How To Make Money on RedBubble | How To Make Winning Designs
If you’re just getting started in the print on demand industry, or specifically on RedBubble, it can be a grind to make those first few sales and figure out what sells. How do you make designs that sell? How do you know what people are looking for? There a few websites that tell you what is trending on RedBubble and in this article we will discuss three of them.
It’s easier than you think to make money on RedBubble and make designs that sell well. Often a simple text-based design can make you hundreds of sales. To come up with the ideas for these designs you can use these RedBubble trend tools:
- RedBubble Automation Tool
- Bubble Search
- Bubble Trends
Screenshot of the RedBubble Automation Tool Homepage
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REDBUBBLE AUTOMATION TOOL
This is the OG RedBubble trend automation tool and by far the most well-known one. It’s also the tool that gives you the most information and filterable information as well.
This tool shows you the top 10,000 search trends on RedBubble each week. It updates every Monday.
It has 4 criteria;
- Popularity: Out of 10,000 it tells you where that search query ranks.
- Change in Popularity: It shows how many spots it climbed or fell in popularity since last week.
- Results: How many results come up on the RedBubble search results page when the search query is entered.
- Change in Results: How many results have been added or taken down since the previous week.
There are a few things to consider when looking at this tool.
First and foremost, is beware of copyright! This tool does not weed out the copyrighted vs copyright-free search queries. Do not make designs for copyrighted queries, you may make some sales to start, but your designs will get taken down eventually and you risk your whole shop getting shut down.
Second, keep in mind that if a trend has tens or even hundreds of thousands of results, your designs likely won’t get seen. However, if it only has a few hundred or even a few thousand search results, you have better odds of your designs showing up in the search results page.
Third, take a look at the popularity and change in popularity, you might want to look for something that isn’t as popular but is steadily moving up in popularity each week. That way you can be an early adopter of that trend and have the best chance of showing up at the top of the search results.
Check out the RedBubble Automation tool here.
Screenshot of the Bubble Search Homepage
BUBBLE SEARCH
Bubble Search is another great tool to use to help discover what people are searching for on RedBubble each week.
It doesn’t provide as much information as the RedBubble automation tool listed above, but it’s still a great place to go to get the tags and trends.
The thing that makes Bubble Search stand out from the above RedBubble Automation Tool is that it updates daily.
The extended list gives you about 500 of the most popular search queries on RedBubble along with the number of search results RedBubble has.
To use this tool effectively you will want to pay attention to the queries with less search results that are moving up the list, or just consistently remaining on the list from day to day.
And again, remember to leave all the copyright queries alone. It’s not worth it.
Check out Bubble Search here.
Screenshot of the Bubble Trends Homepage
BUBBLE TRENDS
Bubble Trends is very similar to Bubble Search and gives you all the tags and search phrases people are typing into the RedBubble search bar each day.
One thing that makes Bubble Trends unique is that you can pick a specific day to see what was trending and when. Very cool.
It’s simple and straightforward to use. You get about 75 of the top search queries along with the number of results RedBubble comes up with.
Check out Bubble Trends here.
SOME THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND
After doing a little cross-reference between the three tools I noticed that they do not all give the same information.
These tools are very helpful in coming up with design ideas and trends, but it is not to be taken as gospel. You still need to do your own research and these tools are just a place to start to get some ideas.
THE NEXT STEP – CREATING DESIGNS THAT SELL ON REDBUBBLE
Once you’ve picked a search query or two to tackle and make designs for it’s now time to get started.
My recommendation is to make 5-10 designs at a minimum for each query. The more the better, as RedBubble is a numbers game. You can start with simple text-based designs using different fonts and placement and then move up to working with graphics, whether hand made or bought.
If you are looking for a great place to get premade graphics with a print on demand commercial license, check out Creative Fabrica here. I have it and absolutely love it! And they often have sales for their monthly subscription.
If you need some recommendations on how to level up your graphic design skills, check out our graphic design resource page here.
QUALITY AND QUANTITY ON REDBUBBLE
RedBubble is a numbers game and you have to have a ton of designs live in order to make any significant amount of money.
However, it isn’t about just throwing up designs you put no effort into and hoping for the best. You need to put thought and effort into your designs.
There is a balance that needs to be struck between taking the time to create quality designs and spending the time creating multiple designs to better your chances of getting seen.
When you’ve picked a niche or query you want to design for, take a moment to look at the search results page on RedBubble. Look at the designs on the first page and decide if you can create better designs than what is there already.
HOW TO COME UP WITH TAGS FOR REDBUBBLE DESIGNS
In order to get your designs found on RedBubble you need to have good titles and tags. Try to get some niched down tags where the competition won’t be so heavy.
You can take a look at what the competition designs on RedBubble have as tags to give you some ideas. Don’t be the person that uses unrelated tags for their designs. It doesn’t help you, if anything it tells RedBubble that your product is not worth displaying as it doesn’t get clicked.
Think about this:
Let’s say you have a cat design and tag it for pony. When someone searches pony and your design shows up it’s going to get a 0% click-through rate because it is not what people wanted, telling RedBubble that it isn’t a good design. And RedBubble will drop it further and further down the search results.
Whereas if you have a super niched down design about cats jumping through hula hoops and you put that in your tag, even though it likely won’t get searched as often, when someone does search it they will click through to your design (assuming its a good design) because it’s exactly what they were searching for showing RedBubble that people are interested in your design and then RedBubble will show your design to more people.
And then if your cat hula hoop design does well for that keyword RedBubble will start showing it higher in the search results for the broader keywords you chose, like cat or cute animal, or something like that. But if you throw in a tag that is completely irrelevant it will do nothing for you.
Does that make sense? I hope so.
If you are still struggling to come up with tags, Bubble Search also has a tag generator and the OG RedBubble Automation Tool has one in the works.
Now that you know the key factors to make money on RedBubble get out there and make some designs! Best of luck.
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