What are the best ways to advertise a t-shirt business?

Shailah,

In college my friend and I actually made and sold t-shirts to pay off parking tickets :)

We found the best way was to stand in the middle of the most popular area for student traffic and loudly advertise what we were doing. This method worked extremely well for us and could work for others.

However, for your idea it might make more sense to advertise online using site like Google for their AdWords search platform. This will allow you to advertise your website to anyone who types in searches like "t-shirt" or "custom t-shirts" or whatever searches you want to target your ad to.

Another way is to go on LinkedIn and find out who the Human resources decision makers are in different companies you are looking to sell to. You can directly reach out to these folks and start conversation regarding your product.

If you are starting a t shirt company, your standard social networks would make great tools. Having an instagram and creating specific tags for your company would help marketing. You can tag it with something well known, along with your own tag that eventually builds a brand around it.

I have owned my own graphic business for the last 5 years and I have had my ups and my downs. There are many ways to advertise, the best for me was wearing my own designs. I also found if I had extra supplies to give them away, let's say a walking billboard....There are also may sites that you can advertise social media is the way to go...Good luck

Hi Shailah,

I would suggest making a facebook page and asking as many friends as possible to like that page-to get the word out. Couple of other ideas:
-School/College fairs
-Flea markets
-Corporate Events

Social Media definitely. SEO is a must also. That is a couple ways that we advertise our custom T-shirt printing and Screen Printing business. Interested in t-shirt printing services ? Try us for your T-shirt Printing

Social media can really help you with this! It's free to create a Facebook page, Twitter account and Google+ page, and good content can go viral quick. You can even reward people for sharing your business and messaging with a discount. It's a great way to spread the word!

I think using free marketing strategies are a great way. Build your strategy using your social networks and maybe the shirts you print out. This drawing may help: https://www.facebook.com/business/power-of-advertising

Customized T-Shirts is one of best ways to advertise your business, create Unique Stylish T-shirt Designs to promote your business Brisk and popular, you can also took idea from from Printland.in

My family owns a restaurant and they have found that social networking and word of mouth are very effective.

Hi @shailah: There is a similar question posted here: http://www.careervillage.org/questions/585/how-can-i-get-my-business-heard-of with a couple of answers already. Does that contain the answer to your question? If not, please let us know how your question differs so we can answer that part specifically.

Hi There!

You need to first understand who you want to target your business to- pre-teens, adult, women, men, etc. Identify some age ranges of your typical buyer. The most cost effective way is free- design a website and ensure it ranks well in search engines for free (make sure you identify the right content in each page that links to keywords people type frequently) and use that free traffic to get the word out. Piggy backing on events already happening with free shirts is great too.

Websites like Twitter and Facebook are great free ways to advertise, but they take a lot of time. You have to constantly be on them to spread the word.

I haven't tried Google ads but I don't know too much about them, maybe I'll look into that. I just recently opened my webstore too

There are many free website directories you can advertise your business on. One I know of is http://www.biznessquest.com. If you do a google search for business advertising online, you will find more. The more you promote your business, the higher your chances are for getting found. Congrats on your new business and I wish you the best of luck!