# Online marketing ideas for offensive T-shirts



## pornorart (Mar 10, 2010)

Dear Forum Users,

first of all, I'd like to briefly introduce my project, I think it is necessary.

The whole Porn or Art project, was started as a university project to teach students how to build up, maintain and promote a profit oriented website. I've chosen Zazzle.com and T-shirt business, because this way we can sell real goods without any financial investment, so the project can be totally free, this is proper for learning/teaching purposes. Due to the fact, that we have only a semester to build up the site and the store, and another semester to maintain and promote it, I've chosen a very popular topic. My basic idea was the following: with the popular topic we can get many visitors, due to the great site content, we can keep the visitors on the site, and finally these visitors will buy some gifts. Although the first two steps were OK, the visitors who are interested in the topic of the site don't tend to buy gifts. After recognizing this, we decided to change our marketing strategy, and now we are trying to reach communities on the web which are interested in offensive T-shirts, and the information reach content on the site is only an extra value for them. And this is the reason, why I request some urgent help.

I have the following ideas:
1. Contact bloggers, who review offensive, funny, interesting T-shirts. Do you have any idea, how to find them? I've tried search engines, and I followed the links in the blog rolls, but I'm not sure if I have found the best ones.
2. Place comments on the above mentioned blogs. A really funny, useful and intelligent comment can get some filtered traffic to our shop. Do you agree? Do you have any additional hint to this?
3. Find T-shirt related forums (for buyers, not for sellers), and post useful, funny and intelligent opinions, similar to blog comments. Although I searched these forums, I haven't found too much. Do you have any idea?
4. Follow T-shirt related members of Twitter. I'm not sure about its effects, but it's easy to do.
5. Build up horizontal connections at Zazzle.com by commenting related shops and products, and joining to the fan club of these shops. Do you think it's useful?

If you have any other ideas, or any criticism about our site, images and T-shirts, we are really open for them. We'd like to learn as much as possible via this project.

Thank you in advance
András


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## kimura-mma (Jul 26, 2008)

Hey Andras, welcome to the forums.

I think it's great that you're trying to use a real world scenario as a teaching tool. But I also think there are some fundamental problems here that are going to prevent you from successfully making this a profit oriented website.

Budget... It takes a real world budget to market and advertise your business, website and product. It takes time and money to educate consumers and convert sales. Even though you're doing this as a small business for teaching purposes and not worried about profit margins, it can take months, if not years, to grow a sustainable business. It's going to be near impossible to grow it to a sustainable level in a semester or two. Which, I'm afraid, may have a negative impact on your students.

Branding... It takes a serious real world positioning strategy to brand your company to the level of converting regular sales. Brands like T-Shirt Hell are lightyears beyond where you are now. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of funny, offensive t-shirt brands out there. And they are implementing strategies with real world budgets and full-time staffs. How are you going to compete with that to prove this project is successful?

On top of all that, I think you have chosen an incredibly tight niche, that is going to be difficult to be taken seriously. The website is not very professional and the artwork is not very good. Even though the site redirects to Zazzle, the initial site just doesn't look like a clothing brand. I wouldn't feel comfortable spending my money with a site that looks like that.

Sorry to be harsh about it, but maybe you should have chosen something more mainstream or family oriented to help make this project run a bit smoother and get some sales going. If you were selling mugs that said "I Love Grandma" you probably could easily have gotten local people to make purchases, because everyone likes giving gifts to Grandmas, and people would have been helping your educational cause in the process. The market you have chosen probably won't care to help you. And if you chose this niche because you wanted it to be difficult, simulating the real world challenge of starting a clothing brand, you just learned the hard way how difficult and challenging it really is.

You can go ahead and try the ideas you listed above. I think they are as good an idea as you can possibly have, given the time and budget constraints you are working with. I wish you luck with your project.


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## pornorart (Mar 10, 2010)

Thank you, I totally agree, and I really appreciate, that you could confirm my marketing ideas.

I know, I'm not really talented as graphical artist, and I know, that the site doesn't look like a T-shirt shop. Basically it wasn't planned a T-shirt shop, the decision about the shop section was made, due to the fact, that Zazzle allows this topic only with an age restriction, and I wanted to provide a shop front with all of the products without any registration.

As I wrote above, the basic idea was to create a successful site, which is successful due to its content, the gift shop was only an additional value instead of looking for PPC advertisers. So my goal is not to get a high income, only to show the students how banners and ads works on a content related site. 

My decision about the topic was made on the fact, that I found really low competence in the search engines for 'porn art', 'hot art' and related topics, although users search for them quite often. But, due to the theory about free tools and services, only a really banned porn ISP was available for this topic, and that's why search engine marketing was not so effective. Although, with direct marketing, we got an acceptable traffic. So from this point of view, it's not a really bad niche. The problem is, that the visitors don't want to buy T-shirts. Maybe an affiliate program with a sex shop would have been a better idea.

So it's not a big problem for me, if we don't sell anything, but it would be really funny, to sell at least one gift.

Thank you again, I know I'm on the right but hard way


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## BassTard (May 13, 2009)

Whats offensive about these t-shirts?


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## pornorart (Mar 10, 2010)

I'm not sure about it, but Zazzle accepted them only with a 13+ age restriction. I think the keyword porn related to a T-shirt is offensive.


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## dptk (Aug 14, 2009)

i agree branding is important,but if you have great , relevant merch & you get the right buyers looking at it . you can sell w/o a brand. #2) if you dont have great products, you aren't going to be able to build a brand


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## offensivefun (Nov 1, 2009)

I have a funny and offensive t-shirts online shop too and is 9 months old. It is a tight market indeed but if you are disposed to wait for results, they will come. But you definitely need to do a great SEO for your website, and you need great deisgns too. I don't have either very professional made designs but I hope I will progress in time. You should try opening a facebook and a twitter account for the beginnings, and use better and realistic keywords to describe your store.
Sorry for my bad english.


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## SHIROINEKO (Mar 31, 2010)

I like the idea.


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