How Do you Win a T-Shirt Contest?

T-Shirt contests are a great way to earn a secondary income, but how do you win at them?

First of all you have to research each site, there are plenty of big players out there that offer a solid amount of cash that you can use to finance whatever you want to. Examples are threadless, designbyhumans or lafraise. Each of those sites gives you at least 500$ in case you win at their contests.

It's not easy to win at a contest, first of all you have to come up with either a very clever idea or some great artwork. In case you are smart and good with words, threadless and typetees might be worth your attention. They offer a good amount of cash for some smart sentences. They pick two of those each week.

In case you have skills at creating art, you can take part at each of those sites. Threadless rewards clever or cute designs, very often with a punchline. Or some beautiful handdrawn illustrations. It's hard to win there though, because there are so many people taking part. Check out the shirts in their stock and you should get a feeling for what can win there.

Other sites reward great artwork and depend more on their community, which means that if you have some very good skills and know what you want to do, and create some wearable shirts you are bound to win sooner or later.

A few pointers for T-Shirt contests:

• Don't give up, it usually takes more than 1 try to win there
• Create shirts that you would love to wear yourself
• Don't be upset when you don't win and try it somewhere else, or try to sell the shirts yourself if you think people would buy it
• Use the shirts you create to build a portfolio so you can go beyond t-shirt contests one day