Ask the Etsy coaches ANYTHING - Marc's Birthday Episode - The Friday Bean Coffee Meet

and jam we are live yay hello dirty 30 dirty 30 marcus turning dirty 30. yes i am cause he's dirty hello dirty oh wow look how freaking good that looks look at that looky there camera's a little dirty but you know what we can let me clean your face real quick let me clean your face real quick sweetie here sweetie there you go there you go sweetheart we got we got all all gunk off your cheekies is that better it's like that better sweetie okay a little bit there we go we are still experimenting with sounds with cameras with effects it you guys are part of an ongoing weekly science experiment which we've primarily gotten to experiment with uh because we've been streaming video games at night um i think that we've done five now four five five a lot more than that but we've had to take a bunch down because they've been messed up yeah so we've done five nights so far uh feel free if you wanna follow us on twitch if you're into that kind of thing our username is just okay i guess uh mark you want to type that into the chat for us sure so feel free to follow us we'll probably stream a little bit tonight for mark's birthday twitch.tv slash just okay i guess there you go all right now on recursion dirty words so no babies in the room yeah well it's hard not to when you have things shooting at you so holy this stream looks good today we're going you said bad word oh man see what i tell ya you're getting too used to streaming well i tell ya we're going to start streaming on twitch and i'm going to start cursing and i'm going to start offending people so we gotta be careful it's your birthday you get one everyone agree everybody agree right he gets one he already used up his one next time he gets a smack right let us know in the chat okay or you just get an extra birthday spanking i already got to give you 30. all right so we we are about that on alphas after dark we don't do these uh open q a's not very often very often we actually did one in march um but we decided that since it's smart or tomorrow is mark's birthday technically but since it's his birthday these are his favorite to do because we get to answer a wider variety of questions rather than being constrained to a topic which we normally are so we thought that this would be a fun opportunity for us to just answer random questions that you might have uh we also have handmade alpha academies opening on june 14th so if you end up having questions about that this is a good chance to ask those because it's only open for 10 days for enrollment and then we close the doors until december so if you've got questions about that this would be a good opportunity because you've still got several weeks to save up if you're planning on doing it um if you have questions about etsy etsy seo e-rank photography branding brand psychology if you have questions about i think the only thing that we don't answer questions about is taxes because we aren't tax experts and you know we don't want you to sue us or try to yell at us and leave you know mean comments about us on the interweb so uh a couple things before we start because i already see some questions coming in the chat thank you guys feel free to start getting those in i'm gonna go ahead and pop the chat out yeah good idea and give you this way we have this set up now i like this a lot more because now we can see everything yeah um before we get started guys and while i'm waiting for you to get some more questions in the chat this week this upcoming week on saturday so a week from tomorrow alph adapt is launching it is launching this is a project that amber marie from the pet portraits that we know and love uh she and i have been working on a project since november bamber because my etsy shop is currently in a state of limbo because swarovski crystals have discontinued their diy components for individual crafters i've got a video about that on my channel if you rely on swarovski crystals you need to watch that because you're going to have to find a new supplier for my jewelry we have not yet um and we aren't sure what we're going to do we're kind of at a stand still with the the jewelry business that i spent nine years building that's my six-figure shop that is the shop that's been featured in news and media around the globe so obviously it's very stressful when i can't get it back open so amber marie and i did exactly what the name suggests we adapted i was able to take all of my skills and knowledge that i've used over the last nine years to build my current etsy shop i used all the skills and knowledge that i teach you guys in handmade alpha academy we followed the exact same launch strategy to launch a brand new brand and you guys don't even know what it is you have no idea what we're launching you you have not even the slightest clue what alph adapt is but over 400 of you have signed up for our mailing list because not only are you going to get to know what we're selling next saturday when the etsy shop opens to the public but you're also going to be able to steal our marketing look at the emails that we send when you're on our email list for elf adapt follow me on facebook my facebook page is starla and the handmade alphas so look for all of the photos with glitchy pop-ups and mysterious messages mysterious messaging because that's the whole point we're teasing and that is a part of my launch strategy i tease products without telling you what they are and that has sparked so much engagement that 400 people have signed up just to see what the heck we're doing that is amazing so if you want to sign up for the alpha adapt waiting list it's linked down below uh just click to show more and i went ahead and put that one right at the tippy top so you can find it there's like a black heart emoji and a red question mark sign up for that email list but don't just do it to be marketed to okay because i am going to market to you i'm going to show you uh you know basically how i market and i don't want you to just look at those as marketing i want you to look at those as educational materials look at how i do my photos look at how i built my email list look at the aesthetic of the pages uh look at the marketing that we're doing on my facebook page and social media and really study how we are getting people onto the email list because ultimately you can take it as marketing and say oh she's just selling to us but really what i'm selling you is an opportunity to learn free stuff because you can literally sit and copy what i'm doing you just have to know that you know i'm not if if you buy then that's great too uh and a quick note we have decided that we are not going to take any of the profit for alphadapt um we are going to be actually giving that to amber because she's putting in so much work on this prog project and uh we feel that it's only right that amber got to take the pot on this one so and we're hoping that with that money the plan is that she's going to save it up and come to america to visit mark and i because she lives in the uk so we're we're like already planning all the videos and fun things that we're going to do for you guys when she's here um after you know kovid's kind of died down thankfully amber's got her uh vaccine so we need to make sure that her hubby's vaccinated and that flights are safe and then we gotta get ours and we gotta get our vaccines and then and then it'll be safe but in the meantime she's gonna save up by saving money from alpha dap so um feel free to sign up to the email list and and watch for that launch next saturday all right let's scroll through there's a lot of questions do it all right all right we had one like right when we started but i think it disappeared so that's that's it no it was one before this one so if your question is before eric floyd's here if you posted it right when we started it can only go so far so i'm sorry but your question is gone you will have to do it but please don't repost it if your question is still showing yes all right eric i'd like to save time and make a few production uh production listing videos to be used throughout our shop dog collars or do you advise taking the time to produce more specific videos for each listing i think that either way is great if you could do a couple of specific videos that's great if you want to do it more like a trailer almost like a commercial for your brand with maybe get some footage of dogs running all happy with the colors on and and really create the the feeling that you want your customers to feel when they're purchasing that product i feel like it's going to be just as effective as if you did a video of just like a dog collar sitting on a lazy susan rotating in fact i would opt to say that if my if i were looking at a brand and there was a very well created like video ad of dogs running with the collars with the sunset in the background i would say that that would bring me closer to making a purchase than just seeing the dog collar like spinning around on a lazy susan um mainly because they're already going to get a good idea of what your product is you haven't reinvented the wheel you're making dog collars most people know what a dog collar looks like and you know how it functions so you don't really need to display that in a video most people know that i would say that if you could get just a video of a dog wearing the collar to show how it fits um and kind of create some happy emotions when they say oh my god it's a puppy that would be the way that i would go but either way it's not going to make or break you the fact that you're getting listing videos in there at all is fantastic so do whatever feels right and you can always change it later it's not going to make or break you i'm considering opening a second etsy shop to sell svg files i was thinking of selling the files that i use uh that i created to use for the products that i sell is that a good idea or should they be different um i can see two sides to that are you going to be upset when you see your designs being sold on other products on etsy because that's why people buy svgs they buy svgs and then they use those svgs to make products that they will also sell on etsy so if you already have a shop that has those designs on them will you be upset if you see somebody else selling pretty much the exact same thing as you possibly for less if the answer is yes then i would create different designs if you don't really care and you're not super married to to your designs then then go for it um but like i said just uh it really depends on where your emotions are and where your emotional attachment is so hope that helps see charlie said i haven't been able to be here for the past few weeks what have i missed well well we ended world hunger um we made peace with the entire world mark landed on the moon last weekend and i'm already on the way to mars i'm a hologram that you're seeing here i'm on a spaceship somewhere no not much uh feel free to watch the the last two videos they're all recorded and ready to go i highly recommend watching the uh seo game show and the brad pitt video those were one people seem to get a lot out of so which is crazy because i did not think that that was going to go over well but apparently apparently you guys liked it oh she's good at doing stuff who would have thought maybe i'm good yeah while holding my world's okay as coach mug that's backwards because the camera's switched yeah i mean it's showing them in the order that we're actually in man it looks good it does you guys like how it looks does it look professional we had one complaint but we'll get to that in a minute oh question if i have two good keywords in my title should i have high competition high search one first or more specific lower competition search keyword first first it doesn't matter what's first i'm a yeah it doesn't really matter what's first i'm a big fan of having what the product is first yeah like whichever one describes the product best first that way when people are searching for it if their eyes scroll through it people don't start reading in the middle of a sentence they start at the beginning right so yeah yeah it needs to because you know you're only going to get like a a little bit of preview text on a search page so what the shopper reads directly under your listing photo uh on a search page with all your competitors that should point to what your product is whatever it is if it's if it's worlds okay as coach mug then i want to make sure that world's okay as coach mug is the text that i see you know front and center um but if you if they're about the same if it's like world's okay as coach cup versus world's okay as coach mug i would say that it i would just um use whichever has the most searches but it doesn't matter because the order doesn't matter um so i wouldn't worry too much about it just make sure that what you have at the front of your titles at least uh is most accurately pointing to the type of product that you're selling tags though tags absolutely don't matter you could put those in any which way you want to yeah uh joining haa in june any supplies i need to buy in advance no that's the great thing about handmade alpha academy the only thing that i recommend that you buy is uh a binder make sure that you have a a printer and if you don't have a printer you can draw the things out right on your own paper most people like to print them out a hole punch for your binder is recommended i usually just tell everybody when they start putting the school supplies out stock up on all the fun notebooks and things that you would have bought if you were in school because it makes taking notes and it makes actually doing the work a lot more fun when you're using the crazy gel pens and when you're using the crazy binders uh it enhances the experience for our i know that our guys who are in aja they don't give a crap about that stuff they don't care about the lisa frank notebooks but i know for a lot of our alphas they definitely respond really well to having the fun school supplies and i do when i do an online course which i've taken many many i i mean i've got colorful pens all over the place yeah so uh yeah that but that's all you need the the point of handmade alpha academy is that you get in and you don't have to buy anything and the one thing that you do have to have which is an e-rank pro membership for 120 a year we buy that for you and we're we're not given that by anthony just because we paid for it i just wrote him a big fat boy check yeah so we pay for that per alpha who enrolls yes so that's the only thing you need deb do you have any etsy google analytics setup info i have my old google iu but with the new changes i can't find out how to see my search terms thanks i actually don't know off the top of my head yeah you're the he's our google analytics guy over at e-rank which debbie knows that because debbie also is a superstar e-rank um maybe you could get a little acquainted with google analytics and do a like for etsy do a little mini episode yeah i can do that maybe later on yeah are you guys accepting packages for an unboxing video yet you know to be honest i don't even know if our po box is still active because we haven't wanted to go our actual post office is so full of people all the time we never want to go there yeah we've so for those who don't who are new we used to do unboxing videos and then covet hit and we asked everybody to stop sending things to rpo for safety reasons i know everybody complain they're like kova doesn't live on surfaces well yeah but i still have to go into the post office which is always very very full of people because we live next to a military base where everyone's mailing things to families so our rp mail office is in between like four cities it's like the center of four cities we have drawers drawers and drawers and drawers full of products that we have not hosted a giveaway for um simply because we wanted to wait until coveted it's a mess right now so we're not sure when we're going to resume them um i promise we'll let you know when we are though yeah we we feel really bad but we want to stay safe and we'll probably end up sending an email out about it when we're ready to start accepting him again and i want to make sure that mark and i are vaccinated um before we start doing them because that is a big commitment we have to go into the post office pretty much every single day and we usually only leave our house like once a week so that's i know that that sounds crazy that it's a big commitment to leave the house but we live in a very very busy town and it turned something that should take 10 minutes turns into like an hour ordeal so we'll let you guys know look how happy this boy is he's just laying his head uh can mark tell us anything about dogecoin and his thoughts on the future of dogecoin yes i can um i think that it's a good idea to invest in it again not a legal professional not an investment professional but it's worth what like 30 cents right now i bought in at six cents at six cents and that was like two months ago um billionaires are mentioning it obviously elon musk talks about it non-stop he's the reason bitcoin went from 30 000 to 60 000 in a day uh if more billionaires get in on it there's a very good chance that they're going to have a little meme war over who gets the dogecoin rights and kind of thing so it could end up blowing up if you got a couple hundred bucks to put into it i mean it's it's obviously more expensive now so only put in what you can lose you can afford to lose but you're gambling uh you're gay it's gambling i mean that's that's kind of what it is but i mean the the market cap right now what people estimate is somewhere between nine and ten dollars because of where interest is at but the more interest grows and the more billionaires get into it the higher that market cap goes so if you're gonna buy in i would buy in now before it gets to a point where like bitcoin was where it went from like a dollar to a thousand dollars like overnight and then nobody could afford it anymore and we can joke about it we can say oh that's silly but look when i remember bitcoins were sixty thousand dollars when i was in the military it was worth pennies yeah we we were like oh this bitcoin thing this is silly this is crazy and now we could literally if we would have been smart and just bought like 10 15 of them back when they cost almost nothing it would have cost us less than a dollar and we would be like retirement worthy right now but anyway well that's that's we'll get off of that but there's angela said your background looks like when ray christine tried to fade out her ugly carpet sorry well you know the thing is the reason that we do that and here let me i think that was it am i on the right thing yeah so i turn that off and our background looks like crap here let's wait till it pops up on here and it'll look like crap because we do this and then it goes away yeah because our our friday bean backdrop it's um i could just get rid of it how about that i just got rid of it yeah angela see what you did what you did i just deleted the background i actually want to see how this looks with the gopro that works really well it's like just cutting their chairs out but yeah so blur in the background because our background looks like crap i don't even have the intensity turned up i'll do it just for you okay anyway yeah quit complaining yeah we're doing it because we're remodeling our space um the friday bean backdrop is getting wrinkled and wrinkled and wrinkled and yes we're moving her desk onto that side of the room over there and then we're going to be putting up some gray curtains to make it a little bit easier and then i'm going to get a chroma key to put behind her so she can replace her background whenever she wants yeah so that that's the plan for the long run in the meantime we're just experimenting we're just like playing we're playing around with stuff hopefully it's not so distracting that you can't uh still learn from like this i think it makes the camera look crispy i think it makes us look good yeah i like it i think that we look a lot crisper care what you think let's see let's see i starla i sent you an email for the one supplier that will be selling swarovski to select artists yeah i'm imagining it's probably going to be people like that do things for companies like helzberg and stuff like that that sell swarovski's i kind of doubt it's going to be etsy sellers yeah unless they specifically said they're going to be doing it for some etsy sellers but here's the thing i'm very offended by swarovski's choices i understand that they're trying to maintain their name and do the high-end thing but a lot of people rely on them and i didn't realize how many people relied on them until i made my video and then i had people saying like oh my god my my business is completely screwed what am i gonna do so i'm i'm actually quite upset i'm a little sour um and i think that people are more upset for me that i'm not making my jewelry now right now then i'm upset like i've been doing it for nine years it's it's fun i enjoy it i've really liked the time off though i've really liked building it yeah we've really enjoyed it and we think this new brand might be uh yeah might be replacing the old brand because the old one unfortunately with us both working for e-rank and also running haa and planning future content it's just too much work it's too much work and yeah we could hire somebody but it's like the business would only make enough to pay someone to hire them unless we really expanded so yeah the glass ceiling on that business isn't very high yeah you know i'm having a lot of fun helping uh amber and building this this new brand from scratch so we'll see where it goes i might end up building more than one brand in the future i'm not getting off of etsy i have to have no i have to i have to stay on etsy it's that's my place um that is that is where i want to be but i don't know what the future of art by starling moore is it might be like a limited thing what's the matter charlie said you skipped over my question but i absolutely didn't nope no what the what if i missed question we we answered that there isn't another question after that yeah feel free to re put it in again all right barbie i have been primarily selling digital fiber arts patterns but now transitioning into finished products how do i not get taken advantage in with shipping you charge what the shipping price is yeah you go to the post office you weigh your package uh or if you have a package scale at home you see how much it cost to ship and you charge exactly that rate not quite sure what plus shipping supplies if it's successful to ship it yeah if it costs five dollars plus two dollars for the supplies charge seven dollars yeah there's no way to get taken advantage of for shipping you state your rates now if it's incredibly expensive to ship but you've got a ship then you've got to put that cost into the product that's just yeah you can always uh round a little you know around all of it or some of it into the product just depending on how much that way you can offer the free shipping guarantee if you want to but free shipping does not mean free shipping somebody's paying for it yeah uh it's just the seller has usually put the price of shipping into the product inflated that price so that they could put free shipping on the you know yeah so it's up to you how you want to do it but either way you just need to find out how much it's going to cost to ship your product by either boxing your product taking it to the post office on a day when they're not super busy and asking them to weigh it for you or purchasing a package scale on amazon i they're relatively cheap and uh see how much it's gonna cost so hope that we're getting close to the end of the questions guys you better be getting in questions if you want to get them answered today we got plenty of time left i'm into a seller i said it would be so fun if amber gets to come to ohio would you guys consider doing an etsy seller lunch or something for local peeps yeah we actually talked about this way back in the day before before it was even the friday bean i think um now we're to a point where we're kind of big enough where we have to do it with a place that kind of has security because with our audience as big as it is there's at least one weirdo um but i mean honestly maybe yeah once covet stuff settles down we might be willing to do that again we have to make sure we have security because we're big enough now that there's at least one person that's like oh i watch this hot girl every week if i can't remember nobody can there's a very good chance that there's a there's a there's a perv murderer watching the stream right now so we did uh fair a couple years in a row and we did the raw artist fair um and we had quite a few alphas come see us but it was nothing remarkable and it ended up being very costly for us for our travel and accommodations and things like that and then you know we had like five or six alphas show up so we've our audience has grown significantly since then um i would love to do it we'll see how it goes but i don't want to get amber here and then try to overcram the time that we have with her by trying to organize some big elaborate like you know thing and i also don't want to do the big elaborate thing in my hometown because we not that we don't love you guys but there's like he said there might be weirdos and we don't want them trying to like find our house or something so yeah we try to we try to do a good job of not letting you guys know where we live because we don't want to get egged by anyone who's like i hate etsy egged huh i don't know get my house shot up i followed your advice and i changed all my listings in one day i'm gonna shoot up your house i don't think that that's uh okay sorry about that guys uh-oh sorry yeah her computer just totally froze up for a second i don't know what the world that was about all right let me get back up here [Music] okay sab or sob stop if the tag undated planner and undated weekly planner both have a lot of searches showing shall i include both of them to aim for the exact search term though i'm repeating undated and planner um so it's up to you i would experiment with both methods because ultimately you don't need to repeat keywords but if you're really trying to aim for both of those keywords then um you can get exact matches for both of those by including the full keyword phrase you never know which combination is going to work best though so i'm assuming that if you're selling planners that are undated you probably have more than one of them you might just want to do an a b split test do one one way do another one the other way and then using erank.com use the change tracker tool uh i believe that's under the listings tab in your top navigation um track the the results of your changes track to see uh how many views favorites and sales those changes have resulted in because ultimately you're never going to know which method is going to work best for you until you put it into practice that's one thing that a lot of people um and i'm not saying that that's what you're saying but a lot of people don't understand that we can't tell you what method will work better because we will never know what method will work better because that's going to change week to week month to month uh it's going to change based on search trends for example you know around this time last year i was telling everybody yeah make face masks face masks that's where it's at i wouldn't recommend anybody start a face mask shopping nope because it's not don't do it it's not trending anymore everybody's got masks masks are readily available they're everywhere now so it's it the the trends have changed you're never going to know how something's going to work until you test it out but if i were you i would a b split test so you can accurately gauge the results see juju how do you guys come up with topics for live streams by yelling at each other and being really mad at each other for an entire day before the stream so sometimes we have a topic in mind for example next week we're going to be talking about alpha adapt in the process of launching a brand i forgot we were doing that i thought we were doing the critiques next week oh no we can push it back a week okay um so sometimes we have some ideas sometimes those ideas are based on you know just common problems things that we see in the alpha community we've been doing this for like three years now i believe we've been live streaming every friday um we are running dry on ideas i i will admit and you guys offer us a lot of really great suggestions but sometimes they're not possible because sometimes you guys ask for things that either aren't possible well most of the time it's an issue of length it's not a topic that we can cover we try to keep these at at least an hour and no more than two hours and most of the time they're ideas that would only take about five minutes to explain right it's like they're they're individual questions like what we answer here and there's not really enough detail without it being drab and dry yeah um we are definitely running dry on ideas but we tend to revisit old topics that we've done because as we grow and as we gain more experience there's always new people oh yeah there's new people but we also we also evolve add-ons and things that we can add to what we've previously stated for example last week we did seo mistakes we've done a ton of videos about seo mistakes but things change right since we've been working for e-rank we've learned a ton of new mistakes that sellers make so we were able to revisit that topic um but like i said i don't give advice on things that i'm not good at or that i don't have experience in so when you guys ask me for like oh can you do the two hour session on pinterest marketing strategy i'm like i don't know anything about pinterest i can't do that for you i could maybe find some expert to talk about it but i'm gonna tell you guys the things that i know about which are marketing marketing psychology seo e-rank all e-rank tools um branding etsy success uh and things within that realm photography i'm pretty good with ipicky.com and canva so yeah yeah midway seller do you want adjectives for the first or main product the very first word i don't think it matters no it doesn't that that doesn't matter at all not at all let's see to the svg question my compromise is that i sell mid-level sellers as an svg file not my top sellers those are exclusive to me but i can squeeze a few more bucks out of a lower seller with svgs sure that makes sense yeah if you got something that's not selling very well push that problem onto somebody else seriously i mean yeah that's that's business that's that's literally capitalism at its best well it might be selling it somewhere else maybe they could find luck with it at a craft fair or that's that's literally how stores like ross and stuff like that operate you have companies like apostle american eagle buckle all these companies that make these big high-end clothes they have stuff that doesn't sell they sell them to companies like that and then those companies resell them and make a profit off of them that's literally the exact same thing just with digital image files yep see i have a question about digital planners i would like to market to android users but uh e-rank shows almost no volume for that just ipad etc how can i target android users just i mean exactly how the the iphone and apple users are being targeted i mean realistically the reason that you're you don't see as much data for that is because android users are used to not being targeted towards i mean really every major company makes stuff for iphone because they've bought ex exclusivity rights to most companies so you never see good android stuff out there and that's probably never going to change so if you're making android stuff then you just got to kind of market it to android people and that's great because i i am in that niche of android users who is very frustrated that every time i want to buy something for my phone they only have it for apple so i think that just using those android keywords yeah you might not be seeing the same the same search results as people who are searching for apple products but the people who are searching for the for android products specifically are desperate for them because there are not as many of them so that's a better niche i think i think eventually that'll turn itself around the more apple burns its customers the more people are gonna stop i mean pc gaming for one is already doing a lot you can't pc game on them i mean you can but very very minimal stuff most games aren't built to be ran on mac but people are realizing that mac breaks a lot of laws and or mac apple breaks a lot of laws they're like anti-right to repair like you can't open up an apple machine and repair it without breaking your warranty which is against the law in the u.s if you didn't know that um but anyway mark's very anti-apple they treat their employees and their customers like garbage and it's not any better for like android but samsung doesn't have a whole lot of like actual stores apple is its own brand they're kind of a a monopoly within their own company but anyway i won't rants on that today i skipped some people did i no i didn't svg question no question angela oh yeah got a bad review today buyer said this is a scam didn't receive item tracking shows delivered to mailbox so ticked how would you handle it if the tracking says delivered to mailbox you can report it to etsy and they will remove it if if the tracking says that it was delivered then don't respond to the review yeah don't respond to it publicly and so he probably won't remove it if you do yeah so report it to etsy you could try reaching out to the customer and say hey i'm looking at your tracking right now it says delivered i would love to work this out with you if you'd be willing to change your review i can reship it uh i can if you want to do that if not just contact etsy uh and and let them know because things do get stolen out of mailboxes unfortunately um but yeah i wouldn't want something saying that i'm a scam on on my storefront either so i would just go ahead and report it to etsy and make sure that you tell them that the tracking shows as delivered tulsi said bitcoin is so bad for the environment it is it is however there is a cap on bitcoin there is a limited amount of bitcoin that can be mined so eventually it will completely come to a halt dogecoin is infinite so invest in doge doge is better for the for the marx nipples going wild and green screen oh because we're the dark you guys got a sweet honey glow in your cheeks because i'm pregnant let's see are you yeah handcrafted by liz said read the swarovski situation keep your eye on preciosa they have opened up their crystal selection amazingly we built our brand specifically on swarovski and that's kind of how we got the brand to be so big to begin with we were one of the like first few people that was using swarovski because we found distributors and nobody knew you could do that yet long long ago to the moon absolutely to the moon and then straight past it right onto mars anyway maybe you can't see it because i included a link to my listing yeah you can't post links on youtube but youtube will automatically remove it yeah uh you missed gifts by right here i'm blind today it's all these lights i have a hard time like all these frigging lights going on anyway how long did it take you guys to make a full time living on etsy also any advice a whole webinar on this so obviously right now we don't make a full-time living on etsy i want to be completely transparent about that etsy allowed us to open a lot of really great doors so that we can move on and build multiple income streams i highly recommend that you guys also plan to build multiple income streams okay because etsy's gonna have off seasons and that doesn't mean have etsy in a day job you don't have to do that you can do things like amazon affiliate links you could do things like a youtube channel that's monetized you could do things like uh having people you know doing wholesale deals for your for your products where you're working with other you know sellers to sell your products in their stores there are so many different things right now our income streams include etsy which you know right now it's at a standstill but we'll we'll tie an etsy handmade alpha academy youtube amazon affiliate links which we donate all of that money but we'll still include it helping with e-rank so there's five income streams i think that we're missing some what else do we do stocks we'll count stuff stocks and crypto which that's very very small that's right we don't put very much into that um that i mean and then at the occasion we haven't done an affiliate thing with anybody in a couple of years but occasionally we'll do affiliate things affiliate affiliate marketing so there's there's seven things okay um when we got our etsy shop to the point we call it the point of sustainability the way that that happened was basically mark was in the military i worked from home on my etsy shop and mark's back was going out he had injured himself um he was there were days when he couldn't even bend down to tie his boots he had to get out we we couldn't stay in california any longer and degenerative disc disease yeah um so basically he said that i had a year and if i could make enough money that we could live off of it we could go back home to ohio and he could get himself a small job here and we could you know settle down in ohio so that's what really pushed me because it wasn't like one of those things where i felt like i had a choice i had to make it work i i had to save him i had that motivation there where i was like oh crap he is he's hurting himself every day and he's doing it for our family yeah and i worked and i worked in a high paid career field getting out of the military except that my particular career field i had the experience and years for it but most positions also required a master's degree and intelligence fundamentals so i was not interested in that i could perform in any job that they would have put me in but i was not going to spend all of that money in like eight to ten years to get a master's degree in intelligence it just wasn't worth it to me yeah so basically i spent every single day treating my etsy shop like a 12-hour job we i mean i'll admit we are our marriage kind of suffered then because i was working all the time he was working all the time we didn't spend a lot but once we built the audience which was the hardest part you got to build the audience once we built that and we had our email list set up with our funnel it was easy because then all i had to do was make the products plan my launches in market and then i could just send out an email to my audience and say hey new collection is now live and they would block to it and that's exactly what we're doing with alph adapt we're doing the exact same thing and hopefully you guys are signed up for for the email list for alpha adapt so you can watch me do it again and this is exactly how i built art by starla moore to that point of sustainability and i know that that sounds too simple i guess but it's really that easy it's just you have to be able to build that funnel and get those raving followers in a location outside of etsy and outside of facebook where you know that you have direct contact with them it's like having it's like having their cell phone number you know you you can contact them at any time and these are people who are so interested in what you're making that they want you to email them yeah when you've got a new thing they're excited for it they're asking you when are you launching new stuff i'm ready to buy new stuff um and and really once you hit that point the rest is easy i like i say in handmade alpha academy it's like pushing a snowball up a mountain yeah as that as you're pushing it's gonna get harder and harder and harder because that snowball is growing and you've got all that weight on top of your shoulders but once you get to the top of the mountain it's like all the weight lifts and then going back down that snowball rolls on its own there's no momentum needed because you've already got the big snowball it's so heavy that it's just gonna roll at full speed all by itself so that's how you should treat your business you know that you're gonna do a lot of work up front handmade alpha academy is there if you're interested in it that helps a ton because that's going to actually give you the roadmap on exactly what to do but i see sellers do it all the time on their own you just need to make sure that you build your own strategy handmade alpha academy i give you a strategy that i know works and we've got 600 alphas who can back up the fact that it works but it's not the only way make make a strategy today sit down with pen and paper and decide what you're going to do over the span of 365 days see any website recommendations for investing in dogecoin you know we just i just started investing this year and i talked to our tax account when we went into taxes and she was very very happy that i was using robin hood i know there's a lot of controversy with robin hood but the thing is is at the end of the fiscal year robin hood sends you tax statements with all of your earnings and your losses so you don't have to do any math or print anything out you just have to open up the email that robinhood sends you print out your tax documents and hand it to your tax person that's for people in the u.s if you live somewhere else then maybe something else is better but robinhood is what i've got currently the only controversy with it is you can buy into dogecoin however it is one of the only investing platforms where you cannot actually withdraw the dogecoin into a wallet like you would with any other virtual currency where you can withdraw them into a uh a crypto wallet you can't do that but they're working on that let's see tien my sale is so slow to the point i'm no sale i just turn off my ads because it gets costly not sure if it's just me or if this is a slow sale time it's just slow right now for everybody yeah for most people there's a whole like two hour live stream on my channel there's a snail as the thumbnail uh i'm seeing it everywhere there there was this gr do you guys know the group etsy etsy etsy on facebook that that is the whiniest group i know that there's a lot of you in it i'm in it too but that is the whiniest group and every time i go in there it's someone saying oh my god it's slow sales i'm not making any sales i'm not making sales right now and and then everybody comments like i'm not making sales either it must be see no this is normal if you started selling it on etsy in 2020 what you were experiencing was an abnormal number of sales in spring and summer because we were in a pandemic and everybody was stuck at home and they were online shopping things are opening back up now so the marketplace is going back to normal where normally in spring and summer we don't see a lot of sales unless you're selling things for like weddings flip-flops bikinis summer stuff you're not going to see as many sales and that's normal that's why we recommend taking handmade alpha academy in the summer because if you take it in the summer if you take it in june you'll be ready by the time sales start to peak back up in september september is when you can start to expect things to start moving again uh october you're getting a lot more momentum and then november is typically everybody's best month as long as they sell giftable items november is what you want to strive for haa gets you ready for november if you enroll in january if you decide to roll and enroll in december then you've got a whole you know six months to prep can you go over e-rank i signed up but i'm not sure how to use it to increase sales on my etsy shop i am currently editing a couple of videos that will be going up for e-rank that will do exactly that yeah so mark and i both work for e-rank that's a really broad question how can i use e-rank e-rank the purpose of it the primary purpose of it is to find good keywords to put in your listing titles and tags using the keyword tool um keyword explorer keyword tool and keyword explorer actually being updated and merged i think that that's complete now debbie if you're still here feel free to let me know i haven't had a chance to look at it yet um i would recommend because it sounds like you're really new i would recommend going to erank.com blog and start looking at some blog posts i think that that would be your best bet start sifting through and learning the platform a little bit better um but ultimately the purpose of e-rank is to find the exact words that etsy shoppers are searching for and typing into search so that you can make sure that you're putting those words into your tags and titles you can check my channel type in e-rank into the tiny little search bar under my main banner on my channel and i have tons of e-rank videos that are going to help you so hope that helps jen and tonic said i know a couple places in dayton that would be great for doing the event i think i'd probably do it in centerville just because it's a little bit of a nicer area yeah i think i think we'd probably go to centerville i wouldn't want alphas to google dayton and then get like hear the bad stuff and then yeah because dayton's got some rough stuff about it anyway do you cover transitioning to your own website in aha i'd still keep my etsy shop but i'd like to have my own site as well i'm really excited about the june class no unfortunately we don't handmade alpha academy is an etsy course it is if you want a website course you got to take a website course what i can say is that what most alphas do is they use etsy as a funnel to get people to their website and the way that you do that is you follow haa you get your etsy shop doing good bringing in traffic you get it sustainable and then when you get those contacts on your email list which we teach you how to do in handmade alpha academy you get them on your email list and then you when you send emails out you link your website or you can put inserts in your packages that direct to your website so it's almost like you you land the customer on etsy and you build the association and you get your first sale on etsy but then all future sales you send them to your website but we teach you how to do that legally ethically not violating any of etsy's terms of service in handmade alpha academy dulce it wasn't a direct question to us but okay i'll answer it anyway if there are any artists or illustrators here what do you guys do to combat over exhaustion i've been working on my two shops and i really enjoy it but it doesn't feel like i ever get anything done even though i'm being really productive yeah that's that's kind of the rough thing about it you got to give yourself free time and hope that your free time balances well with the amount of actual work you're putting into it oh handsome look at you get handsome handsome comments those make him happy you guys tell him you tell him he's handsome not too many though because comments are going to start disappearing oh okay it's the ads is it just a giant gamble uh i used to say no but yeah it absolutely 100 is now that we know how they work yeah um unfortunately it is pam duthie has a great video about etsy ads that she made a couple weeks ago um that kind of talks about the mechanics of how they work because etsy explained how they work not big of a advocate of etsy ads anymore not a big fan it really is a gamble so if they're working for you fantastic feel free to test it out uh check out pam duthie's video about etsy ads if you want to learn a little bit more about how they work um i can't say that i don't recommend them because some people see great success with them yep but if you're not seeing success dump them dump them don't be afraid to you can't to ditch them uh my daughter's shop was gangbusters until january top one percent of sellers thinks things slowed down but we still get orders we're starting a second shop with a new genre of items any tips for running dual shops stick with i have to go get that because that is a very expensive thing i'll be right back yeah so um running two shops at the same time is hard i will say that i i i really recommend that sellers make sure that if you're running two shops that you get your first shop sustainable first because building two shops to success at the same time is like trying to build two houses at the same time when you need somewhere to live okay if you need somewhere to live and you don't want to get rained on you need to make sure that you get one house to live in built first and then when you already have a roof over your head and you're dry and you're warm you can work on your other house okay computer upgrades yay sure it's a mystery to me um i need thunderbolt but running dual shops i mean really you just have to be good at time management i hate to say it we're all gifted with the same 24-hour day and some people are going to be able to run two shops and do just fine some people are gonna are gonna struggle i struggled i wasn't able to do it um so i would say that you need to identify whether both shops are working after a certain given point and if you are you know finding yourself super burned out a year from now you might need to ditch one of them don't get too married to an idea just because you like it because you also have to do what's right for you and you have to do what's right for your customers and if nobody's buying then obviously what you're doing is not right for your customers so it's all about balance and your personal abilities do you have a do you have to have a business license to sell on etsy we can't answer that for you it's gonna depend on your area where you're at your country your state your county what i what you need to do is get a hold of your small business uh small sba small business association small businesses something like that you could probably just google do i have to have a business license for an online business xyz yeah uh and look for your small business your sba look for your sba wherever you live there's usually a phone number on there uh and there's also typically just a big list of common faqs so go in there and and read for your area and it's very it's usually very confusing legal speak for the most part in most places in the u.s that's a no um but these kind of laws change all the time you can make a jeet pie for that a couple of years back when uh he just absolutely destroyed internet law and states decided they were going to start charging sales tax on online purchases even though it's still technically against the law to do so but you know it's just internet government um also just an idea of video prior to june's h.a featuring interviewing past ha students who have done well after taking the course we've done that before yeah we we've done so the only reason that we haven't been doing a lot of interviews lately is because the process that the process used to be easy used to be we could just send somebody a link and they could join us now it's a whole big that's a thing but we do have a huge student testimonial video we have interviews with students on the channel all you really need to do is go to my channel and then type in handmade alpha academy in the tiny search bar under my main banner and you can find all the the the past videos but we do have a lot of them we've got paula haas we've got amber marie we've got yalissa we've got uh we've got stacy we've got a bunch of people yeah we've got a ton we've got questions to answer sorry um uh i did want to take a minute to announce while we have our like pete concurrent viewers um we're going to be doing uh shock critiques again i found a way that we can do that not next week but the week after we're going to be doing the shop critiques next week's q a we're going to have a link in the description for an email list for you to sign up for so you can put your shop in there for the shop critiques we're not going to do them through the chat anymore because some people get pissy and they they they send me mean messages they get crap they get crappy undies and we don't want to hear about it so we're going to have people sign up specifically for the list to put their shops on it if your name is not on that list we will not be looking at your shop i'm going to do it random i'm going to draw it live i found a little online spinner wheel that'll show it it'll pop up the name so you know exactly who we're looking at and we will have the requirements for what you need to put in uh the subscription and for your email and all that kind of stuff we'll probably send you an email to reply to from that email list and then you'll be signed up so just keep an eye out for that next friday yeah yeah because a couple party poopers decided to send me mean messages after the last one because they didn't get picked and i'm not having it it's bad for my mental health why do people have to be like that well you know everybody's got different ways of acting and they were all brought up differently and this that and the other image we're not judging just don't be crappy we're nice to you be nice to us um so i've been selling for like a year now it was a good year but what's seo e-rank and that stuff i found you from the group in facebook i think you've covered almost all of them all right seo is search engine optimization so if you don't know what that is we got a big problem because that's one of the most important pieces of success on etsy if you're doing great on your own that's great but if you're doing great on your own just imagine how great you'll be doing if you incorporate search engine optimization into your shop so go on my channel what i would recommend is just type in seo i've got a video that i think is called what is seo start there and work your way through all of my seo videos because that is something that you need you will hit a cap someday if you do not optimize your listings um so start there i've got a whole video literally just describing uh i think it's called seo for beginners or something like that it's me holding a sign that says send help look for that video send help let's say maybe do part one and part two for longer topics then if they're shorter topics if there's any extra time left you can do shop reviews shop reviews we have to set up a whole thing for so we can't do those on the fly unfortunately yeah those have to be set up ahead of time um is there an easy way to create color swatches for listings ah canva maybe maybe do canva uh because then you can just type in the hex codes um i would do it with canva if you were asking me to make one for you that's how that's how i would do it because you can type in those hex codes directly gary said it seems like print on demand is really big i thought about doing print on demand but i already have all the equipment to do t-shirts with htv would you suggest that i just make my own or jump into pod that's kind of up to you man depends on how much time you've got um if you have the time to make all those shirts by yourself photograph them and be able to to do it all on your own then awesome if you don't want to put in that time a print on demand company is going to fulfill the orders for you they're going to provide the mock-ups for you so that you don't have to do your own photography really you're just going to have to market and optimize them but your margins are going to be smaller if you're doing everything yourself you're going to make more money per sale and you can also guarantee the quality you can guarantee that what's shipping out is always up to your standards if you're making them yourself that's that's kind of how i feel about it it's usually cheaper less up front cost and all that to do pod but i like the quality of something handmade yep so so it's completely up to you up to you just depends on how much time you have i'm used to that android experience as well yep question when a customer marks an order as a gift but doesn't specify if the order goes first to them or the to the gift receiver and just doesn't answer messages should i still add an invoice with or without price so if they mark it as a gift they are asking you to not put the the packing slip in they're asking or nothing with the with the price okay that's all that means so if if they request that it's a gift order it doesn't mean that you need to add a note or do anything special you don't need to message them just don't include the the slip that has the price that's it that's all that means see terpy i create a romance book lover gift package that's getting sales i originally planned to keep it around valentine's day and i'm thinking i'll keep it year round problem i want to update what's included but i know changing the seo would change my rank for book cover or book lover package should i change them to reflect the new stuff i'm adding if the keywords wouldn't work with what i want to add to them i mean if you're changing the title that's different than if you're just gonna add stuff into the description of it the description you can edit no matter what description holds no weight photos hold no way on on ranking the things that hold weight on your ranking are your tags and your titles um but if you are going to change your title there is a potential that you could hurt the seo for it for a developed listing so just be careful with what you do yeah if it's not making sales then you're not really going to hurt it so i wouldn't worry about it if it's selling all the time if you consider it you know a a decently selling item compared to the other items in your shop and just be careful yeah then just be careful and know that that you need to keep an eye on it if you do make those changes because you might take out a keyword that was actually supporting the integrity of the entire listing so hello from ohio i have a competitor that only uses one word keywords and minor long tail they're ranking better did etsy change keyword optimization no there's a lot that goes into that no we have an entire was this the brad pitt video this was the brad pitt video we cover this exact topic not last week but the week before look for the video with brad pitt as the thumbnail that's literally what this was about do they have more sales than you have they've been on the platform longer than you do they have a higher review score than you they have a better listing quality score than you so it doesn't they are the brad pitt and occasionally and i know this sounds crappy but occasionally there are the anomaly sellers there are people that come onto etsy they post like one word things on there and they're just new and they just sale sales sales sale sale we don't know how they do that we don't know what makes that it's rare but it does happen yeah and then it's always kind of been that way yeah in most cases it's because they've been around for a while they created their listing a long time ago they could have had a past shop associated with that ip address that was incredibly successful we know that etsy prioritizes shops that have been successful in the past there very well could be a chance that it could be an ip-based thing as well because they do ip-based bans so clearly they're looking at things from the ip address so we have no idea um about that yeah do you ever run paid ads on facebook or instagram for your etsy shop um for me personally they haven't run that great in fact facebook when you do ads on facebook those cross to instagram so i just make sure that my photo is optimized for both i i make sure that i'm using a square photo when i do advertising that way it looks nice on instagram as well um i will say that typically when i do a facebook ad and it cross posts to instagram it performs better on instagram facebook i don't get very good performance uh instagram i do but my photos are very visually stimulating because i create a product that is unique to anybody else's so that could be one of the influencing factors um but i have in the past i see moderate success with it nothing astounding uh but instagram i typically see better results from than facebook see so how does one build an audience sure i have a few repeat buyers and some followers on instagram and etc but how do you actually grow that way well i'm going to try to answer this as a as simple as possible because this is literally what i teach a nine module course on in handmade alpha academy that's that's the course is building that's a very complex question to answer right um but social media being engaging engaging with with audience members people who are coming around uh making sure that you are personable that you have great branding in place so that people are interested in following you posting non-stop even if it feels like nobody's paying attention to you not repeating things that aren't working and trying to evolve yourself uh as you go making sure that you are experimenting with a lot of different types of marketing styles so you can ensure that you are able to identify when one of those marketing styles works making an email list so that you can begin funneling people into that so that you have them captured in a singular place i'm a big fan of um of creating a facebook group for the people who follow your brand that way they have a cool little place to hang out we talk about how to do that effectively in handmade alpha academy but i've also got some youtube videos on it um making sure that your photos are visually stimulating and catered to the platform that you're advertising on for example instagram doesn't like a bunch of text on your photos uh facebook you can get away with text on your photos so not overcrowding images that are going on instagram branching out to new platforms as they evolve a couple years ago i would have said if you told me that tick tock was the place to advertise products well i told you you were stupid yeah i would have said that's crazy that's for kids and dancing but no tick tock is one of the number one places right now to advertise products because it's performing so well even etsy has a huge uh like campaign i think it's still like a beta type campaign but they have a big thing pushing sellers to get on tick tock um so really it it's not one thing that you do it's a lot of things that you need to do that are going to work in unison with each other so see dulce said i have to do and get into the email thing writing out emails just seemed so exhausting i suppose i can use the same kind of email post like i do on facebook i just want to rely less on facebook it is hang out where your audience is i mean it and they're always in their inbox it is a lot of work but you can schedule it ahead of time you can you can sit down and batch it all out ahead of time and then not have to touch it anymore so yes see i'm working on new content for my shop but i only have 26 items at the moment would you recommend a newsletter sign up now or wait until i have more items no start it as soon as you can yeah start gathering contacts those people aren't just going to be buying those 26 items they're going to be marketed to for the future of your shop and every item that you add so the the sooner you can get that going the better thank you for talking about income streams and audience building i'm spending the next six months on building an audience and hoping that the work pays off absolutely absolutely if you can if you have the free time available on top of what you're already doing if you're doing everything that you can there's no reason not to put that extra time into another income stream if you if you want to you don't have to but it never hurts uh where is the best place to find influencers on influencer platforms like instagram and facebook yeah youtube uh if you go into the about section of most youtube influencers that are within your niche you can usually uh find their email addresses uh instagram you can usually find some pretty good influencers there just know that if you were to email you know a hundred different influencers one might respond and that's normal so make yourself a swipe file that you can just copy and paste and send to a lot of people but make sure that you go in and edit it per person because i get influencer requests all the time oh my god yeah you probably don't even know how many because i'm the one that clears the inbox but like 50 of our inbox now are people wanting us to do influencer stuff no joke and most of them aren't people that are here no it's never people it's never people that are here it's just randos that find that we do etsy stuff some ask for her and some ask for me some ask us to review products yeah like and uh and we could make money off of that but we love you guys too much to recommend junk i don't i don't know um if we recommend something it's something that we like not not because somebody pushed us to or asked us yeah the influencer game to me just is is uppity and i don't i don't want us to be part of that but but to answer your question you just expect a lot of people to say no um but expect to send a lot of emails and when you get that yes that yes is going to be like it's gonna be the best day ever so just don't be afraid of rejection okay because most people probably will reject you me speaking of somebody who rejects a lot of people um just because you know maybe you're not right for their brand maybe they don't have the time maybe it's just not something that they're into that's fine you know they they're gonna have their reasons but maybe you'll stumble across an influencer who absolutely loves your products and is totally into working with you so um amber amber question you know your offer of a one-to-one session if you're struggling with ha at the end of the course has anyone ever needed to take you up on that nope never i mean we had one but it was more just because they didn't understand a particular thing yeah but it wasn't like a yeah no i don't think a lot of people even know that exists that's our open door thing basically um you get an open door application at the it's uh in haa and if you get through the whole course and you still just you're like i don't just don't understand it i don't understand i don't know what i don't know how to do it we have an application that you fill out that way you get a little one-on-one with me we've been running haa this will be year three three yeah year three year three nobody's ever requested it i've never heard them and we're honest because there's there's a good chance a lot of people just aren't business-minded and if you're just not understanding the material because business-minded stuff just isn't for you will tell you that that's probably just not right and we'll help you i mean yeah for sure we'll do our best let's see maya uh oh this is talking about dogecoin my understanding is that the cone is not coin is not technically owned no they ran into an issue with this one dogecoin first started getting big you're buying into their ownership of dogecoin because they didn't have a way to like incorporate a crypto wallet on your end of things but again they're they're working on that so you own the crypto you you own stock in their cryptocurrency ownership which is why they had to constantly shut off the market because they had like was it like a billion dollars or something like that set aside specifically for cryptocurrency and then dogecoin exploded and more than a billion dollars worth of people jumped on it and started buying it anyway uh do you have any advice on audience building would you consider doing a friday bean on that i think we just covered that and we've got we've got friday beans on that um i would check out amber marie's really old interview where she talks about building a viral vip club uh but like i said in essence that's what handmade alpha academy is and i had to take nine modules in like 19 hours to get that into a course so trying to teach you guys how to do it in an hour session isn't going to be an easy thing um because there's so many different avenues that you can take in order to do it so i would recommend watching amber marie's video and checking out a couple other videos on our channel because uh there's there might not be a video that's just titled how to build your audience but literally everything that we talk about builds your audience and one of the essential pieces that you need for audience building in my opinion is an email list we cannot legally teach you how to build that here because if you because there are so many laws and legalities and if we teach you how to do that here and somebody messes it up and they get that what is it 450 000 fine per email sent because they missed something up they could say that we are the reason that they messed it up it's up to that much depends on what what gets leaked realistically you're probably going to pay like a 50 fine but either way we don't want to touch that with a 10-foot pool pole within handmade alpha academy we can do that because we have the direct contact with the students who are doing it so and when you sign the terms and conditions you're basically stating that if you give something up you can't sue me for it so we love you we wish we could but there are videos on youtube about it uh yeah there really there are uh mailchimp is what i personally use so that's where i would start it's free um and i believe that mailchimp has their own youtube channel that has lots of tutorials and since it's their platform they can kind of teach you how to use it so monkey said charlie you're amazing i finally got to the top of the hill just past 3 000 sales this month hell yeah monkeys is one of our alphas of the quarter that's been up for like way more than a quarter but you can check out uh her shop over at handmadealphaacademy.com if you scroll down to the alphas of the quarter you can see our top alphas for man i'm so far behind i don't even know what quarter it was we're going to be changing those out soon so be sure to go check them out now oh yeah except for the wedding industry we're crazy right now as far as sales yeah which means in like six to 12 months those of you guys that sell t-shirts you need to make sure that you have the like happy divorce shirts ready to go that's true i'm not i you not um so i got see i said you got one well that was my one no that wasn't your one you already got one oh what are you gonna give me another spanking oh no yeah now you get 31 spankings you're now 31. i'm excited okay so like with people going out more can people also play things like d and d should i also expect as a dice make it it'd be quieter on etsy or getting zero you know honestly i don't know amber commented about this because last year was huge last year was it was one of the biggest years for wizards of the coast um mainly because people almost everybody has a webcam on their laptop right so almost everybody was playing online campaigns and then there's also like tabletop simulator and all that kind of stuff that people play so who knows man i mean i don't dnd is trending right now i don't see it i don't see it dying down anytime soon especially with people being able to actually go out and do things in person there are so many people that didn't want to do the webcam dnd that are probably stoked that they're going to be able to go and play with their big group of 30 people that they sit around the table and hang out with you know and i'm getting ads for like tons tons of dice makers right now i'm getting tons of really cool facebook video ads from big companies so i know that there's a big market for it it i never d d like kind of fell off the radar for like 20 years and now now it's huge so big i'm not saying that you know well it's just it's one of those things that like being a nerd has become cool like when we were in school being a nerd was still something you got bullied for but now it's like if you don't play video games you're the dork yeah like it's yeah dnd dnd is where it's at i hate when people complain about sales going down and blame etsy for it while their sellers hardly make a sale every month you know a couple years ago there was a whole thing talking about how etsy was like targeting small shops and and making them not get sales and this that and the other and it was always like why would they do that they make the most money off of all of the new startup shops because those are the ones that don't make a lot of sales but post a bunch of listings that's where the etsy gets a lot of their money from so that doesn't make any sense anyway if i make jewelry and gifts and want to start stickers slash printed items is it better to open a second shop or put them in my jewelry shop okay so like i said before opening two shops does not equal double money double shot does not equal double money double shop equals double work uh double hours double marketing double effort it double seo double maintenance double shipping so just know what you're signing up for because i'm not a big fan of running two shops i think that that running one shop well is the best strategy but if you want to run two shops i don't see anything that ties jewelry to stickers unless those stickers are it's like a similar theme yeah those two things to me are so stickers are a cheap little thing that you know you put on a notebook jewelry is something expensive and valuable i don't see any correlation unless maybe there's like if there was like an artist for example me i make i make those skeleton key necklaces if i made like stickers of my skeleton keys and offered them because it's my art that would work even that's a stretch though yeah i don't see anything that ties those two things together you could i'm sure that there was a way that you could make them if you're tying them together if like your whole theme is like zombies or aliens or flowers or something like that then and they're both that thing then yeah but other than that no sarah so can you take customers emails from etsy and use your email list that's illegal yeah that's remember when i said i don't touch this because people will mess it up and get themselves in trouble that's how they get themselves in trouble there are like seven countries with data protection laws now and that's illegal in almost all of them and i think even california yes is starting to work onto onto that so no you can't do that you can include a link in your swipe file swipe files you can include an e your eep url you can include that under your uh folder above the phone above the fold under your banner and your shop announcements and then you can include like a business card when you ship things that has your place to sign up for your email list or your website or whatever on it you can put it in your 10 listing photos and put it in your listing photos yep absolutely there's all kinds of places however you can not just copy and paste their email that is against the law pretty much everywhere yeah um what about the off-site ads they're talking about uh if those were just a gamble pretty pretty much the same thing it's a gamble yeah i mean test it don't don't don't take our advice here because we're not you i haven't seen your shop i can't tell you how your ad performance is gonna do i don't know what your targeting is like i don't know who your target customer is the only way that you're gonna know is to test it and you'll know if it's working or not if it's not working i would say over the span of maybe three weeks you might consider changing up your strategy or just uh opting out but i mean if you make over ten thousand dollars and you don't have a choice you don't have a choice with offsite so um charlie had said i don't know if he answered my question no you posted a link with it the first time you posted it and youtube blocks it automatically so we we can't see even see your question yeah um how do you leverage pinterest to attract buyers to your shop we already kind of talked about that as well we don't know a lot about pinterest yeah so the things that i know about pinterest are that for when they're very visually stimulating for two pinterest is heavily now relying on video content so if you can get short videos those tend to perform a lot better than still photos uh you want to take up as much of the viewer screen as possible so nice long images are going to tend to perform a lot better because they're going to see you for longer while they're scrolling through pinterest and it can also be seo optimized so making sure that you're using good keywords when pinning uh you can do that with e-rank we have some some pinterest data for you that you can use you can find keywords and see if people are are typing in the the keywords that you're using in your pens aside from that i really don't have a lot of great strategies for pinterest i would say that creating some organized boards that almost uh are themed around your brand would be good i have a lot of really great themed boards on my pinterest account where i will do almost like a world i did like an ocean world and then i did a lot of really cool ocean aesthetic images along with my ocean themed keys i think i did like a winter world with all my wintery snowflake keys and you know some winter aesthetic images and i tried to create these on these little universes that the uh you know the person could click on and almost feel like they belong in this nice little planet so that's how i used it um i've got a lot of repins but i don't have like a steady strategy there that was me just kind of experimenting on my own so thus far i've done okay selling high-end wire wrap jewelry around the 40 or 50 price range some pieces for 100 plus i've been contemplating adding some more affordable pieces to the shop around 10 to 15 dollar price range obviously easier to make is this a good idea or to have something for everyone i don't see anything with it so for wire wrap jewelry 40 to 50 does not seem high end to me um i don't know what your skills are with watch pretty expensive wire wrap stuff out there when it comes to the wire wrap jewelry that i own uh 40 to 50 would be on the like middle range for me so you could totally make a couple cheaper pieces i do uh i don't think that ten dollars is a justifiable price you that's usually like something like a little keychain piece or something like that yeah my my cheapest keys that i sold in my shop were fifteen dollars and they were like this big they were itty bitty um but i did sell a lot of them for someone who doesn't have a lot of money and they just want to pick up something small all i can say is test it out yeah you know um test it see how it does and if it doesn't work you can always either disassemble uh give them away sell them somewhere else sell them to somebody else who wholesale them out whatever you need to do with them um but yeah test it with gift orders the packing slip includes the order form which i believe is for your records and the second page is the gift slip without the price and you'll include that in the package yes yes the one without the price is the one that you do not stick in the package if somebody says that it's a gift order all right do you have any books or resources for creating a social media strategy like you do for marketing i've enjoyed authors you recommended before um i don't know if i've actually read a lot of books on social media strategy simply because social media strategy changes almost every year um because there's new social media every year the platforms look different yeah um i don't know any off the top of my head specifically for social media our social media strat i've got one inside handmade alpha academy uh for social media and marketing we've got a whole marketing timeline in there but um in terms of books i hate to say it but i really don't i think honestly just general marketing books are where you're gonna get the most information for that out of and then you take the information that you learn from the marketing like just the standard marketing books and then once you understand a platform you have to figure out how to apply that knowledge to that platform because like we said before social media platforms change constantly yeah the way yeah the way that their seo changes the way that they use images the marketability the how like how they put you in front of an audience changes constantly yeah so it's up to you to take the general knowledge that you learn from the marketing books and then make sure that you keep up with the understanding of the social media platforms you want to market on and then have them meet in the middle i know that's confusing but that's just kind of how it is um the the one youtuber i really like who does talk a bit about social media marketing and kind of stays on top of stuff his name's chris cubby k-u-b-b-y he's a little he's a little raunchy if you've got kids in the room he curses a lot um but i really like his his social media marketing like the way he describes things he's the one who i kind of got the the brad pitt um you know thing with i just flipped it for seo but the whole brad pitt and you know that was from one of his uh keynotes so chris cubby is there a correlation between the number of listings you have and visibility on etsy and i think up to a point somewhat yes because and once again i do have a full video on this how it's called how to reel in the etsy customers it was friday being episode from last year yep um the more listings that you have in your shop it's the more it's like having a bunch of fishing poles out in the water every single listing is a fishing pole out in the water okay so if you've got one fishing pole out in the water that's it it's like you're you get one scratch off ticket right you may win you may not you may catch catch a fish with your one pole you may not but if you've got a bunch of fishing poles out in the water that's more opportunities because as long as they they all have different keywords and they all are optimized a little bit differently those are different experiments those are different fishing poles out in the water and you are increasing the likelihood that a fish is going to bite that pole so yes um having more listings definitely does have an impact to a point when we look at some of the biggest shops on etsy like uh for example planner kate and a lot of the the charm suppliers that sell different little charms they've got thousands of listings but their listings are priced very very low these are low end products and they can get away with this this does not work as effectively for high-end products because it devalues the products so if i go to a shop that has a thousand listings and they're all for you know dollar stickers i'm fine with that i will i will make my purchase but if i go to a shop to buy a gold uh a gold and diamond necklace for my mother and i want to get her for mother's day a gold and diamond beautiful handcrafted smith necklace and i go to a shop and there are a thousand listings i'm gonna assume that that's a piece of junk because no seller by hand is creating a thousand handmade smith golden diamond necklaces definitely not the less listings i see in the shop the more i'm going to feel you know so there's a point of diminishing return basically exactly exactly so you need to decide what's right for your shop ally said happy birthday missed you guys i've sold three christmas ornaments in the last two weeks thanks for all the advice and help out of curiosity i'm assuming it's like a christmas in july thing i know a lot of people do something like that christmas in july yeah that's that's a big thing let's see what are you getting for your birthday mark you already got it uh well i mean i can't that's an office after our question i mean really no tell me what i got you i got a stand mixer with all the doodads and things to attach to it and i'm very very excited to use it maki's what's your shop name her shop name is makis uh how does your alpha course differ from the other etsy teaching courses uh the market is full of different price scales cannot decide where to invest so there are no etsy courses like handmade alpha academy and anybody who's taken handmade alpha academy who's in the comments can verify ours is etsy specifically most other courses aren't etsy specifically well they're just general business courses okay there's a reason that our price point is higher than anybody else's okay handmade alpha academy is the only course that teaches you buyer in consumer psychology it is the only course that is backed by science we there are no other courses out there that go into the psychology of why people buy and how to appeal to those those psychological triggers that are you know that that aren't as easily explained in a quick tutorial on you know here's how you make make a photo in photoshop handmade alpha academy isn't just going to teach you how to set up your etsy shop though we we do do that for the newbies who don't even have shops available handmade alpha academy is going to teach you the strategy that is going to bring longevity to your success something that you're going to be able to apply and then live from for the the lifespan of your shop this is a forever strategy that you will forever be using in order to keep and maintain an audience and grow an audience so um really the only way that i can say to to see how good it is is to enroll there's a 30-day money-back guarantee period no questions asked we don't make you do homework which is another big difference from us over a lot of other etsy coaches we don't you don't have to submit anything you just have to make sure that you do it before the 30 days yeah and if there's extenuating circumstances i've even refunded people after the 30 days sometimes i don't usually do that yeah i don't do that because it's it's against our rules too but but things happen but yeah if if there's a family emergency like we're people we get that but um yeah 30 day money back guarantee pop in snoop it out uh there's a reason that we have over 600 amazing students the big thing is that a lot of courses and it's not just with etsy courses it's with most courses that you see out there there's course selling is a big thing right now we've been doing it for a few years and she did it the right way a lot of sellers will do just experience this is what i did to get my store where it was anecdotal we start with that yeah anecdotal evidence only we have anecdotal evidence but you should also see the ridiculous bookshelf that she's got just full of business books where she's compiled all of the best information from all of the best sources that she could find and then tested them tested them and then put them in a way that you can understand them for an etsy shop specifically because most marketing books aren't for etsy most people i al or a lot of people that i know still have never even heard of it so that's where we kind of differentiate ourselves it's the actual science the actual real marketing information that has been converted and used on etsy and we have tons and tons and tons of successful sellers yeah and this isn't just me trying to market this it's my honest opinion of it i don't teach any of the material in haa i'm the guy that manages the website and not to mention if we add anything to the course you get that for free everything that we add is included and not this year but the following year because we're getting better recording equipment and our the content is going to stay the same we're going to re-record everything in higher quality better sound better imagery and you'll get all that too yep you'll get any any updates or additions you get for free yeah we just we want to make it sound better since our mics are better now it's still it still sounds great we've gotten better at what we do yeah so um yeah if you guys have any other questions about it feel free to let me know question when you say two shops do you mean two shops or two different types of products or do you mean having a website and having an etsy shop where no referring to two different two different products with two totally different shops yeah because if your brand is the same if you've got the same brand on a website and etsy that's that's the same brand it's the same business you just have two uh two avenues to to make sales for that brand and you can market them with one social media platform you don't have to have you know two different social media platforms for advertising so can i send a physical thank you note to customers if it's in the package in their package you can't do it after the fact you cannot mail things to them afterwards and i know it's a little bit weird because you probably get a bunch of spam mail in your box all the time but the thing is is that's not targeted mail everyone in your neighborhood gets that that's how they're legally able to get away with that crap is they print out enough to give to everybody in a city or everybody in the county or whatever and then they give it to everybody in a county they cannot specifically target you unless you clicked up sign somewhere that they can market to you signing up for an email list is kind of the same thing i i don't quote me on this and again not a legal expert but i'm pretty sure if somebody signs up for an email list that's a consent for you to market to them in any way that you want so you could technically send them physical mail after that but i wouldn't stretch that far i think that there's an opt-in and there's a whole other list of rules for that yeah with mailchimp there is a mailing um some type of mailing law that you have to follow i don't do physical mail i i wouldn't recommend it yeah that's a whole other just just in the package yeah that's the best way to to know you're not gonna get in trouble uh did etsy change something so that the seller wouldn't show on all listings on the first page no no uh are they not doing that anymore i see the same sellers taking up the majority of the first pages on searches that is the listing quality score we talked about that pretty regularly now yep you can still dominate search pages um you there's no that's why p i get really ticked off when people are like oh i should don't use the same listings or the same keywords in more than one listing or you'll compete with yourself you can't compete with yourself that would only apply if you could only show up once for one search you can show up infinitely for a search it just depends on how high your listing quality scores are competing with yourself is not a thing it is not possible is it is absolutely illogical um but yeah they have not what is that called clumping clumping they they were testing de-clumping um at one point i've never personally seen them not clump though clumping is still a thing so you can still dominate a search page which is what i would want if somebody searches for world's okaiest coach mug and my shop only sells world's okayest coach mugs i want my mug to be all they find i want them to only see listings of mine so see i noticed on a rank that many of the shops that are having the highest sales sale really inexpensive sell really inexpensive jewelry stones and crystals i was surprised at how inexpensive and really cute stone rings etc yeah i mean high output shops costume jewelry is a big thing people like really cheap jewelry so they can accessorize for every specific outfit so yeah that makes sense but that's not your target customers if you make high-end jewelry yeah it's easier to make one 100 sale than it is to make 101 sales so that seller who made a hundred sales on their little one dollar rings they're packing orders packing orders packing orders packing orders packing orders all day whereas someone who sells one 100 ring made the same amount of money but they've only gotta pack up one order and they only have to do the workload for one order and they only have to do customer service for one order yep i would rather sell high-end i don't know about you guys but i am all about making more money on a on a singular product rather than having to sell tons and tons and tons of little products which if you make stickers and stuff that's different because stickers are a little easier you can just stick them in an envelope and go but if you make something that you've really got a package up it can get time consuming my jewelry it takes us an average of what like how about how much how many minutes do you think to pack one single order about five to ten minutes between the two of us doing it together yeah about five to ten minutes so when we get like 100 orders it's crazy and this person asks has two questions i'll go ahead and hit them both uh i got suspended from etsy what can i do to restore i'm gonna need to know exactly what you did um if you broke their terms of service you probably can't yeah um if it was something minor you might be able to convince them hey i didn't know this that and the other that's ignorance isn't it isn't an excuse for the law is the old term so um for breaking the law i mean so if you broke a rule then there's nothing you can do about it if it's just a random suspension which we've noticed has been happening a lot to newer sellers then you just need to message them and let them know what's going on okay guys real quick would you guys like a video about etsy shops getting suspended because that's a new thing i just don't feel like there's enough detail no i've already got i've already got shut up you just shut up you shut up we got a box do you guys want a shop or a video about shop suspensions just like a short one like like a five minute video about shops and all these shops that are getting suspended recently let me know all right what was the second part of their second part of it was will you offer a suspended free guarantee if i do it correctly what they're what they're asking for here is that if they do everything right and they don't get anything from haa will we give them their money back um no we won't do that because here's the thing 600 students did it so if you did it and you didn't say and not all 600 have been successful but we have several that are making six figures now if one person can do it based on just the material that we've provided then we know that it works it won't work for every product it won't work for every industry it won't work for every person because every person is different it is entirely up to you to do the things correctly and we've done it so many times with so many people that we know that it works so if it doesn't work it's either something with your products or something with your execution and if it's or something with your audience and if it's your products and audience you can pivot and still use the information so if uh i would say that if that's the case if if you're if you might not want to enroll that's well and then you also if you're if your shop was suspended for breaking the rules then you're not going to be able to even start a new shop because they probably will have ip banned you so it won't matter anyway yeah that's the unfortunate thing about etsy is if you if you get if you mess up you get ip banned they don't let you open another shop it's kind of weird we're getting a mixed response on people with the suspensions few knows is there any particular reason why no or just not something you're interested in which is totally fine we have more than one yes which means we're probably going to do it anyway yeah so just don't watch it if you don't want to watch it it's extra content it's free it's free it's free it's for your real mistake we won't do we won't do a whole q and a no no no no no no no it won't be a q a it'll just be one of our little five minute uploads like we usually do um question i know you mentioned before that mystery items weren't allowed is that still correct yes it absolutely is and i would expect that pretty much every website's going to be the same i would watch it with your own personal websites because you can countries you can thank video games for this it's considered gambling yeah so i wouldn't push it yep no mystery boxes mystery bags mystery products mystery eggs mystery gift baskets you can't do mystery anything on etsy it's not allowed see yes i think for christmas in july but the ones that have sold her specifically for breast cancer okay i got you so just i think is gifts too so for like survivors and stuff like that i get it and october's uh breast cancer awareness month they might be buying now to give us a gift for october so that person in october can put it on their christmas tree in you know november if they put it up so didn't pam do a video on shop suspension i don't i don't know did she i'm not sure maybe she did pharah said there's another etsy course out there that bugs the tar out of me their info is so out of date and i can't believe people buy it man you know and i kind of give them a little bit of slack for that because when's it like we had to update mailchimp and we updated mailchimp and then like a week later mailchimp updated stuff again so we had to do a patch up so we had to do another patch up video and that's that's one of the things that we need to re-record yeah there's a state in there with the up-to-date information but you got to watch the update video and yeah and it's such a nightmare and then when uh when seo kind of changed we we had to re-record what was a three-hour lesson and i had to break that down into eight individual smaller videos and it was crazy but it's all fixed now question if you purchase ha do you have access for life and are you an haa for life yeah absolutely yes as long as you're not a jerk yeah because i've i think it's only happened once that i've banned someone for being a dill hole what but i can't even remember just the just the group though not like once you're in you can get on the website for life just oh no i have i have it said in the terms that if someone's a dill hole i can kick them out no matter what that is the person who tried to steal our content that we banned yeah that's right yeah there was somebody else that was trying to steal our content she did she basically stole our course and put it in spanish don't don't don't don't give any more details that's a legal thing well um hello i've been trying to get an honest review of my shop do you know how i can find that uh sign up for the email list next week when we put it out for shop critiques and maybe you'll be one of the lucky people that does that either that or down below the handmade alpha facebook community is linked uh you can link your shop but you need to ask a specific question because we don't allow advertising and we know the difference between advertising and asking for help so if you want to go in there and say hey here's my shop link i would like some ideas on what i could do to improve that's fine um feel free to join we've got nine over nine thousand alphas now many of which are in handmade alpha academy and i'm sure they would be more than happy to let you know what you could improve on uh the 40 to 50 okay this is the one that was selling the wire wrap got it the 40 to 50 range is currently my low end 100 plus is the high end was considering bringing the 15-ish very simple pieces to make the 40-50 mid-range for my shop i think i'll test yeah i don't see any problem with that i little thing like little keychain things little additions little things like that i don't see any problem with that little pins if you can pull it off uh also is it true you shouldn't post your link as it hurts your conversion if people don't buy from your shop no you can post your link wherever you want no that's that's i don't even think they would be able to do that conversion rate is is is an important factor but typically when we talk about conversion rate we're talking about people who find you organically and search and i doubt that you're funneling so much traffic from posting your link somewhere that it's going to to hurt your conversion rates that much um conversion rate is a a metric that we use to see how many people find us organically in search and then convert from a you know casual shopper to a buyer so it's i wouldn't worry too much about it and absolutely post your links if you're advertising you need to post your links not here though yeah people need to be able to find you though if you post on social media uh pam did one four weeks ago 12 reasons etsy will suspend yourself you know why you know why you know what because that's that's not what i'm talking about though i know what you you it's not a video that's breaking that's different right i'm talking about shops that are getting suspended right now for no reason not the reasons that you can't get suspended we did the video on that first and then peg did a video on it but those are reasons that you can get your shop suspended by breaking the rules what i want to make is a video covering the shops that are getting suspended right now for no reason whatsoever and that is a huge problem right now so all i'm gonna ask you again do you want a video about the shops that are getting suspended for no reason because i might have some super top secret insight on that because our etsy shop might have got suspected it might have uh not art by starla more a different one somebody answered this but would you like to know all the reasons or i would like to know all the reasons for getting banned so not to make mistakes danielle no who was it doug yeah it's up to you to read the terms of service you click a little thing that says i agree to etsy's terms of service when you sign up for an account that is what you have to read i mean genuinely that is what you have to read everything that they can ban you for has to be in there legally you can't ban you for anything outside of that and there's a there if you go to my channel we did a friday bean episode a few weeks ago 10 reasons uh 10 reasons etsy sellers get banned or something like that look for the picture of mark and i in jail um because we cover at those exact things their terms of service and all of the reasons that etsy sellers get banned from the platform i've seen some sellers use their shop strictly for launch drops leaving it in case room mode until product launch what are your thoughts on this strategy yes that's we literally do that yep and uh i love it i love it major brands do it oh i love it it's not even kit like for instance you got archiplayer and jacksepticeye's brand two of the biggest youtubers on the platform that's literally how they do it they do a launch like once every two weeks or so they have a big audience though they've got like millions and millions of people but they do it big brands do it even companies like buckle at the mall they do it they hell they even call me buckle friggin calls me to let me know that they're doing a summer launch or something don't do that scarcity tactics are fantastic they are real dogs sell out launches are great because it makes your audience pay attention we we normally if you've got infinite products it's really hard to get people to pay attention if you have a limited number of products in a very small window to purchase they know that they have to purchase if they want that thing they can't put it off they can't wait until a better time they have to be sitting there waiting for that launch to drop we have several brands that do that that we follow and we will sit and wait until they launch a product just so we can buy it i think it's a great strategy it's one of my favorite marketing strategies and it's very very trendy right now so easy to market that would be very interesting versus explaining the rules yes yes i'd love to know that yes yes yes what does one actually do when an influencer says yes send them to your rings okay so when it comes to influencers if they're like one of the kind of people that typically does look at a product and then shouts it out or they write a blog article or something about it they you will usually have their own terms for how they do something once they say yes that's when the like negotiation process starts some of them won't know if they're a smaller influencer they won't know what they want so then it's up to you to kind of come up with the terms but most of them will want like a very specific thing they'll want it within a specific time frame they'll want to know what you want said about it or what like what you think is special about the product it's up to them really um i would definitely educate yourself though on on that kind of stuff yeah and make sure that you have a plan as well because if they message you and they say yeah i would love to what do you want me to do you need to have an answer for that yeah don't say i don't know do what you're comfortable doing don't say i don't know make sure that you have you say well you know it would i was thinking it would be great if um if you wanted to do this if you're comfortable with shouting out my brand and in return i will uh i will share you know your video samantha that's that's perfect answer for proper influencers will have a contract telling you exactly that what they want from you and what they will do for you yeah yeah i mean that's that's that's typical just business stuff if they're an influencer they know exactly what they want because i mean nine times out of ten like as an influencer they're taking a risk taking on your product if you end up burning somebody and it was somebody that they recommended buy something from you then it falls back on them so the influencers are usually pretty strict all right performance before we get to the the last question that's in here for now guys we've got 161 viewers make sure that you get in your last minute questions we only have 52 likes on this video we're here two hours of our friday there's 157 of you here that means we could have at least 105 more and i know that some of those original likes haven't been hit on there yet so like it for mark's birthday for my birthday he's he is going to be 30 tomorrow this is the last day of his 20s every like on there is an extra spanking over 30 that i get give me a spankin gonna warm these hands gonna be making them biscuit bones i i don't know i don't know i don't i don't you can have a like well thank you for gifting me with that they're 75 now we're getting up there okay continuing on my hands are going to be so are my buns what do you think about connect spock it with etsy i don't know what you're talking about i have no idea what that is so i don't have an opinion unfortunately feel free to feel free to let me know what it is but i probably won't have an opinion until i look more into it how to make sure those influencers will do their end of the deal my product takes like 50 plus hours to make plus i live in asia first make sure they're a legit influencer look at their content if they are a legit influencer not just some jerk they're gonna have people that follow them they're gonna have an audience they're going to interact with people they're going to have past reviews they're going to have past reviews of products and if they don't probably not real that's just how it is if you're a smaller brand and someone's asking you for a product uh probably not gonna be real um so yeah just check on their background check their history and if they don't end up doing a review of your product you could be a couple different things really could be the product i mean i hate to say that but i gotta be the brutally honest guy so if you've got a nice product and you send it to them and you know that it's good and you've got a lot of good reviews already you're an established brand something like that and they don't do it then it might just be something they didn't want to do and there's nothing you can do about that yeah hopefully there's a contract in place though and they already have like a game plan ready for things like that so uh what do you do when usps damages the product and a customer wants a refund i would send them a refund uh if i ordered something from amazon and it arrived to me and it was messed up i would expect that i would either be sent a new product that i could you know return it or that i would be reimbursed um that that's what i would expect that's yeah that's how i mean you're you're a small seller but you should still treat it like you're a brand i would i would if the customer wants a refund i would ask them to please send it back even if it's damaged because they shouldn't get to keep product and and and money um but i would definitely do something to to help the customer don't leave them hanging that's not what you would want if it were you and i know it sucks but that's that's kind of why um you know i recommend having extra products laying around that you don't list if you make you know a hundred and twenty oh that's too many if you make 25 necklaces maybe list 20 of them keep five on the side in case something like this happens which is what we did we we you know kept a couple extras buffer space just in case something happened because we know that things happen i i recommend sitting and writing down all the worst case scenarios that could possibly happen to one of your packages um and then make sure that you have a plan of action in place to kind of combat that that issue so oh you look so happy i am handsome that's right you don't want a spanking from some of us mark you don't know that he you don't know what i like that's true he might he might want uh an out one of those spank those tunnels just one of the just this just a spanking line like the spike train spanx train man we used to do that like in school and now as an adult i'm thinking that's lining up all the little kids spanking it's a little weird it's only weird if you think of it weird though right like like a lot of things it's only weird if you make it weird yeah because i don't know that's that's strange our facebook ads worth running etsy ads have been kind of meh for me yeah i don't have any problem with running it facebook ads just do it right yeah yeah just uh track your results if you're not seeing results from it it's gonna be a case-by-case basis just depending on on the type of content that you're promoting the type of product that you're promoting the people you're targeting it's going to be an ongoing experiment so all right have you all set a date to open your shop have we i don't know guys make sure that you're on the email list down below for alph adapt this is the mysterious new and the amber marie and i are launching uh a week from tomorrow you guys have no idea what we're selling we have not announced anything about what we are selling you have no idea but we are selling a product and really the purpose isn't for us to sell what we're making though it'll be great if you guys could buy some because amber's getting all that money to come to the united states to to meet us and we're gonna make videos for you guys um but the purpose is for you guys to study what we're doing we want you guys to see us build an etsy shop from the ground up we're doing all the marketing we're doing the email list we're basically following handmade alpha academy 100 that way you can watch us do it um normally around this time of year we do like student interviews and things like that but this year we've decided that we are going to build a shop using haa and hopefully that alone is testimony to show you how great my course is but even if even if you don't enroll in haa you can still study what we're doing and copy it so hopefully you're on the email list down below for alphadapt there's also freebies down there we have my uh summer survival guide if you guys are experiencing slow sales right now you can be sure that slow sales are going to continue as weather warms up so that's going to be a checklist that's going to teach you things that you can do now to kind of stay afloat during summer but it's also going to give you some strategies so that you can prepare for when sales start to pick up starting in september so that's free we've also got the 2021 marketing calendars down below so you know when to market where to market uh it's a full marketing plan for you and it goes out until december uh amber's wholesale cheat sheet spreadsheet that's linked down below also free there's a video that goes with it make sure you watch the video you won't know how to use it if you don't watch the video and if you request to edit our official document uh in google drive you are not going to be approved so watch the video for that uh and then the last freebie down below are my email swipe files those are i guess not email ssar customer service swipe files though i know those are going to help you to get more five star reviews while following etsy's terms of service and they are also going to help you to build your listing quality scores this is going to help your overall search ranking which is a part of seo this is going to help to get your products in front of more people because the higher your listing quality score the more likely it is that etsy is going to recommend your products in search so make sure you get all the free stuff make sure that you sign up for the alpha adapt email list uh and make sure that if you're interested in handmade alpha academy on june 14th it'll be open for 10 days for enrollment the link for the waiting list is down below for that as well uh and there's a full page of information there's a video of student testimonials if you're interested in that kind of thing sign up opting in does not obligate you to buy however it does ensure that you get a big foul uh big fat discount when doors open june 14th are you good now we got like five questions that popped up all right do it our etsy ads usually so expensive i'm being charged like 30 cents per click you should go watch pam duffy's video on on etsy ads because yeah we're not a fan of how they're handling them right now yeah they're they're draining it and if they're draining it you're not getting a return on your investment then i probably wouldn't be doing them to be honest with you i mean seriously etsy's being kind of dirty with their ads right now you're gonna love your 30s mark i love every day now that i've conquered my existential dread it's all it's wonderful guys i keep telling them 30s 30s like for men it's going gonna be the dirty thirties thirties for me doing dirty thirties and i'm gonna be wearing a lot of polos i think thirties is gonna be polos you got this at least thirty to thirty one polos polos i think polo shirts i like this tie-dye that looks good on you it does you look really good see happy birthday and happy spanking session that's gonna look really weird out of context for over whoever watches this afternoon right happy spanking session uh okay what do you do when a buyer purchased an item and then the next week i launched a sale and now they want to refund for the difference ask them if they would like whipped cream and cherry on it because they can eat it yeah tough luck sorry tough luck does literally any brand ever do that i wouldn't even respond to it if i'm honest with you no and if they leave a bad review because of that just report it don't even respond to the review report it to etsy they'll take it down they can't do that yeah that's stupid yeah i i know that that that that sounds harsh but you can't do that at walmart you can't do that there's nowhere that you can do that that's sorry but where is that link out which one what's uh description down below if there's a link we talked about for something in the video it's down below more unlikely if you're talking about the one for the shop critiques that will be in next week's video yeah yeah that we'll put that in the description next uh let's see the spreadsheet was a godsend i changed a lot of it but it helped me figure out how to start the spreadsheet yeah there was one piece of helpful advice that one person did comment through email that i fully agree with and that is if you are doing wholesale excuse me if you're doing wholesale and you have a repeat customer somebody that buys a lot of stock from you you can get to a point where you build up enough of a relationship that you're not asking for a payment up front when you're negotiating a price for something sometimes if someone has a lot and they're selling a lot of your product from their store the time it takes for them to message you and then you to message them back and then you're coordinating and then you send the invoice and then they buy it and then you ship the products it could take a week for you to get all that communication done and sometimes they need product like this so if you already have a reputation with a company or with an organization that's buying a lot from you sometimes it's okay to ship some stuff ahead of time just as long as you have an invoice set and a date for it to be paid yeah you need to there needs to be trust there and maybe a contract and maybe a contract if you have a contract with a company there's nothing wrong with sending them a product before they pay for it because sometimes they might have a treasury department in their organization and it takes a while to coordinate with them and that kind of stuff so you might end up actually hurting a business and ruining reputation by not just shipping them the product but don't ever i would never do that the first time let's see i really struggle with adding tags in pinterest me too dog i don't use pinterest um e-rank that's that's all i can say is keyword optimize it the same that you do with etsy uh e-rank's got pinterest data so and not a lot of people know that not as many people use it so make sure that you use it because if we notice that people aren't using something we might get rid of it so and i don't want to get rid of it because i love i love that we have all that data uh questions about descriptions short versus long sentences versus bullet points adding all info or linking faq also how to link an faq i don't like blinking an faq nobody's going to click on that nobody's going to click on it short versus long doesn't matter as long as you get your point across so descriptions they're only going to see a little bit of it and then they have to click show more just like our youtube description how you have to click show more to get the links to the freebies same way on etsy now i hate it but what i recommend is start with a bulleted list where you can see all of the bullet points without clicking show more the things that they need to know the size the processing time the the material whatever whatever you want to put in that should be kind of up front and center first thing they see and then when they click show more whatever other stuff you want to stuff in there about it i like shops that are descriptive with it but not like like a paragraph yeah i don't want a novel yeah break it up where it's readable if i open it and i get anxiety then i'm not going to read it stop you know start start with your bullet list first so they know but then give the extra details for the ones who want to know more uh yup 30s is more rock star and more got your stuff together in your 20s man i don't think i'm ever gonna have my stuff together life changes too much to ever have it together every time i get something together things take a whirlwind and i'm doing something different and then i no longer have my stuff together let's see i'm 29 i'll be 30 in january 1st here 30s for men are better than the 20s so i love it up and enjoy it my i got a busted knee and a bad back where are you all getting this from how long does your quarters run for uh 16 hours before bonuses 19 hours afterwards ish i think that she's more asking you you're enrolled for life yeah you're enrolled for life it's it's your own pace yeah it's your own pace it's just like going to youtube yeah but we have to charge for it because it was literally like thousands of man hours yeah it's it's you go in and everything's pre-recorded and ready to go you get a facebook group to work with me and the other alpha alumni who are often way more insightful than i am because they are so darn smart um and you can take the entire course at your own pace we have some alphas who enroll in june and then realize that they just they're too busy and then they pick up the course in you know january so it doesn't matter when you enroll check influencers on socialblade2 make sure the following is real yeah absolutely i never think to recommend socialblade even though i use it myself absolutely yes uh do you use tags and pinterest in the descriptions where would the tags even go i haven't been tagging anything i don't know i don't use pinterest i have no idea i keyword optimize my my pinterest descriptions with uh with keywords i like the camera focus and lighting good job thank you all credit goes to nvidia for their nvidia broadcast software it is freaking wonderful she's coming down it is taylor we're still live streaming okay don't worry about it and the cool thing is too i've got it running now and i'm typing on my very loud keyboard which is right underneath this mic and you can't hardly hear it at all even though my voice is probably cutting out a little bit it's pretty wonderful it's pretty wonderful software if you're a streamer i highly highly recommend look how bright he goes he's doing that i highly recommend looking into it i know that's why i'm excited to get your freaking thing over there and we can get another light over here and it'll always be like that this light is the reason my eyes aren't like that i can do this your eyes are so pretty so pretty blue okay guys that is pretty much it if you aren't subscribed yet make sure you click the subscribe button click the little bell icon to get notified every time we go live and every time we upload a video hit the like button if you liked it hit the like button if you didn't like it comment below what your favorite part of it was i don't know and uh we'll be working on a video about etsy shops getting suspended for no reason just like alph adapt did but it's still launching we've worked we've worked around it and i'm going to teach you how in that video that i haven't recorded yet alph adapt the mysterious brand that you guys don't even know what we're making is launching a week from tomorrow get on the email list you don't even have to buy anything we just want to make sure that you guys are able to study exactly what we're doing launching a brand from scratch handmade alpha academy june 14th market on your calendars for anybody who wonders how much it is we've had a couple emails about it for the public people who aren't on my email list people who aren't in the alpha community people who i don't give super secret discounts to um it is 1 97 however for alphas that are on the email list on opening day you guys get a private link you will not be able to find it anywhere you will not be able to google it and you will not be able to go to handmadealphacademy.com to get it people who go directly to handmadealphacademy.com will pay a thousand dollars more if you're on our email list or you're in the handmade alpha facebook community i'll be posting the secret link that gives you guys a thousand dollar discount making the price of the course 997 dollars one-time payment you're in for life self-paced 30-day money-back guarantee or you can pay 199 per month for six months and get all the same stuff there's no drip feeding everything is in there from the moment that you enroll you don't have to do any homework if you end up wanting a refund you don't have to explain why you can just send email and you can send an email that says refund please please refund please and we will issue your refund yes uh we did have one question is there a chair you recommend these are all right these gamer chairs are all right um i'm falling out of love with them they're not as good as i would like them to be they're they're comfortable don't get me wrong they're comfortable they hold their firmness forever but it's like a they're good for the price for like the like 250 300 that you pay for a chair like this they're not bad if you have the money for it and you want like actual comfort make sure you get the right size but the herman miller aron chairs they're probably the best chairs that you can buy they're they come in different sizes specifically for your body height there's all different kinds of ergonomics built into it get all the bells and whistles they even have wheels that are meant for hard floors if you got a wood floor they've got like a rubber coating on them so they're not loud like they're great for apartments because they're not loud for the people below you but they're like fifteen hundred dollars with all the bells and whistles so dawkins i'm on the email list but never received an email which one if you're on alpha adapt i've only sent one email i sent it the week before last i think if you're on our main marketing list for like aha and stuff like that you've never really received an email then uh shoot an email over to starlighthandmadoffacademy.com and i'll get to you in the next couple days yeah uh but for elf adapt we're sending an email out tomorrow so keep an eye on that yeah priscilla said my office has the hermann miller chairs i miss them yet oh for the waiting list we haven't sent anything out yet no it's not open yet so it's not open you won't get anything until it opens um yeah she said that her office has herman miller chairs yeah the wild thing is is the hermann miller shares the reason that i have a bad back because they had the wrong sizes they just bought the like the extra large chair for literally everyone so the ergonomics are bad you have to make sure they have a size chart you can look up for your exact body type but anyway that's enough for this week also if you have those chairs there's a third-party headrest you can buy that's freaking dope are we froze are we froze i don't know no we're still running oh okay it's just being stupid there you go there we go all right guys thanks so much for joining us we will have a video next week about etsy shop suspensions next week's episode of the friday bean is going to be super fun uh we're going to be talking about alph adapt and starting a brand from scratch and the the challenges and the things that we needed to uh kind of work around and new new adaptations uh the way that society has changed how an etsy shop should function or how a new business should function we i will give you guys well no i'll save that i'll save that for next week because that'll that'll ruin it um i posted the name of the chair in the comment section so you could look for the exact one it's got a goofy spelling okay all right we will see you guys next week we'll have some other videos coming up hopefully next week as well

Channel: Starla Moore

Views: 1,949

Keywords: handmade alphas, etsy seller tips, grow your etsy shop, grow your etsy business, grow on etsy in 2021, selling on etsy in 2021, starla moore, make more money on etsy, make more sales on etsy, how to be successful on etsy, etsy shop tips 2021, the friday bean, how to scale your etsy shop, biggest etsy sellers, top etsy sellers 2021, growing on etsy, successful etsy shop, successful etsy business, etsy tips for beginners, etsy shop tips in 2021, how to sell on etsy

Id: SndvrBh6EZA

Length: 126min 40sec (7600 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021