedBubble, and it is really easy to connect with others even if you aren’t wanting to sell. You can share ideas, personal pieces, and input using each community’s section of the site, and you can also interact with individuals via BubbleMail.

Conclusion

Arguably, Spreadshirt and RedBubble have two of the best shirt-selling methods in the online world. By all appearances, the user-base seems a little small compared to Zazzle and CafePress, but they seem to be exactly what next-level shirt sellers could want. Test them out if you haven’t before, and see if you can get a feel for them.

What other uncommon shirt-selling websites do you use? Have you had any luck in the t-shirt selling business? What kind of designs have you made?

Image Credit: alvimann

While getting many people to visit your blog is fairly achievable, turning them into loyal visitors is a bit more tricky. Producing great content is one way to achieve that. But you need more than quality content to keep your readers coming back for more. You need to entice them, and PunchTab might help you to do that.

Packing The First Punch

The idea behind PunchTab is more or less similar to the Facebook fan gate concept: you ask visitors to do something and reward them for it. If you can make the actions and rewards interesting enough, your readers will come back for more.

You have two options after signing up with the service. The first one is setting up a loyalty marketing program, and the second one is running a one time giveaway. Let’s look at the options one by one.

To start a loyalty program, click the “Begin” button.

Begin by choosing the type of site you have, then decide on the location of the “Reward” tab.

There are several types of site that you can choose from including Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress. Since all of my blogs are powered by WordPress, I chose it from the list.

Upon clicking the “Submit” button, PunchTab will generate a key for you. You’ll need to input the key in your site later.

WordPress users can download and install the PunchTab plugin directly from within their admin area.

To enter the key, go to the PunchTab settings menu.

Other than the key field, you can also adjust the location of the “Reward” tab.

The Reward tab will appear on your blog at the location that you’ve specified.

If your visitor clicks the “Reward” tab, they will see the pop-up reward window, and they will go through the process that you’ve set to get the reward.

Managing The Rewards

You can give virtually any kind of rewards for your visitors. You can manage these rewards by clicking on the “Manage Rewards” button next to “Loyalty Program Settings“.

Create your own reward by filling in the brand and type of reward that you want to give.

Set the number of points needed to redeem the reward and click the “Add Reward” button.

All the rewards that you’ve created are listed on the reward table below. You can trash the reward(s) using the delete button.

Give Away The Second Punch

Besides the loyalty program, you can also create a one time giveaway. This type of incentive giving is perfect for contests or a time limited bonus.

There are several fields you should fill in when creating the giveaway. Start with the name, description, and URL of a specific blog post.

Then continue to questions, Facebook page, and the end date. If you have a Facebook fan page, use the URL here.

You can see how the “Giveaway Ticket” will look on the preview.

The last step is copying the generated code snippet and pasting it in the HTML mode of your blog post.

There are many things that you can give as a reward to your readers, either in the loyalty program or as a one time giveaway, for example: (PDF) e-books, special short courses, exclusive memberships, shopping coupons, or even physical goods like mousepads, mugs, t-shirts, etc.

I think that if you are serious in your blogging business, you should consider using methods like PunchTab to build your loyal visitors. What do you think? Do you have any other ideas on how to keep them coming back for more?  If so, please share your opinions using the comments below.

Image credit: Zoom Zoom

Facebook is fully aware of this fact and has already provided users with Pages – a Facebook tool to do some promotions. Users can build and expand Pages on their own, but the result would be much better with help from professionals – which usually comes with a steep price.

If you are one of those who could use some help building your promotional pages but can’t spare any extra cash for it, today might be your lucky day. Wildfire – a social media marketing professional – has just launched an iFrame App for Facebook Pages. This is a tool to help you optimize your Facebook Page as a promotional tool, and it’s available for free (for a limited time).

Let’s Prepare The Pages

The concept behind the iFrame App is simple but ingenious. This app will display two different pages, one for fans, and one for non-fans. You could show an invitation to click the “Like” button on the non-fans page with a promise to access incentives, bonuses, or simply more information on the fan page. Basically, you can “bribe” your visitor to click the “Like” button.

To use the app, just click on the big “Install this app” button.

However, you need a Facebook Page to install the app.  I won’t go into details on building a Facebook Page. For more information on setting up your own Page, you can read our comprehensive guide : Promote Your Blog Using Facebook Pages.

Installing & Customizing The iFrame App

After you have built yourself a page, you can then continue to install the iFrame App. Click on the “Install this app” button on the iFrame website and the app will ask for permission to access your basic information.

The app will also ask whether you want to add iFrame for Pages.

After the installation, you need to register your app by filling in your personal information and clicking “Submit“.

Now you are ready to set up your iFrame. Turn on the “Fan Gate” if you want to display different information for those who have clicked the “Like” button (fans) and those who haven’t (non-fans).

For the content of the page, both in the “Fans view” and “Non-Fans view“, you can upload custom images or a custom HTML page. While images are easier to create, HTML pages will give you more flexibility. If you know your way around HTML, you could put almost anything there.

Here’s an example of the non-fans page, encouraging visitors to click the “Like” button before they can access the content of the fans page.

When used correctly, iFrame can really help you boost the popularity of your blog, products or business by improving the probability of getting a “Like” from visitors. Even though you still have to bring traffic to the Page, you have already won half the battle.

The tool is available to promote your blog for free until around June (three months after the March launching date), and the developer has promised that those who grab the tool in the free period will be able to enjoy it forever for free. So go and get iFrame App, try it, and let us know what you think about it in the comments below.

Image credit: MailChimp

Instead of hassling your friends, you can browse Fiverr to find someone offering the right sort of services. You can even check out examples of their work and ratings from previous customers before you ask them to do the job. And when you make the deal, you’re only promising $5. It’s only as risky as asking a friend to do you a favour and promising a few drinks in return. How’s that for a great idea?

What’s Fiverr?

In short, Fiverr is a marketplace, connecting people who have skills they’d like to sell for $5 with people who want small things done for $5. The $5 price point is crucial and leads to some fascinating offers.

Sign-up is quick, directly through Fiverr or even quicker with a Facebook login.

What Do People Sell for $5?

On Fiverr, there are people selling Photoshop skills, offering to draw pictures for you, offering to post postcards from a particular country, offering virtual assistant duties, posting special family recipes, singing happy birthday, offering critiques of websites, giving tourist advice of their local area, songwriting, giving industry advice, writing your name in Chinese calligraphy or elvish, taking photos of messages in coffee froth, proofreading and all sorts of other random offers.

Browse by popularity, rating or the type of service and you’ll get a feel for the variety of skills available on Fiverr. The ideas are wild and varied — some of them are so unexpected! Browse away and you’ll find yourself thinking “Hey, that would be cool. Yeah, I’d pay $5 for that!”.

If you do want to buy someone’s services, Fiverr links into PayPal to make payments simple.

What If No-One Offers The Skill I Want?

If no-one’s offering the service you’re after specifically, you can also advertise as a buyer in need of that service. To do this, look for “Request Gigs” in the right-hand column. Say what you’d like done for $5 and see if anyone takes you up on your offer.

What Could You Sell For $5?

As you’ve seen, there are many possibilities as to what you can sell through Fiverr. What is clear though, is that people selling their skills must quantify exactly what they will do. For example, “I will proofread one essay under 2,000 words within three days”. If you don’t specify how long the essay, how many essays you will proofread or how long you will take, things will get confusing for the buyer. Also be careful if you’re offering to post things — think of how much it would cost to post worldwide before you offer!

It seems as if some sellers are trying to undercut others by offering to do an incredible amount of work for their $5 fee. That sort of thing happens everywhere — just don’t buckle to the pressure if you think you’re worth more (which you are). Browse the site thoroughly as there are some very imaginative offers out there which would be quite useful for the buyer and yet easy for the seller to do. Let them inspire you into profitable ventures.

At the top of most pages in Fiverr is a box where you can offer your services for $5. Start there and it will allow you to add more details in the next page, including specifics and an example picture. They also make it easy for you to share your Fiverr service offers with your friends on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere.

What Else Might You Use?

Obviously, Fiverr isn’t the only online marketplace for services in the world. There are many other ways you could solicit services or offer your services for hire online. The Facebook Marketplace is one of the simpler examples, followed by Craigslist. Any freelancing marketplace shows some similarity to Fiverr, eg. PeoplePerHour or MicroWorkers. Also worth considering are the other tools listed in this article on how teens can make money online.

Despite all these similar market options, Fiverr still has a unique selling point – that is, the $5 price tag. This encourages both the buyers and sellers because it’s an appealing amount.

What is the best service you’ve seen on Fiverr? Have you found it easy to use? What do you sell through Fiverr? Let us know in the comments!

Using the WYSISYG editor, you can add images and text, select your font, background colours and more. While there are drawbacks to using the free version of Pagemodo, it offers a great opportunity for startups or individuals, but for the serious entrepreneur, one of the paid packages will be more appropriate.

If you haven’t already created a Facebook fan page, you can do so here, choosing the category, sub-category and page title.

Once you’ve created your page, the next step takes place at Pagemodo.

Registering for a free account will of course require you to connect Pagemodo to your Facebook account, allowing access to your basic information, send you email, post to your wall and manage your pages.

With a free account, you can create one branded tab, which will feature a Pagemodo footer. There are several customisable templates to choose from, but any templates which include videos require one of the paid packages, starting at $9 per month for three tabs to $59 per month for 15 tabs. Of the paid packages, only the most expensive removes the “Powered by Pagemodo” branding from the top of the page, but with all paid packages, the footer is removed. For a truly professional appearance, the footer and branding may not be the ideal choice for some.

Amongst the templates, there are some, labeled Reveal Content, which require fans to click the like button before being able to view your videos and coupon codes, but this kind of practice could turn away more fans than it gains you.

Once you’ve selected your template, click the customize button, and begin to add content.

The WYSIWYG editor couldn’t be easier to use. Each box is clearly labeled and numbered. You can upload images from your computer, or simply link to images hosted elsewhere.

When entering text, you can also select the background design and colour, and text formatting.

The preview pane makes it easy to see the changes as they are made.

When uploading images, you can scale and rotate them to fit the allotted space.

Once you’ve entered all images and text, you can then save the template for later or, if you’re ready to launch your page straight away, select the Free package, and click the install button.

You will then be redirected to Facebook where you can add the tab to your Facebook fan page.

If you want to make changes to the template at a later date, it’s as simple as going back to the WYSIWYG editor, making your changes, and updating it.

While Pagemodo does offer a very easy method to create a welcome tab, one major drawback, due to Facebook’s settings, is that you cannot rearrange the tabs to place the Welcome tab before your Wall and Info tabs. The best you can do is click and drag the tab into the third slot behind them.

What free services can you recommend for jazzing up your Facebook page? What do you think of Pagemodo? Let us know in the comments.

Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or new to the world of business, these tools will come in handy. All you need to bring to the table is your concept to create a business plan, the first step in taking it from an idea to reality. These tools can be used independently of one another, or you can choose to combine and tailor them to suit your personal needs.

Business Model Canvas

One of the best known tools for creating a visual business model comes courtesy of Alexander Osterwalder. Accounting for all of the essential elements included in any business plan, he has provided an easy-to-use business plan template and a guide to the information to be included.

The canvas can be downloaded as a PDF from his website and an iPad application is currently in the works. He also provides a blog post on how to use the canvas in a working session.

The business plan template is divided into 9 sections, each accompanied by a short series of questions making it easier to fill out the information. The sections include key partners, activities, cost structure and revenue streams, amongst others.

PlanCruncher

PlanCruncher is a free, no-registration-required service which is perfect for the budding entrepreneur who needs a step-by-step guide on how to put together a visual presentation.

The first step in PlanCruncher is to introduce your start-up. Choose a name, and describe your pitch.

Determine what kind of business idea you’re bringing to the table, and whether you want to use a non-disclosure agreement.

The next step is to introduce your team and their capabilities.

Next, describe the current state of your product, and determine the product’s intellectual proprietary status.

Next, describe your revenue model.

Then determine the kind of funding you need.

Select the kind of partnership you are seeking and the share you are willing to offer.

Finally, enter your contact information and any additional comments you feel are necessary to include in your plan. You can also choose to send a copy of your business plan to PlanCruncher where it will be shared with investors who could eventually contact you. They do include a disclaimer that you should not submit any information you consider confidential or proprietary, and they do not accept responsibility for protecting against misuse or disclosure of any confidential or proprietary information, which is a little unsettling when putting your business concept in their hands.

Once you generate the business plan, right click the link that reads PDF business plan summary and click ‘Save link as…’ to save the document to your computer.

The final product will look a little something like this.

It’s worth mentioning that it includes a footer stating that the document was generated using PlanCruncher. If you would rather not include the footer or submit your idea to a third party site, you can download the icons and put together the presentation yourself.

Startup Toolkit

The Startup Toolkit is a free service that allows you to create a canvas visually describing your business model.

After signing up for an account, rather than provide step by step instructions, you are presented with a canvas to be filled in as you see fit.

In addition to creating a canvas describing your business model, you also have access to a ‘Risk Dashboard’, a to-do list for your business risks and leaps of faith.

There are three canvases to choose from. The Startup Canvas, which focuses on finding and resolving early startup risks.

The Lean Canvas, which focuses on the product and the customer equally.

And lastly, the Business Model Canvas seen earlier, developed by Osterwalder.

Each canvas provides you with a guideline and questions to answer for each section.

After you have entered all the information on your startup, you can save a snapshot to return to later, but the site does not provide any easy way to export it as a document, so it is better suited for internal or collaborative use only.

If you want to share the canvas with other members of your team, you can invite them via email either to view or edit the information.

The Risk Dashboard is where you can enter your leap of faith (what are the major beliefs and assumptions your business is built on?) and your hypothesis. After saving the information, you can then fill in the actual results of of your experiment to test the hypothesis, and your insight and course correction.

Do you have any tips on how to get your business concept down on paper? Have you used any of these techniques? Let us know how they worked out for you in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Lockerz is one such site that takes advantage of both of those things. Lockerz is a social commerce company whose mission is “to be the homepage for men and women ages 13 to 30, building a community of trendsetters and tastemakers who love to shop, play, and connect on the web.” It’s a place where you can interact with others in the community while earning points you can use towards major discounts on your favorite items. Does that sound like something that might interest you?

What Exactly Is Lockerz?

As I mentioned in the introduction, Lockerz is a social commerce site. It was founded in 2009 by former technology and retail executive Kathy Savitt, who was formerly the vice president of strategic communications, content, and entertainment initiatives at Amazon. The Lockerz community has grown to more than 17 million members in less that one year, and the site offers major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.

Members of the site earn PTZ (points), which are used to lower the prices on your favorite merchandise. PTZ can be earned a number of different ways, like watching videos, listening to music, answering daily questions, inviting friends to join, buying your favorite brands, and with “FWB;)”, Lockerz’ social commerce feature.

PTZ are then used to lower the prices of merchandise in the Lockerz Boutiques. The more PTZ a member earns and decides to use, the larger the discount, which can be up to 100%.

Explain FWB;) To Me

FWB;) (yes, I have to include the winky face. Sigh) is Lockerz’ social commerce platform that they introduced in October 2010. It’s a self-proclaimed “”, and it rewards members for interacting with one another. For instance, members are rewarded with PTZ for introducing their friends to their favorite fashion or technology brands, as well as music, videos, and more.

“FWB;) creates a mutually beneficial relationship between members, their friends, and their favorite brands and artists. Friends share favorites, and everyone benefits.”

Once you sign up to become a member of Lockerz, you will create a personal profile (Locker) in which your badges (Decalz) are showcased for friends to view. When a Lockerz friend clicks on Decalz in another member’s Locker, both members earn PTZ.

Furthermore, if a friend purchases a product or views a video in-full after clicking on Decalz, both members earn (significantly) more PTZ. As you can see, the more influential members are with their friends, the more PTZ they earn towards their own shopping experience.

Conclusion

By now you may be wondering what types of products you can use all these PTZ towards on Lockerz. Well, Lockerz has partnered with thousands of the best brands and stores in a lot of different categories, including electronics, designer gear, sports equipment, and clothing outlets.

I’m a fan of what Lockerz is doing. I really think that they do a good job of offering their members incentive to use the site, as well as give them creative ways to engage other users. It’s an interesting niche social network and I can’t wait to see other companies follow suit.

What do you think of Lockerz? Leave a comment below and we’ll discuss it!