Creating buzz around your Gallery takes patience & hard work – it also helps to have a specific sales strategy in mind prior to designing a T-Shirt line. That’s exactly what Gallery owner, BarackObamaforom set out to do before opening his Gallery on T-Shirtmonster.ca.
Step 1: Registered his domain name (www.barackobamaforpm.com) specifically to gain traction with Search Engines. Canreg.com is a Canadian site that charges $29.95 for a full years registration. This is an important step if you want search engines to pick up specific key words. Try to Google “Barack Obama for PM”…you’ll notice his blog comes up #1.
Step 2: Redirected his domain name to his blog – this is so he can update content on a daily basis. Blogger.com offers this service for free. Here’s a photo from his blog:
Step 3: He contacted as many political bloggers and news reporters as possible. Getting published is a sure fire way to instantly increase your T-Shirt sales!
Step 4. He sent Reporters that were interested in his concept a FREE T-SHIRT. Nothing makes a reporters morning better than receiving a free T-Shirt and a newsworthy story!
He was published today in Vancouver 24hrs.ca
It’s a low res clip, so here’s the highlights from reporter Buzz Bishop:
“This is one of those ideas you wished you’d come up with. A few weeks ago, Sean Kane received an invitation from some UVic professors to go to an election party. But the party’s not on Oct 14 when Canadians go to the polls , it’s on Nov 4th – he’s going to a party with Canadians to watch the American results come in. That’s when Kane, an illustrator for the likes of Amazon.com, got an idea.”
“He recalled polls that had been published recently that said Canadians were more captivated by the drama and personality of the American election, than our own plodding candidates. Sean’s idea was to start a grass roots campaign: Barrack Obama for Prime Minister. The idea was not so much to get him legitimately elected, but to sell T-Shirts. In an internet age, having a money-making idea like that and getting it launched can happen instantly.”
“Sean’s idea cost him $10 for a domain name and a few hours of graphic design work. ” ‘I registered BarrackObamaforPM.com and then through the host company, I just redirected it over to Blogger for a free blog. When you have an idea for a cool .com site, you don’t need to worry about hosting and servers – you can point the registered address to any other webpage and in this case, Sean gets his cool web address and just redirected it to a free blogging site from which he could launch the Obama for PM campaign.”
“Finding a way to have the T-Shirts printed up took a little more effort. Sean didn’t want to have to buy dozens up front, he was looking for a site that would handle the fulfillment as the orders came in and just cut him in for his share of each sale. After some poking around for a Canadian operator to save cross-border shipping charges Kane landed on T-Shirtmonster.ca”
” ‘Once I had that figured out, I was off and running to Photoshop to create some content. Within five hours the site was up and it was live’ says Kane.”
“To spread the message, Sean posted a few comments on some relevant discussion boards and sent some emails to political bloggers, created a Twitter Profile and his idea went viral. The Obama for PM campaign is non-partisan; he’s taking a parodying shot at each Canadian party and re-working the logos to read Obama for Prime Minister, even oddly cropping in the heads of our leaders wearing the shirts and showing their support for Obama.”
” ‘It’s a lot of fun and if I can get people engaged in our own campaign here, maybe people who never would have thought about what’s going on in our federal election, then I’d be pretty pleased.’ ”
Congratulations to Sean Kane for his hard work! We wish him all the best this fall in his T-Shirt sales.
