The average person interested in building an online business is not able to simply quit their job and get started with it full-time. Despite all gurus trying to tell the world how easy it is to build an income on the internet “if you just follow their formula”, you probably know this is complete bullshit.

While it’s true that there is probably no upper limit to how much an online business can make you (including print on demand), all beginnings are small and take their time. Therefore, to make your first steps towards a growing online income, you will want to find something that seems reasonably doable without requiring too much of your most scarce resource — your time.

The whole process of operating a business on a print on demand platform can be broken down into three steps:

Research — Finding a niche with sales potential. Creation — Creating digital designs suitable to be printed on products and attractive to your researched niche. Upload — Making your design available on the platform, provided with the right keywords to make it findable for your target audience.

This is a reasonably manageable amount of steps that you need to get familiar with before having the chance to generate sales and make actual money.

Just compare this to another path that many people choose to get started with their first online business — starting a blog. To start a blog you will need to:

Find and buy a domain. Figure out how to host your website. Build your website. Research content ideas people are looking for. Create and publish targeted content consistenly to be found and to get traffic to your website. Think of creative ways to monetize your content. Learn and integrate those monetization methods into your blog.

And this is already the most simplified list of steps to create a blog, without having had a chance to make even $ 0.01 yet. Doesn’t uploading design files to a marketplace where people can find and buy products with it without you doing anything seem a lot more doable?

Just don’t be fooled to think that starting and running a print on demand business is easy. It will absolutely require a lot of time and will overwhelm you at times. But in comparison to other online business opportunities it is simpler to start out.

If you can free up just a few hours each week to learn and constantly improve those three steps from above, you will eventually make your first sale at some point — and the likelihood of making another sale increases with every single design you upload. That’s how it works with selling something on the internet.

A Tangible Introduction to Ecommerce Dynamics

Another reason why print on demand is a great entry into the online business world in my opinion is that it’s combining something very familiar for anyone — selling and buying simple everyday items like t-shirts — with the infinitely big market that the internet resembles and making it accessible to anyone.

The reason why participating in e-commerce holds such a tremendous opportunity for anyone is the fact that there is literally no upper limit to how much money you can make when selling something online. I illustrated this in the simple chart illustration below.