As I described in my last blog, I finally took action on something and started a closed Facebook page in August 2018. (https://thesidehustlejourney.com/2019/04/28/taking-action-by-starting-a-closed-facebook-page/)
After purchasing the URL www.theordinarymom.com from WordPress and all of the extras I thought I needed in case I created a website, I had spent $98. To sign up for your own WordPress account to start your own side hustle journey, click here: https://wordpress.com/alp/?aff=13401&cid=2093430 (FYI- this is an affiliate link and I’ll make money if you sign up this way).
I had started The Ordinary Mom Parenting Community on Facebook in September with 252 members and grew it to 284 by the end of the month. The growth was from several people inviting friends to the site (Thank you!). I wrote a post on 9/18 saying the following, “I launched this parenting community page a little less than a month ago and we are now 283 members strong with 620 posts, comments or reactions. Wow! It’s exceeded my expectations when I thought about creating a forum for parents to share both the amazing and hard parts of parenting.
Hearing about what everyone finds challenging and/or loves about parenting has been amazing. We all have so many similar challenges and loves but it’s also clear that we also all deal with our own specific issues because parenting is hard. And wonderful. The biggest oxymoron that I know of. Thank you all so much for sharing your personal stories.
I hope you have found some value in this group. If so, please invite a few friends (or 30) to join so we can continue the parenting conversations. Also, feel free to share an interesting article, a thought for the day or pose a question (thanks to those who have already done this).
I’ll pose a question that is top of mind for me these days and I can’t believe I didn’t put it as one of my top 3 parenting challenges. For any of the parents out there who have kids who fight (anyone? Bueller?), what do you do? Have you found any non-violent ways to change this behavior? We are experiencing this with our 6 and 8 year old girls who are frenemies. They are fine individually but are painful together because of their fighting. Like leaving restaurants and waterparks painful. Pulling out my hair painful. Please help.”
I was getting great engagement and having so much fun in the process. I decided to upgrade to WordPress Premium for an additional $48. I honestly can’t remember why I upgraded but there must have been some feature I needed (I hope). I decided I might have something with The Ordinary Mom branding and have 3 creative kids so I bought the www.theordinarykid.com domain and private registration for $26.
Then I realized that maybe my kids would want to do something together at some point, so I bought the www.theordinarykids.com domain and private registration for another $26. My running total was now $198. In hindsite this might have been a wasted $52 but hindsight is 20/20 and I’m on a journey that will be filled with good and bad decisions. I promise to share all of my decisions, both good and bad. As I mentioned in prior blogs, I had set aside $2,000 for this side hustle journey so I now had $1,805 left.
Early in September, I decided to do a second but related side hustle which was to create t-shirts. I thought I could create some that would promote my The Ordinary Mom Facebook site and any branding I came up with around it. I had listened to two interesting podcasts over the summer about “merch” (merchandising, mainly t-shirts to us lay people).
The first was Elaine Heney at:
The second was Chris Green at:
Both said that Merch by Amazon is the big league but it can take 3-4 months to get approved for that. I good place to start and learn is Teespring. I re-listened to those two podcasts and watched a few YouTube videos on how to design t-shirts in Teespring. Just a little reminder– you can learn anything on YouTube so make sure you are taking advantage of that free resource.
I want to make sure that I am clear that 1. I am not a designer 2. I’m not an artist and 3. I’m not a crafty/Pinterest person. What I am is a business person who is motivated to start some side hustles so I learned the hard way- by researching and testing. This goes back to my whole “launch and learn” philosophy so I decided to just figure it out. Oh, my other philosophy is “all boats rise” so I’m going to walk you through this so you don’t have to waste the time trying to figure it out on your own.
Here is how to create t-shirts (and other things) on Teespring::
- To to www.teespring.com to set up an account
- On the main site, click on “Learn More” under “Experience the new Teespring, A place to create and sell online”
- Then click on the “start creating” under “Create & sell online”
- It will ask you to “Log In” but just click the “Don’t have an account? Sign up”.
- I can’t remember all of the details on what the sign up entailed but just follow the prompts and be ready to enter bank account information to get paid
- When you get accepted, you’ll get a “Welcome to Teespring email” and click the “Create products to sell link”
- At this point, you do the following to create your merchandise (I uploaded mainly t-shirt designs so I’ll stick with that
- Under “Choose your product”, go down to “Apparel” and pick what kind of shirt (or other apparel) you want to create
- I’ll pick “Unisex/Men’s Shirts” for this. Click on “Start with this”
- Pick one of the following:
- Classic tee
- Comfort tee
- Premium tee
- Triblend tee
- Premium v-neck tee
- I ordered Classic, Comfort and Premium tees for myself and felt that Premium tee was a much better quality and I wanted to have high quality products so I went with Premium as my standard
- Hover over “Premium tee” and click on “Start designing”
- You’ll see the options of “Buy” and “Sell, click “Sell”
- Click on “add image” and upload an image from your computer
- If you want to add text, click on “add text” –I like putting the text in the image so I just have to upload an image
- Click on the + by add colors and a color palette will come up
- Click on each color to see how it looks with the design. If you like it, keep it checked but if you don’t, click it again to uncheck it
- Then click “Done”
- Next you can set your price. I have been taking the default pricing (i.e for a Premium shirt, they suggest the price is $23.99 for a profit of $10.01)
- Click “Continue’
- It will have the Premium t-shirt as the default but you can add other products here.
- To add more products, hover over whichever category you want to add and click “Select style”
- You can select individual styles or click the “Select all styles” button to select all
- When you have all of the selections you want, click “Continue”
- Add a title and description
- Select “Publish listing”and you are live
See my first Teespring site at https://teespring.com/stores/the-ordinary-mom.
