Print on Demand Store With a $100 Budget
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I could earn a commission if you sign up for or buy something through them, at no extra cost to you.
Many people believe that running your own print on demand store on your own website, instead of having an Etsy shop, is one of the best ways to make real money with print on demand in 2026. But a lot of them are afraid to invest in creating something like this. What if it wouldn’t cost a fortune to start your own website, run ads on social media, and even work with content creators in your niche to make your sales? This post shows how to start a print on demand store with just a $100 budget, with the goal of making your first $1,000 in sales in 30 days or so. Results vary, and that figure is a target, not a promise.
This is the launch strategy I’ve used since starting my first store in 2016, and it’s what I teach. So far, people who have gone through my training have reportedly made over $6 million on their own print on demand stores. I send mugs like these to people when they reach different sales milestones. I also have a free print on demand course called POD for Dummies. Inside, you can download my print on demand playbook ebook and go through over 30 step-by-step video trainings. It’s completely free. This post is primarily based on the marketing strategies you’re going to use.
What We’re Actually Creating
But first, I want to talk about what we’re actually creating. What I’m going to go through is a little different from what most people think they should do with their print on demand store. But I’ve done it a lot and taught it to a lot of people, and in my experience it works. What we want to create is a niche-based brand. We don’t want to sell to more than one niche. And we want to focus on one niche with our brand.
Four Designs for Each Product
I know a lot of people think that at the beginning they should be creating dozens, if not over a hundred, designs. This is the model for everything that I teach. There are three different types of products, and when you’re just launching your store, you want just four designs for each product. That gives you a total of 12 to launch your store. From there, if you want to grow, that’s fine.
But my point is that when you’re launching, we’re looking for about 12 designs. That means one niche for the brand, three products for your collections, and four designs for each product. Once you have that, launch your store following everything covered here. If you need help choosing niches, choosing products, and seeing more examples of this in action, check out the POD for Dummies course.
$100 Budget
Shopify Plan
Remember, to do this we have a $100 budget. The first thing you’re going to want to do is get yourself a Shopify plan. They have a good offer right now where you can start for just a dollar for your first 3 months, so that’s not going to take up much of our budget. From there, we’re going to start marketing, beginning with a free method.
Free Marketing Strategy
A good example is a store called Kingdom and Country. It’s an apparel brand for Christians, and they also have some hoodies and other products. Their Instagram is a good way to break down the free marketing strategy I recommend starting with. You can start it right away, and it costs nothing. It has made me a few thousand a month with only a few thousand followers, and my stores have grown from there. Even if you only have a fraction of what this store has, you could generate some sales.
Basically, this is a social media page that attracts people inside of the niche by posting content they might want to engage with. That means different types of imagery, different types of videos, and product photos sprinkled throughout the feed. This store has grown to just over 7,000 followers, which means every time they post about their merchandise, potentially over 7,000 people see their products.
80/20 Ratio for Content Strategy
What I teach is to aim for an 80/20 ratio in your content strategy. About 80% of your content is just for your niche: memes, images, videos, things people are going to engage with. The other 20% is promotional content, where you show product photos or mockups and tell people about the products you sell. It might take a little while to see progress, but I’d start it at the beginning. It’s free, and over time your accounts will grow. It’s a way to promote products for free and begin creating a community around your brand.
$5 Per Day Facebook Ads
The next thing we’re going to spend some money on is $5 per day Facebook ads. If you ran a $5 per day ad for weeks and weeks, that would go past our $100 budget. So the hope is that in the first couple of days of running the ad, you make your first sale, take the profit from it, roll it into your marketing budget, and over time scale the ad up beyond $5 per day.
Ad Library
Take a look at a store’s Facebook page. There’s a handy way to see all of the ads that any print on demand store is running on Facebook and Instagram. Reaching people in your niche on those platforms is one of the more effective ways to sell products on social media. A lot of people think they need a really big budget to do it, but you can start running ads for a very low budget. The idea is to make a few sales before you increase the budget on those ads.
Simply click on the store’s name, then down below click on transparency and privacy policy. This lets us see the ads from the page. If you find a store inside your niche, you can do this and see every ad they’re running, if they’re running ads on Facebook at all. It’s a great way to see what other stores are doing and to get a sense of how their ads are performing.
Reading Ad Start Dates
Click go to ad library and you’ll see all of the active ads the page is running on Facebook or Instagram right now. Each one tells us when the ad started running. For example, one ad has been running since October 20th, 2025, which suggests it is likely quite profitable. From here we can start to understand what’s working for other stores and how they’re marketing their products.
There are some newer ads too, like one from February 27th, 2026. I say newer because compared to ones from back in September of 2025, it is much more recent. Another is from May 12th, 2026, which is just a couple of months ago. Another is from June 14th, 2025, which is over a year ago. That one is a very simple image-based ad. One thing they’ve done with it is something I do all the time, which is add their logo to the bottom right corner of the ad.
Facebook Ad Copy
They also have sleek, organized ad copy up at the top. This is how I teach Facebook ad copy. When I say copy, I mean the text that’s on the ad. This ad has just three lines of text. The first is a description of the product, the second is promotional, and the third is the actual link. They also make good use of emojis throughout. I’d model your ad on this, and it’s how I set up my own ads.
If you need help getting your Facebook ad account set up, there are a few technical steps, and the POD for Dummies course has videos demonstrating all of it.
Partnering With Content Creators
The next method is one of the better ways to sell print on demand products, and it’s something I believe most print on demand sellers never even try. Take a look at a social media page where the person who created the account is clearly very into riding mountain bikes. That’s what the entire account is about. This person has 46,000 followers, and it’s probably safe to assume that those 46,000 people also have an interest in riding mountain bikes. That’s likely why they follow the page.
We all do this. We follow pages about niches we love, whether it’s video games, baking, basketball, or being a nurse. As a print on demand seller, if we created a store for a specific niche like this one, we could partner with an account like this to promote our products. I’ve done this over and over, and it’s a way, even if your store is new, to begin reaching tens of thousands of people. First, take a look at one post. This is the content creator, and she is unboxing some sort of product here.
Commission-Based Marketing
She is going to promote this product for a brand. They likely sent her the item, and if someone buys it using her discount code, which she’ll likely share somewhere, she earns a commission. That’s what we’re talking about here: partnering with people who have social media pages inside of niches and offering them a specific discount code to promote, then paying them a commission when they make a sale. This is called commission-based marketing. She is a commission-based creator, and we can partner with creators like her to sell our products. In fact, this post is an example of exactly what I’m talking about. She is modeling this shirt and has tagged an account in the post.
Finding Content Creators
When we click on this account, it’s some sort of apparel brand that does business inside the niche this person is a part of. To do this with your own print on demand store, go on your favorite social media platform, whether it’s Instagram or TikTok. I’ve even done this with people making videos on YouTube. Try to find as many content creators as possible that you could reach out to. As a general rule, I try to work with people on the smaller end. Somewhere around 50,000 followers on any platform is about where I like to cap out.
The reason is that if you reach out to someone with a million followers, they’re probably not going to want to promote your products only for commissions. They’ll probably want a large upfront fee as well. We’re looking to send out samples, have people promote our products, make sales, and then pay them a commission.
Sending Samples
You can get started by simply sending messages. I’d suggest finding as many people as possible, reaching out to introduce yourself, sharing a little about what you’re trying to do, telling them about your commissions, and sending samples to the people willing to come on board. This can work well with a new print on demand store because whether your store has been open for a week or 6 months, it doesn’t matter. You can tap into the audiences these content creators already have.
Three Methods of Marketing
So we have three methods of marketing to use your $100 budget on. The first is completely free. The second is running $5 ads. The third is sending samples to commission-based creators and paying them a commission when they make a sale. This is the approach I’d recommend for getting a new print on demand store off the ground, and I’d start practicing it right now with your store.
If you want some additional help, I’ve created an entire free training for this. It’s a free course with over 30 videos that demonstrate how to get yourself set up.
