New T-Shirt Professionals Group on LinkedIn

Are you a T-shirt designer who'd like to learn about new T-shirt printing companies? Do you want to meet people in the apparel merchandising industry? Are you a POD looking for T-shirt designers? Are you an affiliate marketer looking for great T-shirts to sell? Or do you just want to meet others in the T-shirt world like yourself? If so, read on...

I've been diving into LinkedIn over the past several months as I wanted to make connections with colleagues before I left my job. I never expected to find LinkedIn so wonderfully useful, well-designed, and easy to use.

If you don't know about LinkedIn, then go there, sign up & learn more about them. No, I don't make money by telling you that :-)

Once you get an account going, you'll soon learn the benefits. What drew me to them is I heard they were the largest professional (think: opposite of MySpace) networking website, and I happened to have a lot of friends and colleagues already on there.

I joined a few groups to see what it was all about. Basically a group on LinkedIn lets you view everyone else in the group, you get to display the group's logo in your profile, and it offers another way to be able to make connections with people within the group, without having to have worked with them previously (or know their email, etc.).

How did it help me? Well, for starters, I had a creative talent recruiter find me in a Minnesota Networking group. We linked up. We emailed. I met her for lunch and now she'll keep me in mind for future work.

Until now you couldn't just look for groups on LinkedIn. Now you can search their groups by type, key word, etc.

So I looked for something that would tailor to people in the T-shirt industry. Designers, sellers, printers.

I found nothing!

So I created a group called, "T-Shirt Professionals."

Here is the group's description:

Do you have experience designing, printing, or selling T-shirts? If so, please join us! The purpose of this group is to help connect T-shirt designers to affiliate marketers and apparel retailers, share T-shirt marketing trends & ideas, & recommend POD and manufacturing services.

If you're like me, you're always looking to meet people in your industry. I can't work in a bubble, nor should I.

My hopes for this group is to bring together people on all sides of the T-shirt biz. Personally, I hope to lure in some affiliate marketers who I can share my latest, greatest T-shirt designs with, maybe meet up-&-coming folks in the POD business, share ideas & trends with my competitors (yea, I'm a little crazy that way) & see where it goes from there!