Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hey, my name is Lizzie Smiley and I absolutely love helping people connect with their calling and all the tools they need to kick roadblocks and excuses right out the door so they can cultivate the life they dream about. If you want to launch, grow, pivot, or scale your Etsy shop, or you've always wanted to develop the mindset and skills to run your own business, then I'm your girl. I've had that entrepreneurial spirit going strong since my very first lemonade stand. And now I'm a work at home mama with multiple online companies and a full time Etsy shop, all while being present with my kids for the everyday chaos and most important milestones. On this podcast, we'll talk about all things business, mindset, Etsy, creativity, dazzling our customers, and so much more. There's plenty of room at this table for you, so scooch on in and let's go. I'm holding nothing back. Welcome to how to sell your stuff on Etsy. I'm so glad you're here. All right, guys, welcome back to the podcast. I am fired up because I have been working on this for weeks. This is a big culmination moment. I'm really excited you chose to press play on this one. If you're one of my OG legacy friends, I love you so much. Thanks for being here. I'm super excited that even though you know what you're doing, you clicked play. And if you're brand new here, I just want to say welcome to the family. I'm so excited for you because we're just a really cozy, friendly corner of the Internet and I am a no gatekeeping, give you all the love, boost your energy kind of gal. So you're in the right place if you want to learn about Etsy, how to make this a real thing, let's just like bust through the myths. Let's talk about the tea. Let's, let's. We're going to like drill into it today. That's why this took so much time. I have 12 pages of notes. I'm going to be talking like a Gilmore girl to get through them. And if it feels right, I. Well, let me just announce this. So I wrote a book. It's. It's an ebook. I'm not trying to like, put it on paper or anything. Let's save the trees. But it's a gorgeous, colorful PDF ebook called how to make your first 10k on Etsy, and it has been a labor of love. In the last couple months, one of my team members has been beautifully formatting it into this book and it is now available. It's $27 and it's 177 pages of everything I could possibly think of to tell you what you need to know and strategy and just really getting into it. So if you are a reader, if you love that kind of medium, grab it. That's why I made it. I literally started getting feedback. Lizzie, I know you got courses and workshops and things like that. I really would like a book and I'm like, well, I can do that. So here we are. That's the launch. That was like the least professional launch ever, but there you go. Grab it. If it feels good for you, it'll be down in the show notes. I'm excited for you to read it. I held nothing back as per usual. The other thing I want to talk about is the one tool that I think you should spend money on to help with your Etsy research. And that's called Profit Tree. I've talked about it before, but I'm gonna talk about it again because I'm kind of thinking about it from a different lens these days. I've really been like refining what do you guys really need? And if you've been listening to my, my other episodes or you took my SEO class that I just released recently, that's another really great little masterclass. Teach you everything. I think you need a lifetime access Profit Tree account which is do you pay $67 once and you get access to all this crazy data? I'm gonna explain in a second and I think you need a free ever be account. So I'm not over here trying to sell you. You need all of these things. I think you need those tools and one of them is free. Profit Tree is the only one I think you should pay for. Get the lifetime access plan. It's going to help you make data based decisions. So too many people come to this and honestly some of it we just didn't know. Right? We're are a lot of us are artists or creative people. You don't want to go on Etsy based on emotion or a hunch. You know what you, you want to follow the data and make decisions. That's how you get results faster. Profit Tree happens to have the most up to date data. That's one of the reasons I really like it. It's generating from the past 12 hours of activity on Etsy. That's. That's insane. Other third party tools are like 30 days behind. That can still be very helpful. But 12 hours is bonkers. So you're going to see the behind the scenes data of why other listings and shops are making money. You can't just see that with a naked eye on Etsy. You need these tools that go behind the scenes through the API, do the math, have their algorithms, they're going to tell you how old your competitors listings are. That's really helpful marker. How much money they've made, how many sales they've made, whether or not they're trending right now. Crazy data that really can help you decide what you should be creating. And then the other thing I like about Profit Tree is you can integrate it with your Etsy shop and put your expenses and things in there. Like, especially if you start doing Etsy ads and it's going to tell you your numbers. I'm not naturally good at math. I need a tool to do that for me. I don't even want to think about it. This thing just does it. So if you want to be Shark Tank ready with your numbers, if you've ever watched Shark Tank, it's such a guilty pleasure of mine. Only then I can't go to sleep. I'm too wired. Like right now. You go on Shark Tank and they like want you to tell them what's your profit, what's your net, what's your ad spend, what's your roas, what's your da da da da. Don't even. I'm getting dizzy just talking about it. This thing is just going to show you a screen, like a beautiful aesthetic screen that's just going to tell you your numbers and what you need to know. It can be really, really important, especially if you're running ads or doing handmade. But that aside, the data is crazy. And then the final thing I want you to know because we're about to dig into it. Okay? I'm about to give you a lot of information on what you need to do and. But because most of you are just listening to my voice, some of you are watching me on YouTube. But the how is like the next level. I'm going to do as much of that as I can. But unless you're kind of sitting with me over the shoulder and I can spend hours, not just one podcast episode, helping you understand how to do all of these different things, you might be a great fit for my scaling society. If you're new here, you're trying to grow on Etsy and you're running to Roblox, get with us where we can hold your hand. Okay? This is the one resource that you need to get from 10k to 10k for the first time and beyond. And it's my all inclusive membership. This is how the highest level you can work with me directly where you get support, you get feedback for every step so that you don't have to get overwhelmed and like wonder if you're doing it right. So I have an Etsy success roadmap in there which is just basically going to help you figure out where are you. I you might know you're right at the beginning but you, you might not realize you're further in than you thought or you might be not as far as you thought. And it's going to help you figure out exactly where you are and based on where you are, what you need to focus on. Because too many of you email me, I'm overwhelmed. I don't know what to start, I don't know what to do next. I don't want to waste time. That's why I built. So the roadmap's gonna help you figure it out. The community is going to be a daily source of getting your questions answered from my coaches, myself as well. Hearing what's working now from the other members, lots of encouragement because I think part of it we can feel really isolated on this journey. Seeing what's working for others is so helpful. Just getting that feedback and then access to monthly group coaching calls with me. You actually get in the room with me live twice a month for at least an hour. I have no boundaries so it's usually two hours but it's so good and we talk and we become friends and I help you short circuit all of the things that took me years and we get you there in months. Just like you've seen on some of these episodes recently. Like last week with Rose. She's 66, she's a mom and a grandma and she's making it work with an AI Etsy shop. How crazy is that? So proud of her. Or Becca, who literally just blew up her shop selling digital invitations in six months she's working with me now. We're running shops together doing things. You probably heard Shannon's episode a few weeks ago. She did 2,000 sales in six months and now she's trend setting on Etsy. You've probably heard Preston, who's one of my handmade, Tristan and Trista are two of my handmade superstars and they have just done incredible things. We're all in there and we're getting these results because we're doing it together and we're helping each other and it's like no man left behind. No woman left behind. I have a whole vault of resources you get access to that'll help you refine. It'll teaches everything. And if there's something in there that won't teach it, I either know where to send you or I'll create it. We're working hard, so there's so many ways we can help. I'm so excited for you. Get a pencil and a paper this time. You probably in your car or on the elliptical and that's cool too. But you're going to be coming back to this one because this is meaty. Or grab the ebook and it's all in there. That's another way to just capture it all if you don't want to take notes. So the reason I picked the number, I'm just going right into it now. You guys, I listen to and you're going to hear about this in a few weeks. I listened to this podcaster called Tiffany Carter. She's very intense. She does a lot of mindset and business coaching stuff and she was so willing. She's mixed. She's made like, I think hundreds of millions of dollars, like numbers I can't quite fathom yet. And she was so much more willing to talk freely. And I think I already do that. But after hearing her, I'm like, oh, there's more room for me to just like be, really be me. So here we go. We're going, right? Okay, So I picked 10k because there's a few things that happen. First of all, it's a number that gets people's attention. It's not ridiculous. I'm not like become a millionaire on Etsy in six months. It's not going to happen for 99.9999-9999% of us. But 10K is a life changing number for pretty much everybody. It's something that feels like it's pushing, if not totally full time income. But there's a deeper reason I picked this. There's something psychologically about the number $10,000 and you making it from a side hustle, you making it online, you don't have to show up for a job there. There's a belief shift that cranks in your brain where you're like, wow, I can do this. This is not an irrelevant number. And once you do it, once something changes in you where you realize you can do it again and you kind of level up in your capacity as an entrepreneur. I'll tell you what the really exciting thing about entrepreneurship is. You will have many of these Level ups. Uh, I just had a bonkers one. It's the best feeling ever. But you almost, I think in a. In a healthy way, begin to feel a little more unlimited and invincible in the entrepreneur space. It's like once you. Once you know something, you can't unknow it and it gives you more power. It gives you more not. Not power in the bad sense. Power to take charge of your life, power to take charge of your finances. And so I just want you to hit your first 10k. So you lock in with me and realize, I can do this. If I've done it once, I can do it again. Let's go. That's what I have the chills. That's what I want coming out of your mouth. I want you to your belief. I want your belief level to go. Let's go. It's on. Also side note, if you're a Ted Lasso fan, which I am, and also in a few weeks, Sweary Carrie is coming back on the podcast. She does stickers and she's my little Roy Kent, and she always says on the Ted Lasso to her, Roy Kent, and it's the sweetest little thing ever. But the word believe, I can't say anything but believe and not think of Ted Lasso and believe it. If you haven't seen it. I'm really sorry about all the cussing, but it's one of the best shows ever made. It's like. It's like, for me, it's like Gilmore Girls. And then right there, maybe even tied with it, is like Ted Lasso. So just believe. Here we go. So step number one, we're going to literally go through this in steps, and I'm just going to keep rattling this stuff off. There's going to be a bunch of links in the show notes. Step number one, open your shop. That might sound crazy and that might feel really big, and that's actually why I want you to do it, so you don't have to know what you're selling yet. I know, I know a bunch of other people told you you need to have all this other stuff figured out, but I'm telling you the truth. As someone who's made hundreds of thousands of dollars on Etsy, and more importantly than that, coached hundreds of other thousands of other people to do it successfully as well. Just open the shop. Do you know what? Your name doesn't even matter. You can play with the name. You can find something that just fits, right? But you know, you can also change it later. I want you to open the shop because that step overwhelms people and it keeps them from starting. There's almost something where you get over that hump of I've opened the shop that you kind of force yourself to create stuff for it because there's this really healthy tension of it's open, I better do something with it as opposed to being on the other side of oh, it's not even open yet, I can wait. It feels like a big deal. And so doing it's going to make everything else feel more doable. Opening it now. Also there's a. There's actually a practical, not just an emotional port, a psychological part of this. It allows you to use the third party tools that I talk about for the research and that's actually going to help you make a better decision about what to sell and get results much faster. So there's a link down below. If you haven't opened your shop yet, you can use my link and you will get 40 free listings. That's really nice. That saves you 20 cents times 40 and so go ahead and use that if you like. There's money as any barrier to entry. There's going to be a fee to open the shop anywhere from like 15 to $30 for most people. It's different for everyone. That's why I can't give you a. I don't know why they do it that way but they're testing it. So use that to at least get your listings for free. Step number two, shops open. You're putting a dummy listing in there by the way. You're not actually. Because it's going to, it's going to prime you to add a listing. You're not going to put a real listing. You're just going to like upload a picture of whatever. Put whatever you have to put and then you're going to deactivate it, put it in drafts, it doesn't matter. They're trying to get you through that first step too because they know once you get a listing up you'll go. But I think, I don't know, I don't get it. Just put it in draft number two, open up your profit tree account. That's the one where you get this is. I don't know how long they're going to have this deal but they have it now and they have gave me a special link for it. 67 paid one time gets you lifetime access to some of this incredible data. So you're going to pay for your profit tree account so you get access to the data. I Have below a link for that special, what do you call it? That special lifetime access, you know, thing. And then I also have a tutorial for all the ways that I use it. So that's kind of fun for you. You don't have to go figure it all out. I also recommend, and you're going to want to get this now too, get yourself a free Everbee account. Free. That's going to be for your SEO research and you're literally going to be able to look at your competitors listings and see the keywords they use to rank for their SEO, which is Banana. Can't see that with your naked eye on Etsy. You're going to be able to also see not just what keywords they used because Profit Tree has that. Everbee is going to tell you how valuable each keyword is. Bananas. Link for that below the free account and a tutorial for ever. Be down in the show Notes. Do I sound like a. I don't know if I sound like a coach or a drill sergeant today or what, but I am wired. Number three. Choose your product category. So this is one of the first decisions that you need to make and I think you know, now that you've got, you can start playing with some of the data. It'll help you make this decision. There's a couple of different product categories and this is where you've got some room to play. So the first category is handmade. Anything you make at home, you can use supplies from other companies. You could use another, you could use a manufacturer if you wanted to. I think that's like a little intense for most people starting out. This can be, you know, let's say you crochet plushies at home, those could be your handmade thing. I made, I made wood signs. That's how I made my first 200 something thousand on Etsy Handmade wood signs. Some people do jewelry, some people do their own candles. Some people do, oh like laser engraved items or you know, stuff like that or sublimation items. Lots of things you can do handmade. That's the first one. That's the biggest one. Well I thought it's not the biggest one, but it's the one that Etsy really got started on and we're going to talk about that more soon because I think handmade is about to get more important. The second option, I didn't know about this in the beginning. I probably would have done this instead. It's called Print on demand. So Print on Demand is where it's a, it is a physical product that you're selling, but the products are provided by a third party company, I like a company called Printify. Printify has hundreds of products and you upload your design to the product that you want and then you put on Etsy, you use a mock up, which is a blank photo of the product that you demo your design on. So imagine you want to sell, you want to sell shirts, but you don't. This way you don't have to make them yourself or anything. You just link it to Printify and when someone orders your shirt, it goes through Printify and they make it and ship it. So you're just creating the design and then you're creating the listing. On Etsy, you're using a blank, a picture of the shirt that you like that's blank. And then in Canva, you're pulling your design over onto the shirt to make it look like this is what the shirt looks like. It's great because you can test a bunch of things before having to actually make them. Whereas handmade, you've got to make it, it's harder. So you handle the design, you handle the listings, you handle the customer service. There's hundreds of products. Shirts, mugs, journals, wall art, phone cases, candles, blankets, magnets. Go over to Printify. You can see there's so much you can do there. That's a big one. The next one, which is my current favorite, it's called digital products. I like these because they're mostly passive, which means you create the product once you upload the digital product to the back end of Etsy. When someone buys it, Etsy just delivers it straight to their email. You don't have to do a thing. It's like that's why it's semi passive. Yes, you have to keep, keep creating listings. But let me tell you what, compared to when I got an order and then I had to go paint a massive 45 by 17 inch sign, good lord, this is nothing. Digital products are things like coloring pages, templates. So imagine like an invitation template or a resume or a social media template, branding template, baby shower signs, templates. You usually make them in Canva and then you give them the Canva template link and they can go edit it. Other project, other digital products would be like trackers, PNGs, laser cutting files, lesson plans, scrapbooking, ephemera, crochet patterns, tons and tons of possibilities. This is my favorite because for the busy mom or the person trying to figure Etsy out, it's the lowest barrier to entry, it's the lowest risk. It's the lowest investment and you can get listings up really fast to test and see what's going to work. It's a great place to learn. Vintage is another option. So Items that are 20 years or older, if you love going to garage sales or you love going to estate sales or you love antiquing and all of that, this might be fun for you. This is a labor of love. But vintage stuff sells great. It just has to be 20 years or older. And then there's a supply category. So this is where you can sell party supplies, jewelry supplies, crafting supplies, kits, things like that. I have never played with supplies or vintage. I do think supplies could be fun. You know, when I think about people who love to buy art kits, I love to. I. This, this holiday season I bought like a. An ornament, a DIY ornament making kit. It was amazing because it had everything in it, you know, just came with it all and that's kind of fun. And I know someone else who makes a ton of money selling, what is it, embroidery kits. So they're just giving you everything. I mean it's. You have to be really good at marketing and positioning, you know, and showing what it looks like. But holy moly, those can be great. And then people will get on subscriptions and stuff. But I digress. Number. Anyway, the point is focus on one category to begin with. Just pick one of those. There were five of them. Handmade product, print on demand product, digital product, vintage products or supplies. Pick one, but then test different products within that category. What do I recommend? Like I said, I recommend to someone completely new to E commerce, doesn't know anything, not sure where to start if you already know, go with what you know. If you don't start with digital products because again, lowest risk, lowest cost for you, fastest to test and scale. I'm going to say this, and I've said this before, but I really want to reiterate it. I think in three to five years, handmade with some print on demand will take over more as AI changes what people know how to make for themselves. I think there will always be demand for digital products and I think it'll just change as it always has. But I do predict that over time, when people can just go into ChatGPT and have it make whatever they want with whatever aesthetic they want, it might go down a bit. But I promise to be completely transparent about this as we go right now, digital products are ripe learning ground. I'm encouraging students to learn in digital and then ultimately once they can go Full time because time's usually a big issue. Then start playing with handmade or print on demand after you know what you're doing from the digital products. I also think this is wise because if you listen to Rose's episode last week, it's a really good idea to start learning AI skills. And I don't think AI design is the end all, be all, but I do think it's a really smart place because you're, you're having to play with prompting and get really good at it. I can't tell you how much I've learned from being in that space. I think it's going to have you be light years ahead when all of this hits even harder. So before we move on to step number four, this is a really good place for us to have a vocab lesson because I'm going to be throwing out different words and I want us to be on the same page. So the first one we just talked about, product category, that's the type of product. Print on demand, digital, handmade, vintage or supplies. Then you have the product itself. That's the actual deliverable what the customer gets. A handmade necklace, a print on demand shirt, a digital template or link, a vintage Santa mug or birthday party supplies. The next word is next. Vocab is trend. So a trend is a certain concept or aesthetic that is in high demand right now. So for example, we're seeing a lot of grunge distressing. So whether I was selling handmade signs right now, print on demand shirts or PNGs, all of these things are things I've sold. I would be using the grunge distressing trend on everything because it's high. It's a hot trend right now. 80s and 90s vibes. You probably especially notice the 90s, 80s are coming in strong right now. That's another trend. The hand drawn or doodle style. Whether you're talking about the types of fonts people are choosing or the types of elements, lots of hand drawn and then another one is another trend. Example would be 3D textiles. So if you go and look in, I like to study Trends in, in PNGs. That is a digital product and it's basically just a design with a transparent background. So someone, someone buys it, they get a design file that then they can use however they want. They can put it on a PDF that they're printing out. They can put it on a, they can print it on their sublimation machine and put it on some kind of, you know, like a tumbler or something. Like that they can sell it on a print on demand item. There's lots of different things they'll do with these PNGs. Teachers will use them on, you know, in their lessons. Trends typically emerge in the PNGS because they're. That's like the earliest spot and then the next place you'll see them is women's T shirts. So even if you sell completely different items, those are really good places to study the trends and see what the patterns are. So what you're. What we're seeing right now in some of those PNGs is 3D textiles. So it looks like real. It's just a picture, but it looks like actual knit stitches or if you guys ever did the latch hook craft as a kid, I'm dating myself. But it kind of looks like 3D yarn, 3D textiles, embroidery, 3D embroidery, all that's really big right now. The next keyword, keyword vocab word is niche. You've probably heard this before. People confuse. I'm doing this because people confuse especially niche and trend and product, but especially niche and trend. Trend is the concept or aesthetic that's high demand. Niche is who your customer is. So teacher, golfer, homeschool, mom, plant lover, bookworm. The niche is the who. And that's gonna help you a lot. Number four, establish demand. This is your fourth step. This is extremely important. This is why I'm always saying, don't make emotional decisions, make database decisions. You can go back and listen to Trista's episode. Let me make a note about that. It's going to be episode 212 and she's in the handmade space. She had negative 400 in her bank account. The family was spiraling out. And she listened to me just from listening to this podcast and dug into data and her Etsy shop has blown up. Their lives are changed. It was an incredible story. I was literally crying. You have to listen to that one. Establish demand with data. Like. Like Trista did. There's a few ways to do this. If you want to be very data led, which I recommend, this is where you're going to pull out that free Ever be account. You want to have a Chrome browser and add the Chrome extension for Everbee and Profit Tree. You're going to use Everbee's keyword research tool and you're going to do some searches to see what the search volume is like for your product. And search volume is just how many times per month customers are searching for a word or phrase. So you can type it in there and it's literally going to tell you how it does. Are there thousands of searches a month? Is there a lot of demand? Are there really low searches a month, which is an indicator there's not enough demand drilling down into the related keywords, because now everybody's going to suggest similar keywords that can give you really great ideas for what to create, help you find holes in the marketplace. Another way to test this is to use just the Etsy search bar and Filter by Bestseller. So search, whatever term, whichever general, you know, kind of head keyword term you want to use, filter by bestseller. I have a 2 if you don't know how to do that because it's a little bit of a workaround. Etsy took away the best seller filter, but there's a workaround, it's easy. There's a link below for a YouTube video that'll show you how to do that. What you want to see is multiple bestsellers for the things that you plan to create. Ideally, you want to see that they're under six months old and your Profit Tree extension is going to tell you how old the listings are and how much money they've made right below the listing itself in the Etsy search results. So we're using these different tools to help us gather that data. And then seeing, See, this is like a misunderstanding that people have sometimes. When you see a lot of best sellers for something on Etsy, it doesn't mean that that product is way too saturated. What it means is proof of concept. It means that lots of people are buying them. And especially if you see bestsellers like using the Profit Tree tool that are newer, under six months old, that's a strong indicator that you can also compete in that space, that that demand is higher, not, maybe not literally in numbers, but there's, there's more demand than there is even saturation. Like, there's lots of room to play. So keep in mind that Etsy is a search engine marketplace. Shoppers are coming to the platform with something in mind and then they fall. Or like either they come and they type something in the search bar or they follow Etsy's search categories. They've got something in mind they want to look for. And that means that it's not the place. It's a mistake people make. It's not the place to launch something super new, innovative, unique, because no one's actively searching for that thing. And it won't sell unless you drive traffic. It doesn't mean your product's not spectacular. It means you really can't benefit from, from the marketplace. It defeats the purpose of using the marketplace where Etsy is taking its buyers, looking for things and sending it, sending them to the relevant shops and listings that are selling the things that they're looking for. So leverage the marketplace. Follow demand number five. Step five is going to be to study the trends and patterns that are performing well for your product. I'm using my professional microphone, but my phone has been going. I just like, did you guys hear the cha ching? I don't know if you did or not, but if you did, I just put it on silent. I, I don't know if the microphone picks it up or not. Okay, so what types of products like yours are flying off the shelves? The ones that you want to create. Like, study what's working. What are the common elements between the best sellers? What patterns do you see? Is there a certain aesthetic or vibe that works really well? So for example, in women's shirts, if you're, if you're going to be selling print on demand shirts kind of a thing, what design elements or styles or fonts do you see over and over again on the first few pages of the search results? You'll see, you'll see patterns. This is what I've become an expert at. I'm an Etsy Etsy trend expert. That's kind of what I'm known for, patterns everywhere. So another example would be for crocheted items. So we're talking about handmade now. What yarn weight is performing well? Are people buying a really tight stitch or are looser designs performing well? There's going to be trends in this stuff. What, what color palettes are, are neons selling? Are muted colors selling or earthy colors selling? Pay attention to what's trending. And then social media templates would be an example for digital product. What aesthetics or filters do really well? What, what are the filters that they're putting on those, on the images for the templates? Like, you can kind of pay attention to the new bestsellers. Is there a type of content that's selling well? Like, are you seeing more bestsellers that are for carousel templates for Instagram, or are you seeing more reels templates, TikTok templates or static posts? What are you seeing that people are buying? Is it branding? Is it branding? Social media templates are the trending subjects, including people? Are there people in them? Are there people? But they're faceless as opposed to seeing the out what people look like, when and then what formats are best selling. So here's what we're going to talk about build your brain cash. Whenever we talk about following the patterns and trends, we got to talk about your brain cash. This is a term I came up with. What is a brain cache? Think of it like a folder in your brain where you store everything you're learning about what actually works. It's a master computer built around the customer and what they're drawn to, what they click, what they buy. And over time, you're going to absorb into your brain cache patterns of colors, fonts, design elements, aesthetics, vibes, trends, mockups, and also phrases. You'll notice patterns and phrases like the words that people are using or how they're using them so deeply that creating new concepts becomes intuitive. So the idea is you look at this stuff long enough that it's not new to you anymore. You're not trying to figure out, oh, gosh, what's going to work. It's just going to come out of you. It's not forced, it's intuitive because you've trained your brain cache. And a brain cache grows like a muscle. So the more that you train it, you want to do this regularly, the stronger it gets. And you're also going to do this ongoing because over time these things are going to change. And you've got to be. You're going to be ahead of the curve because you keep training your brain cache. You train it by just intentionally consuming images of what works over and over again. Looking at the best sellers. Listen, every day I'm on Etsy looking at the first couple of pages of bestsellers for several different products. So this is a really important part of this step. And for step five, you're taking in what's working well for your type of product. What could you put a fresh spin on? What do you observe about the best sellers? What patterns emerge? What insights can you gain from reading their reviews? This is such a pro tip. What are the customers that bought that the best sellers love or hate that can help you make the best possible products? You either do the same thing that they said they really liked and you include the thing that they thought was missing. It's crazy. Crazy Insider data. Let's move on to step number six. Step number six is where you're going to pick one niche to test your your product concept on. Here's where I differ from some other coaches. You can absolutely test other niches. I actually think eventually you should, because that's how you can build a really big shop. But in the beginning, drill down to one to start because otherwise you can get overwhelmed. I want you to get really good at one. So this is where it's time for even more research. Rather than on the trends or patterns for your product. Now you're going to research the customer that you're gonna. That you are going to target search for the best sellers for your customer. So you can put your customer and niche together as a search term, like, for example, homeschool mom shirt. So my product is the shirt. My niche is the homeschool mom. Now I'm putting, now I'm gonna. I'm gonna get less broad, get more specific, and see what are the best sellers for that person. Or, or you could do it more generally. This is another way that works too. And you could do homeschool mom gifts. Then you might get some ideas for things to put on shirts that no one's done yet, but that homeschool moms are buying on other products that can be really fun too. Then you're gonna look at the profit tree stats. You're gonna notice how much the listings are earning and how old they are. That's the whole point of you looking at those best sellers so that you can see, wow, okay, this one's two years old. It's still selling well. That tells me actually there's something about the test of time that's working on this. That's not a bad indicator. I'm like, huh? That's made money over time. It's still a bestseller years later. And I also love seeing the new ones because I'm like, wow, someone created this new listing. It's competing as a best seller. That means that there's more space here. If they're all. All the best sellers are years old. I'm probably looking for a new concept, so some things to look out for. What patterns do you notice? What are the subjects these people talk about? You know, for moms, you're going to see stuff about exhaustion and chaos and blessings and feral children, that kind of thing. What elements are specific to them? So for nurses, you're going to see stethoscopes, nurses, hats, needles. Specific elements that are going to relate to that niche. What aesthetics are common for the niche that you're studying? You know, when you think about, you know, the fisherman niche. So this might vary. If you were focused on a whole different niche would be women fishermen, but like really dainty text in a. On a really kind of more masculine colors or, or a really masculine element that's not. That kind of aesthetic isn't going to work for a men's fisherman tee. If I'm if I'm buying something for grandpa, it's not going to have a feminine font on it, most likely. So pay attention to the aesthetics that are common, that work well for that niche. What are their badges of honor? Every niche, especially the occupations, but also sports, also moms. I mean, most niches, there are things that they're really proud of. And when you create products that speak to those things, there's a really high emotional connection. Emotional connection is something we're always going for where when someone sees our listing, they feel so seen, known. They see it, they're like, oh, my gosh, that's so me. I have to have it. That's when price starts to matter less and less and less. So badges of honor are a really hot emotional connection item. Look for popular color palettes, trends that work well. Ask yourself, from what you've observed, are there any universal trends that you saw for your product type that you could uniquely apply to your niche that's getting a little more advanced. But because I'm obsessed with trends, I love paying attention to some of the newer trends and then seeing, okay, this one is a really good one for. For the niche that I like to design for. How could I get this over there before anyone else does or be one of the first people who's bringing, you know, grunge distressing to pickleball players? I don't know. Just throwing that out there. Always think about that. All right, I have a little P.S. here. I have a little. I want my perfectionists to. To listen up for a second. Okay? We just talked through six steps, and it was a lot. It was meaty, chewy. I listen here a second. I'm like trying to prep you. Those six steps should take one week max. You are not sitting there for one to three to six months doing all of this research, figuring all this out. One week max done is better than perfect. The game here is to start getting listings up asap. Not trash, not. Not like that. High quality. Yes. Do the research, but don't allow analysis paralysis to slow you down and prevent you from starting because you're just going to get burnt out. You're going to suck at first. That's just part of sucks to suck. But the more you create and list and test and study and refine and create, the faster you get to get through the sucking stage. So it's okay. The good news is when you suck, almost nobody sees any of it. And you can clean it up later, but you've got to put in the reps. So one week to get steps one to six done. I just spend a lot of time on them because I want, they're so important. Like you taking the time to do some research before you get going is going to help a lot. We're going to move on. Step number seven now you're going to create three products. You're going to choose things that you plan to create more of. Not that you're just, you know, testing one off. These, these aren't one offs, these are prototypes. I want you to create three main products, go through the steps of making them, you know, photographing them if you need to, if it's handmade or mocking them up, get it looking good, plan the packaging, how you're going to deliver it, whether it's shipping or it's a branded PDF with a, you know, Canva template link for a digital product. If you're selling like a one off file like PNG or, or you're selling a. Let me think of another example. Oh an SVG or a JPEG or you know, a checklist that's not that no one's going to edit as a PDF. You don't have to have anything separate. You can just upload it to the back end of Etsy. If you're going to be, if you have a bunch of things that you're selling as in a bundle, you're going to put those in a Google Drive and you're going to get a link to that Google Drive folder and put it on a PDF and that's what you're going to get the customer on the back end of Etsy. Same thing with like, if you're selling a template where they're going to edit things, it's a Canva template link and you're going to put that link on the PDF. So this is doesn't even apply to print on demand. You don't have to worry about it, the packaging or any of that. Step number eight, you're going to set up listing templates, or I like to call them dummy listings. This is a huge time saving hack. I never used to talk about it, I don't know why. And then Becca on an episode a few months ago brought it up and I'm like, we need to be telling everyone about this because we got a ton of like I, to me I've done it for so long it's just like intuitive. It was apparently not intuitive so we're talking it through. So have create standard listings that you save as drafts so they're slightly generic so you can reuse them and then customize them to whatever particular product you've made. Again, I call these dummy or template listings. And then later when you need to create a new listing, you're going to just go into it and click Copy. Etsy is going to copy that draft. You're going to edit it and customize it with all of the details for what you're selling and then you can publish it and the others still stay in drafts. It's literally the most time saving. Incredible hack. So to set up a dummy listing, you're going to go to, you're going to click create a listing. You're immediately going to get prompted to set the category, which is just to identify the type of product it is for Etsy you're going to make a title, something general for the products for like. So for example, if it's going to be your dummy listing for coloring pages, you're just going to put coloring pages in the title. Nothing more specific than that. You're going to edit that later when you use the dummy listing or if you're selling print on demand, you know, comfort color shirts, you're just going to have comfort color T shirt in the listing title. Then you're going to create as much of the description as you can standardize. So like I said, I like to have one of these for all of the main things that I create. You can study three to five bestsellers like that you're competing with to see the layout of their description and then use it to create their own. So things like when I was in print on demand, things like the sizes of the types of the type of shirt, like if it was comfort color T shirts, there were standard sizes, there were standard colors, there was standard instructions or you know, information about care product, care, whatever it is that's standard. So I can have that part of the description already in there. Later on I'll customize it for you know, more of like keywords and things that are specific to what I created. Another example is like PNGs. Every single time I sell a PNG it's going to be 5,000 by 5,000 pixels, 300 dpi. Those kind of details can just be in there in that dummy listing. Then you're going to create any standard images. So I always, for my dummy listings, this is a simple one time thing. I'll usually create a simple image that just says the product and then dummy listing for the thumbnail. So for example, I had 40 inch wood signs was a bread and butter product back in the sign shop. So My dummy listing said 40 inch wood sign dummy listing and that's just that thumbnail picture. So when I go over to drafts I know which one to click on or now it would be like Western PNG dummy listing already got all my, all my like standard keywords. Because I know I'm going to create a lot for Western, for Western stuff. It's going to save me some time. I get that specific because you can have you know, drafts up the wazoo. So then you know I delete this out of course like that, that print that first thumbnail picture when I'm setting up the real listing from the draft because I'm going to put in my mock up instead. Hopefully this is making sense. I feel like it's wordy. So also though create anything else that can be standardized. If there's size or color charts. If there's like a note that says this is a digital download, nothing's going to be shipped to you. I just want you to know that anything you want the customer to know about the product, you're going to want to put it in the photo gallery because they won't read the description. And a lot of that can be standardized. So if you have like a little branding graphic that says something about your shop, it can already go in the dummy list. It's going to save you time. And then you're going to set the pricing and inventory because that should be the same every time. When you start, if applicable, you're going to set up a shipping profile if it's handmade or print on demand. Some of that you can sync over from Printify. That that makes this a little different actually. When I'm thinking back to my print on demand days, I had the dummy listings over on Etsy and I would click in them and I'd copy and paste them over to Printify because you have to create the listing over there. So I was just kind of doing some more copy and paste. The other thing you can do in Printify is I would just duplicate old listings there. So like let's say I had a mom shirt. I would just rather than go create a new listing in Printify, I would just duplicate the mom shirt one because then a lot of like the description and the title would stay the same. It would save me some time. So that's another thing you can do there. That's kind of time saving is just do the dummy listing over there. It's really smart though to standardize for like handmade your shipping profiles. Shipping is overwhelming. Like the first time and then you've got it set up and you don't have to deal with it too much. I really encourage you try to have standard shipping box sizes. You don't want to have a different size thing for every single every single product. You want to try to keep it standard. Step number nine is now it's time to do your SEO research for those three products. This is where you're going to use that free ever be account the most. You have to have a Google Chrome browser for this. But when you go when you have it like set up as a Chrome extension, when you go through your Etsy search results like let's say you filter by bestseller. When you click on the little B on the listing, a window is going to pop up on the right hand side of your screen and then you can scroll all the way down in that window and see the tags that that seller used to rank their best seller. And you're going to be able to see how many searches there are for that exact term. You're going to be able to see how many other listings are competing with it. This is where it can get really, really interesting on SEO strategy. I love this stuff. So quick pro tip. We can't go into too much on SEO strategy today, but I have other stuff on that. I even have a whole SEO course that just came out last month. But here's my pro tip for you use when you're looking at you writing your keywords, especially when you're new, especially on a new listing. You want a combination of low, medium and high competition keywords on your listing and you can find them by looking at three to five bestsellers or listings on the first page of the search. If there aren't like bestsellers or you just want to mix it up a little bit, you can look at all the listings on the first page of search results. Those are going to be some of the most popular and you're going to look at all of their all of their tags and just find some that like on ever be low competition is going to be green, mid competition is going to be yellow and high competition is going to be red. So you're going to use a combination of those. Don't do all red because they're the highest search volume. You want a combo for your keywords. I want you to use all 13 tags. This is a mistake that I see a ton. Use all 13 tags. Use the majority of your title characters. I just talked about this in that's right. It was just in that in that SEO masterclass kind of responding to Etsy's new thing about kind of writing your titles for you. They have this AI thing that's like editing them. You'll get this like, you'll see this like warning on your dashboard that says you know you're losing whatever you need to optimize your titles and people will click it and change over the titles for their whole shop. And I like 90 plus percent of the people I've talked to that has tanked their shop. So I think you should use your title the way that we always have. Use all the keywords. I just think make sure the very beginning of your title is like optimize with the strongest keywords for your customers experience. So even though we love to use the strategy of like low, medium, high keywords, that beginning of the title, regardless of whether or not the keyword term is going to help you rank or not use what the customer is going to recognize. So for example, let's say I'm selling coloring pages that have pandas on them. I want to call it Panda coloring pages at the beginning of my title. Even if that is a trash search term that's not going to help me sell. You want them to know what they're getting. So that's kind of my advice on that. Also use your title space for any longer keyword phrases that don't fit in your tags and then otherwise you can kind of duplicate what's in your tags into your titles. For more general keywords like really high saturation crazy keywords that I don't typically recommend you using your tags, you're going to put those in your description. So words like would sign, that's really general. So sublimation, comfort, colors, T shirt, they're super general. People could mean a lot of different things when they type that in. You want to put that in your description as opposed to your tags or title. Step number 10 now it's time to create and publish your first three listings. So use your dummy listing, make a copy, update the details to the specific product that you're publishing, put the mockups or photos that you created in the gallery, refine your SEO based on the research you just did and then add the relevant shop section and publish and you're done. And you really did the heavy lifting when you created dummy listing. So it should be the SEO is going to take the most time on that. Step 11 create more products. Yes. Don't wait to see how the first three do. Don't obsess about your stats, just keep creating. Feel free now to actually test two to four more niches. Clutch those pearls, she said, I don't have to have one niche. I thought I'm supposed to niche down. No. Oftentimes the one you start with isn't the one where you succeed. Unless you're coming to this with E commerce experience, marketing experience. You just. You already know you have to test and play and tweak and grow before this is going to work. And I think the more freedom you give yourself, the better. Test things. Spend some time working on your brain. Cash right before you sit down to design. That's what I really want you to do. Pay attention to how you can level yourself up from the first three you did. Like, soak in the details. Now we can get more refined. What did I miss before? Is there, like, a nuance? If I compare mine to the bestsellers, if I look at them again, what did they do that I didn't do? You know, sometimes coming back to something days later, yes, publish it, but come back to it and, like, how could I do this better? Then create more products that are slightly better than before. This is called. This is what I like to call putting in the reps. It's like at the gym, you have to work hard and consistently without reward for a long time before you see results, right? So the hard part, like creating this stuff isn't the hard part. It's the hard part is disciplining yourself to do it without the dopamine hit of instant gratification. Right in the beginning, it's something new. If you're like me, something new is just like dopamine in and of itself. But now I've gone through all of these steps and all of this stuff and created these three listings and nothing has happened. Or maybe I've done 20 listings and nothing has happened. I don't have. I, you know, I don't have the Cha Ching. I don't have the money. I don't have the receipts. This is. This is. That's the work. That's the messy middle. That's where community can help you a ton. Like, not to mention, like, feedback. Just so you don't feel like you're spinning your wheels. Another set or, you know, in the case of our group, 300 sets of eyes helping you refine. How does this measure up to what I need to compete with? That's what we do for you in scaling society. But the longer that you keep going and creating and refining and studying and creating, eventually you win. Like, just like with your workouts, it all adds up. And then at some point you hit, oh, it's a beautiful tip tipping effect where now you're like, like Shannon, you know, you're making a lot for less work. It doesn't take as much effort or self discipline necessarily. I don't know, maybe sometimes actually having to create more once you're there can be annoying. But we'll work on that when we get there. Right. Mindset is a lifelong thing to work on. Okay, so a little bit of the practical here. Handmade requires the least aggressive effort with creating listings usually. But you know, it'll make up for it in the day to day work, you know, of having to get the products out. You can often get to $10,000 in handmade with 5 to 50 listings. This is what happened with Trista. Like depending on the demand for the product, the research that you did up front, how much competition there is, the quality of what you create and the quality of how well you position it. Like how well do you make it look in the pictures? For me, I hit twelve thousand dollar months with about two hundred listings for signs because I had a big learning curve. My early ones were ugly. My first month was 20. I made. It wasn't even my first month. The first time I made anything, it was like $25 in a month. But I got it up to 12,000. If you can use mockups for your products, it's handmade. So that means a mockup is just where you have a standard base and then you for your products and you customize it. So in signs I used the same sizes and colors every time, but I changed out what the quote was or what the color was, you know, that kind of thing. But the sizes were the same. So I could paint the base of the sign and take a mockup picture of it and then go into Canva and I could just test a bunch of things without having to actually make the sign, the new sign and photograph it. I didn't have to make it for the first time until someone bought it. That can really help. And now I do laser engraving. I'm playing with that. So you know wood items or you hear about Preston's story with the patches. You know, he's got the same base product, he's got a mock up for his patches and he can just then test designs on it. And that's really, really helpful. So if that's you and you can use mock ups, I would shoot if you, if you want to go aggressive, I would shoot to add one to five products per week because you're Just testing it on the mock ups. If you have to take photos, every single product has to be made each time. Photos then shoot for one new listing a month. I think that's a good, a good approach for print on demand and digital. It's more aggressive. So it depends on what you can consistently do. Right. Like, well, we'll talk about that in a second. But more daily activity is going to equal faster results. So if you can get one to five new listings up per day or several days a week, that would be, that would be aggressive. That would be really great. Now if you are a workaholic like me, I knew someone who got to 20,000 plus months in digital products by doing 20 to 25 listings per day. Now they were obviously they didn't have another job, they could really focus on it. But like if you're telling me, if you came to me and you said, lizzie, I want to sell digital products, I want to be making a full time income within six months, I'd say 20 to 25 listings per day. Good luck. You can do it, you could totally do it. I've seen it done. But it comes down to like, what can you reasonably do? And that's okay. Like just match, match your expectations for yourself and your results to be reasonable for what the output is that you can create. Right? So it's better to publish two times per week because you have limited availability and do it every week, then sit down and do 10 in a day and then not touch it for a month. If you know anything about social media and they talk about feeding the algorithm and how you want to post almost daily to feed the algorithm, create activity. Etsy's kind of the same way you want to create activity. Now here's the good news for you because some of you are like, well shoot, that doesn't sound like a long term thing. I'm like, well I'm just going to tell you right now. If you think you're just going to create 20 listings on Etsy and be done and like you know, kumbaya like that's not how entrepreneurship works. You're going to have to keep innovating, designing, leveling up. It doesn't end just like, just like you could become an extremely fit person. You could be Atlas. And if you stop going to the gym and working out, it's not going to take too long before all your results are going to go away. That's life. And I'm really sorry, I really wish I could say you're just going to push really hard up Front and then you're carefree. It can get easier because you've got the benefit there is. How do I want to say this? You get to leverage what you've created before for the next thing. It's always a touch easier in a way because you're not starting at zero. But what I want to say is don't choose to not start because you're going to be limited to only two a week. Or you don't like that, how long it's going to take to get to the results you want because you're probably, you know, two a week, you're not going to be making thousands in your first six months. Most likely depends on, you know, it does depend, but keep it up and you could be making thousands within two years. Oh, I think I've said this to you guys before, but there's a lot of new folks here. So when I. I got braces in college. Ugh. And I didn't want to, as you can imagine. But my orthodontist at the time, he said, listen, two years are going to pass either way. You can either have straight teeth in two years or still be wishing you did. Like it's worth it. It's worth it in two years if you were making $2,000 a month. Holy moly. Can be faster if you can put in the reps faster. Step number 12 is going to be observe your results. So notice what's working. If you know, if there's not sales, but there's views, favorites add to carts, you can still use that as a good indicator. You can create more listings like those. And for those types of customers, those are still signals of what's working. If they don't sell, you can copy the listing and level up the product with your more highly developed brain cache because it should be getting stronger every day. I think that that's an underused thing. I can go back and look at something and say, you know, I created that design, it got some views, maybe even a favorite. It hasn't sold. I wonder if I tested it with some grunge distressing on it. And then I don't take the listing down. I just go into my original file, distress it, and I relist the same thing just with some distress and just test it, right? We call it a B testing. If you're not getting views at all, you likely have an SEO problem. So that's where you need to learn. If you're getting views but you're not getting sales, your SEO is working, but the product position needs refinement It's a whole, a whole different ballgame. Something about the pricing or the listing or the picture or some competition, some competitor has it a little better than yours. It's how your position, you're getting seen. But there's something that's not converting. And if you're getting sales, lean into it. Make more like that. Use that as a strong signal that I need to create more of those types of listings. Same thing on social media. You have a post that does really well. I know you guys shouldn't be doing social media, but it's something that people know the language of, right? If a post does really well, do more posts like that, right? Number 13. We're getting there, guys. Thanks for sticking with me. Once you begin to get repeat sales on the same listings and or you have best sellers, now you're identifying your personal sweet spot. This is a really important moment. How can you expand and scale that success? Is it a style type that you can then go apply to other niches? So for example, you did a grunge distress. I know, I'm using that example a lot. We're talking about it constantly in scaling society right now because it's just this massive over the top trend. Grunge distressing worked for your nurse's design or product. Why not try teachers or you know, if you're maybe in a handmade space, is it a concept that can be refined? So I had a sign that said this kitchen is for dancing. And it started to sell really well. So I then began to offer it with other colors. I tried some different fonts. I tweaked the coat the quote to what did it say? So there was this kitchen is for dancing. Our kitchen is for dancing. In this kitchen we dance. All of them sold. Another way to look at it is, is it something that can go on other products? So you created something that worked great on a shirt. Can you try it on a sweatshirt? Can you try it on a tank top? How about a mug, tote bag, journal, phone case? Are there other ways you can expand on it? The bottom line, do more of what works. And at the same time, because we want to lean into that, we've hit our sweet spot. This is really exciting. We're kind of moving past the messy missile and middle, messy middle and knowing what to do. But this is also very soon to when I want you to try testing the next thing. So like this, like now I know that my boho tapestries sell well. Why don't I try some dark academia themes? It's Kind of different. It's different from what I'm good at. But then I have my bread and butter working for me behind. It's making me money and I'm building it out right. I'm doing more of what worked. But I know that the market eventually will turn. At some point that will fizzle and I want to be ready with the next iteration. I want to have layers. If you want to stay with Boho, that's totally fine. Could you do different products? Boho tapestries do great. Let's make sure that we're leveraging. Let's like maximize. There's not like a firm rule here. I want you to listen to your gut at this point, you know more than you did before. Test more designs on other or, I'm sorry, don't. Just don't lose momentum because you never iterated or pivoted. This is a mistake people will make. They kind of get too comfortable, you know. So this is also how you can stack and diversify your income. This is how it can get bigger. Because now you're layering, you're like, you're like testing that next level, that next thing that's going to work and then take you through. This is what I failed to do in signs, by the way, guys. I did it for years, but it got to a point where the market changed in signs. I, I pivoted into print on demand before it all crashed out. I was still doing great. But what happened was the way the market was changing, I knew I couldn't compete with. I either would have needed to buy a printer because just customers didn't care whether it was handmade or printed anymore. And I couldn't make my labor. The time I was taking actually hand painting them, you know, I couldn't do it for the price point. And then the other thing was, is the Joanna Gaines style farmhouse sign was going out and much more colorful non lettering designs were coming in and that wasn't my bread or butter. So if you want to stay in the game, don't do that. Iterate and test and figure it out long before you have to and then that's when you can start really building a big shop. Step number 14. This is kind of parallel to 13. This is also the time to turn on Etsy ads if you want to. You have proof of concept. I don't recommend turning on ads on to see if things will sell or try to help them sell. You want to make sure they sell organically first and then turn ad spend on behind them. And that is what took my shop from 6,000amonth to 12,000amonth in science, it's worked in every shop. It's doubled. But that, that, you know, that ratio that 6 to 12 tends to get people's attention. If you want to learn about Etsy ads, like, you're there, you're getting lots of sales. You haven't played with ads yet. You'd love to, you know, throw gasoline on the fire. There's a free ads masterclass that I will link below. Done by Hannah, who's one who also created Profit Tree. It's an incredible. She talks, she just describes it. She's much better at the, at the data than I am, so she'll describe it for you. Moving forward, the next step is number 15. This is where you're going to narrow your scope and refine your focus. So as much as before, I was saying throw spaghetti at the wall, feel free and open. If you, if you gave yourself a ton of freedom up front, and I hope that you did, I recommend it. If you have no experience now, you're going to know which ones are working for you and which ones aren't. And so you want to focus on creating where the data is guiding you. So it's, this is optional. It's not going to hurt you if you don't. But you could deactivate listings that are six plus months old that are unrelated to what you become known for or know you're good at. You'll kind of know at this point. You'll look at them and be like, that's not, that's not going to sell. I would for sure turn ads off of any of those. Now, I'll give you a caveat to this, because I had this happen where I created a design that I actually knew was good, but I did it too late in a holiday season. And so I didn't deactivate it. I let it go through and the next holiday season for it, it sold. So you can kind of look at it and be like, I know this was a crummy design. I looked at that way. So this was a good design. I actually was surprised it didn't sell. Then you can kind of let it ride and see. It's just, you know, this is all, follow your gut. You can now get rid of irrelevant shop sections. So clean things up. Go to your first, you know, several pages of your shop and change the. You can kind of reorganize, you know, the order that things are showing in. You can make it look better. In the beginning. I just Want you blowing and going and getting stuff up. And truth be told, that's what I always want you doing. But when you're starting to get repeat customers and things like that, it's a good time to tidy things up, highlight what you do best and refine, get more specific. Step number 16 is now we're going to talk about the math. This is kind of the fun part. This is where I think a lot of this. I know it was a lot of beginner, it was a lot of very just meaty steps. But now we're going to talk about how you make the 10k work, how you figure out, you know, how long it's going to take, how many listings you need, what do you need to do? So a conservative conversion rate for E Commerce or for Etsy is 1 to 3%, which means that you're successful when you're getting 1 to 3 sales for every 100 visits to your shopper listings. So knowing that that kind of. And many of you will have a higher conversion rate than that, which is great, as you get better, you'll also have a higher conversion rate. But once you know what it is and you've got your numbers, you can reverse engineer your goals. So I'm going to talk you through a couple scenarios here. So picture a seller with 20 listings and they're bringing in $200 a month from those. That means on average each, each listing is worth about $10 a month right now. Not because the listing is only worth $10 forever, but because that's the current data point that we're reverse engineering from. Okay, so if we, if we keep everything the same and we only scale the number of listings, we just, we're going to use that number to figure out how many listings do we need. The math is very simple. $10,000 a month divided by $10 per listing per month equals a thousand listings. This is like a, you know, lower end product area, right? So in the same performance, just more listings scenario, they need to grow from 20 listings to about a thousand to hit consistent $10,000 months. And this is the moment where most people either feel discouraged or they finally understand why the pros, the professionals, look so calm. Because the goal isn't go make a thousand listings overnight. The goal is to realize you have two levers you can pull. You know, one is, is quantity, which is what we just calculated, and the other one is value per listing, which is where, like strategy makes it way more doable. Right? Because if our listings start to perform better, which, the more we create and study and build our brain cash. They should. Then the average of a listing's making me $10 per month. They're now going to be making me $20 per month. Or Becca had one that made her $1,000 in a month. So if you have, if your average, your listing is on average making $10 per month and you get it to 20, that's. Now you just need 500 listings. See what I'm saying? Get different levers. You can pull here. If you can get it to $50 per listing per month, now it's 200 listings. And if they could get it to $100 per listing per month, now it'S 100 listings. And that's why reverse engineering is so powerful, because it Turns I want $10,000 into what do I need to change my number of listings, my conversion rate, my price point, or my traffic. So now let's tie it back to conversion rate so it clicks. Okay. If the E commerce rate is 1 to 3%, you guys with me? That means for every 100 visits, a healthy shop is getting 1 to 3 sales. So if their 200amonth is coming from, say, 10 sales, 10 sales are generating 200amonth. That's a $20 average order value. At a 2% conversion rate, 10 sales requires about 500 visits a month. 500 visits to scale that same shop to a $10,000 month. At the same $20 order value, they'd need 500 sales. And this is, you know, Etsy ads can help turn on, you know, turn some levers as well. At a 2% conversion rate, 500 sales requires about 25,000 visits a month. So the story becomes either you build a shop that can handle thousands of listings at $10 a month each. Lots of people do that. Or you build a shop where each listing earns more per month because the offer and SEO and conversion are stronger. Those are your choices. And the most successful sellers honestly do a little bit of both. So let's look at a digital product seller playing like the low ticket game, because that's what a lot of my students do. Mostly passive, low ticket. So let's say they have 50 listings up and the shop is making a hundred dollars a month. What that tells us is that not every listing is doing the work. If about 10 of those 50 listings are selling, we can roughly assume that 1 out of every 5 listings is. Is helping, is becoming a seller. Right? They're not all going to sell. Those 10 listings are responsible for the hundred dollars, which means each selling listing is bringing in about $10 a month. So let's reverse engineer that goal. To make $10,000 a month at $10 per selling listing, you need a thousand listings that are selling. And if only one out of every five listings sell, that means that you need about 5,000 total listings to support that. So it's not a prescription, it's a lens. Right. Because once you understand the ratio, you can change any part of it. You can increase how many listings sell, you can increase what make what each listing makes. You can, or you can do both. You can, you can do something, you can sell bundles that have a higher price point. But the math stops being mysterious and the goal stops feeling abstract. Right? Okay, here's how many listings I need to get up. How, how long do I need to be able to do that? How many listings a day stop making. And to be honest with you, if I could really, I could really talk to you. Stop worrying about the dollar. The dollar number to me is less important to than like set the goal of your activity. How many can I get up a day? The dollar amount just helps you reverse engineer it all. I would also add that long before you create a thousand listings. I'm sorry, or 5,000 listings for that matter, your ratio is going to improve dramatically. So we're using beginner low result ratio. You're going to get better than 1 to 3% conversion rate ideally. And just as we saw with Becca and Shannon and Rose's stories, the more they built their brain cash, the more they got listings up, the more they iterated, the faster it happened. Right. Shannon got to 2,000 sales and a couple thousand dollars a month, I think, I think she has like maybe 500 listings. The point is you just get better. You get better and better. So wow, this is a long one. If you're still here with me, you are amazing. I hope it's been helpful though. I really tried to make it a deep dive. So now you know how to do it right? If you want to go deeper in the weeds with me, grab the new ebook, how does how to make your first 10k on Etsy. It's $27 packed with over 170 pages of full on strategy, no gatekeeping. All of this more visually more expounded upon. We're going to go deeper on everything we touched on today and things that we couldn't get to at all. This was already long enough. Right? And if you want the support, the coaching, the feedback, the access to my coaching calls, access to me, everything that you need to learn to master this Check out Scaling Society. I want you in there. It's going to come with the ebook. Don't buy the ebook separately for coming in. And this month, February, uh, there's gonna be a private member podcast bonus, I should say. So Jenny from the shop is coming back on the podcast for a mindset episode and we're gonna do, you know, an hour or so with you guys here on the podcast and then we're gonna continue the conversation over in the coaching group. Over in Scaling Society, they're gonna get another whole training that goes much deeper and she's also gonna be there in the community to chat with us. I'm also releasing two custom GPTs. What those are, if you don't know, are I've basically built with ChatGPT these tools that I've trained on my own knowledge. And actually I have to give both my, my team members, Caroline and Becca, a lot of credit because they helped me with these. We've been, I've been working with both of them for a long time now. They're both working for me now in addition to their own Etsy shops. And we, we pulled our skills all together to put this together. So one of them is a prompting formula. At this point, Becca is better at prompting than I am because I'm out here doing all this stuff for you guys. She's in the whee weeds run in the data for me. So she like, she taught that thing how to prompt. You basically can, can write your design prompts whether you're doing PNGs or you're doing shirt designs or you're doing anything that's graphics or text related, as though Becca is sitting next to you writing prompts for you. Anyone inside Scaling Society already knows that's insane because she does that in the chat with them. So now you can just use the GPT. The other one Caroline built, she is so good at understanding customer. It's like she's like a wizard. And she built a niche trainer. So what it's going to do is you can use that custom GPT to, to do your, to build your brain cache on a niche. Let's say you, you know, you want to try a bunch of different niches, but you don't want to spend hours and hours of studying you put in there. Tell me all about preschool teachers and it's going to tell you the fonts, the colors, the aesthetics, the elements, all of the things that you need to know about that. So you can just run with it. You can ask, what about, you know, I don't know anything about hunting, but I know it's a huge niche. It is. By the way, tell me what to use for that. Another one's the Christian niche is massive. Lots of people are best sellers in there who aren't Christians. But you know this thing is going to tell you exactly what you need to know. So great things happening in there in addition to everything else. And then, you know, for a lot of you, I really understand that that's a higher ticket that's going all the way with me. If the investment is more than you can make right now, I completely understand. I really respect that. My students also get excellent results when they start with my lower ticket membership. The trend spotting. That's where you get a weekly trend report. For me, it's incredible. You get a training video on the trends. You can always this is time saving. This is a time saving tool. Reduces you can build your brain cash faster. You can get to designing faster because you've got it right in front of you. I give you six listing ideas. Here's what you can create right now. I do the SEO for you. Saves you time. You get access to a monthly live coaching call with me. So you're getting some of the scaling society access a little more help, you know, without the price tag. So that one you can actually get your first month for $17. It's normally $37 a month. That's what it's going to renew at. Use the code keep20 at checkout to get your first month for $17. That'll be linked below. This is excellent for like here's who it's good for. If you sell print on demand, excellent. If you sell digital products most of the time, excellent. Like if you're just doing real estate templates then no. But if you're doing a more a variety of templates that are digital products that are influenced by trends, this is going to save you a ton of time. If you're in handmade and your product is customizable. So basically if you can use mock ups for your handmade product, this is great for you because whether you're selling patches like Preston signs like I used to, coasters that are laser engraved stickers, the trends influence those things and the more that you incorporate them into your designs, the better results you're going to get. So those are the ways to go deeper. I can't wait to see a lot of you inside these different tools and resources. But either way, I tried to make this episode where you don't have to spend a dime. You don't have to do anything. You should be walking away with so much actionable strategy that you're golden. And that's what I love to do. So, you know, hit that, subscribe, Stick with me. We're going to keep it coming. I'm going to keep it really high value. What's happening next week? Next week we got Preston on the podcast that's going to be so much fun because he's just had such amazing his story. It's, you know, it's taken him a few years to really get there. He was my very first ever coaching student. And then the week after that is Jenny from the shop. We got really fun stuff coming up. So thank you so much for spending the time with me today. I'm gonna stop it here since we're over an hour and 10 minutes in, not even adding the intro and outro. Thanks, you guys. Until next week, you go make something awesome. I love y'. All. And that's a wrap on this episode of how to Sell youl Stuff on Etsy. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. If you're looking for more resources, head on over to howtosellyourstuff.com where you'll find podcast show notes, all the links from today's episode, the blog, courses, coaching, and more. If this episode episode was helpful to you, awesome. The greatest compliment I can receive from you is a rate, review and subscribe on this podcast. Not only will it allow us to connect again on a future episode, it lets me know I'm providing you with value and helps other people find this content more easily. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your support. Have a great day and see you next time.