Get ahead in your Etsy business in 2024

was recently watching this other YouTuber her name is Kim Bliss and she sells basically handmade Goods on Etsy and in the video she was basically critiquing a tick tocker that was basically Throwing Shade at Etsy handmade sellers kind of saying that they just don't want to grow legitimate businesses they don't want to put in the effort you know all the things basically and so her video was a response to that video a part of me wanted to take the side of the Tik tocker because I'm also a handmade seller but when I come here on YouTube I really am teaching from a place of how do I take this handmade business and turn it into something to such a dialed in operation that will take me into the later six figure or seven figure a year mark even if that means it's in the comfort of your own home that's possible or your garage right I did it in my grandma spare bedroom it is possible to achieve those Heights but to get into the later six seven Figures it's not possible just like on a whim right it actually requires strategy higher level systems in place maybe even a team that's going to help you get to that point but as Kim continued to explain her reasoning I was like dang she's right sometimes I think I forget that every business owner has their own goals and I'm always going to teach from a place that aligns with my own business goals but not everyone has the same business goals as me at this point I've talked to hundreds of Sellers and there's a big chunk of people that legitimately are just doing it as a side hustle because they actually love their corporate job or they're retired and they just you know like to make a couple sales a day because it's just fun for them and all of that just to say is that I'm only a singular data sample of someone sharing my experience based off my goals and it's important to keep that in mind as you're consuming free content because you know one particular person's experience could be completely different from another person's experience every single seller on here has value to give you have Cassie Johnson and Heather Studio that kill it teaching in the print on demand space you have Ryan Hog who is the master of automation you have people like Starla Moore and Dave from adart who have been on YouTube before I was even on YouTube that have just been in Etsy for so long and have learned so much about the platform they just have a lot of value to give right in summary the reason I just preference that whole bit to this point now is because the title of this video is how to get ahead in your Etsy business right so I'm talking from a place of what my personal goals are for my own Etsy business in my e-commerce Brands right which my personal goals and the place that I'm teaching from which is what how to set my business up to be successful 5 years from now right what sacrifices what things do I need to do today that I'm going to reap the benefits of and continually reap the benefits up to have a legitimate business for many years to come number two is how to play the game of etsy in the way that Etsy wants you to play the game right so every thirdparty selling platform has an algorithm that algorithm has a cryptic set of rules rul and it's our job to try to dissect those crypted set of rules which makes it not that fun when the people at the top don't even know their own rules but for the most part we have a somewhat of a blueprint of how we can see that Etsy wants us to play this game so how do we play the game of etsy and play it to the best of our ability number three is how do we build such a dialed in Etsy business engine that we have the opportunity to remove ourselves from the parts of our business pie chart or our business engine that we don't want to do right I've never worked in a corporate background I've never worked a corporate job a real job ever I've only been an entrepreneur I mean I bartended but that's about it but historically when you work a corporate job you don't really have this opportunity to just assume any role and do any job that you want normally you're assigned a role as an entrepreneur as a CEO we have a unique opportunity if you set your business up properly be able to position yourself and only the role of which you enjoy doing so if you just like doing research and development then you can get your business systemized to a point where that's your only job if you just like doing photography then you could just do photography maybe you are somebody that loves only Inventory management and quality control right then that could be your only job right if you get your business to that point so in order to get your business to that point there has to be Sops standard operating procedures and systems in place and this leads me to the last key thing that we optimize for how do we optimize our business engine for profit instead of Revenue and again let that guide us for our next best decisions to make in our business so hopefully by the end of this video with those four key talking points that we're going to dive into right now this is going to allow you to get a grip on your business and get ahead based off of my personal goals for my my own business all right so let's get into number one so what do we know about the future of where all this may or may not be heading well we know that as time goes on competition is going to continue to arise and I think one of the common themes not just on Etsy but wherever you're selling or launching a brand something that's not going to go away anytime soon actually it's probably going to get way more intense is learning how to story tell right and you can do this even in Etsy so storytelling comes down to the brand vibe that you create the colors that you choose the photography this type of Photography that you do the type of video you do the types of Graphics you put in your images right and telling the story of why someone should purchase it from you versus some Chinese reseller down the street and this is a big thing that I even get in my YouTube comments which is like how do I compete against a bunch of people just reselling things from China well I'm going to tell you how you're going to compete you're going to actually have a brand meaningful story behind what you're selling so if you're handmaking leather wallets tell that story of how you're hand making leather wallets right show that video of you actually making and cutting the leather and put that in your imagery in your videography in your descriptions but more so in your videography and your imagery right tell me that story make that connection right that's a price justification within itself if you're competing against a bunch of people selling the same thing at a cheaper price point because they're not actually handmaking it right you have 10 image slots and you have video slots right and in each of those image slots you have the opportunity to not only put an image but all of those value propositions that tell the story about how you handmake where you Source from how long it takes you to make your product why your quality is better where your sourcery raw materials from and why it's better than just going to a reseller right all of that information that exists in your descriptions tell me that story in your images right there's a lot of ways that you can manipulate your imagery so you are basically forcing people to read and see all of those value propositions that's no one's going to read in your descriptions so do the storytelling in your listings alone is one thing but I'm going to take this even a step further when it comes to the actual brand Vibe of your store creation I believe that it's going to become very important and the algorithm likes this for your entire Etsy shop to be a cohesive brand Vibe so the way that I like to describe this is like when you walk into a store like Victoria Secret versus a store like Nike right even though Victoria Secret is selling underwear they're selling bathing suits they're selling pajamas they're selling socks they're selling a whole bunch of different types of items but it's a very unique and identifiable brand Vibe when you walk in the store the way it smells the colors on the wall the images right and when you put all of those accents together and you put them together it makes sense where on the contrary if you walk into Nike it's a completely different brand Vibe again they're selling shoes they're selling backpacks they're selling socks they're selling so many different types of goods so you can sell many different types of items in your shop but when you put all those items together and the colors and the textures right it makes sense and so when you're thinking about setting up your Etsy brand think about building a cohesive brand that's even maybe recognizable off the Etsy platform so then one day if this manifests into driving traffic to your own Shopify store or a social media account or something like that you already have that part of your business taken care of you have an identifiable brand Vibe where it's recognizable just by the name right they can visually see oh those are the colors of that brand oh those are the types of products they're selling and when you do this your particular brand vibe that you create attracts a particular customer Avatar so two people in the print onto manspace selling the same type of goods that is you know shirts and stuff like that a Gothic branded print on demand store versus a girly hippie boho sweatshirt store even though they might both be selling sweatshirts it's attracting a completely different customer Avatar so really really get narrow in the sense of who do you actually want to attract as your customer Avatar and let all of your marketing your colors your fonts your logos right let that speak to that particular person all right so now I'm shooting in my living room if you've noticed we are changing it up because I'm in the middle of moving and I don't really have an office right now so we're just kind of going wherever and shooting videos okay so the next part of this is learning how to play the game of etsy and playing the game to your very best ability so it's kind of like playing Monopoly you know there's strategy involved but it's specific to you know the deck of cards that you hand at play or what you can play right and so it's kind of similar that even though everyone has a bunch of different businesses we're collectively trying to win at the same game with the needs on fears and goals of our unique position our business right so what does Etsy want as you as a seller well one they are also business actually a very big business so if you're making money then they're making money so they want you to have the highest average order value right if you're competing in a niche selling leather bags right compared to all of the leather bags are they going to prioritize listings that have a $40 average order value or are they going to prioritize your listing that maybe has a $75 average order value right so how do we optimize to increase aov we have more expensive things to sell right if you're currently selling at a lower middle tier ticket consider launching things that are more expensive there's always this percentage of people that are always going to buy the most expensive thing so if you're selling small Lea handbags maybe launch a medium or a large size handbag right and that's double or triple the price right this overall helps your status in the eyes of etsy similarly if you're someone selling only High ticket items maybe consider selling lower ticket items as well so your store has a mix of lower ticket and getting a higher quantity of people buying but then you also have someone also purchasing on the highest tiered thing this is going to increase your Revenue when you have an up sell and a down sell on your items another thing is who's winning the majority of the clicks when your listing is showing up in the search Pages whether you know it or not you're competing for that click compared to everyone else that has similar items as you or similar keywords as you right so out of all of the listings that show up the algorithm is judging based off who's earning most of the clicks this this is why I'm really big on split testing so much about Etsy sus is not just about your main image obviously cuz having poor branding in your listings can actually scare away people and hurt you in the long run but that main image is so important and so it's in your best interest to not just limit you to one data sample of an image when you go to launch your product when we launch a listing we are launching two to five Renditions of that same product whether it's bundled in different bundles whether we're split testing the main image image and we're always competing against our last best ctrs so if we launched a product and it had a 1.2 CTR we're going to run it again against another image to see if we can get it to 1.5 CTR CTR stand through click through rate and this is how you're competing always against your last best metric and where do I get the CTR from I get the CTR from my ads when I'm running ads on my listings which we're going to talk about that one in a second but basically once you've got a couple hundred clicks on a listing you collected a good amount of data to make a conclusion on that CTR right after you've had significant amount of data run through that product right you can say Okay 1.2 we're trailing a 1.2 how do we get this to a 1.5 another thing that etsy's always going to reward sellers for is constantly updating their product sample with quality products so we have a system where we launch 10 new products every month we have a consistent engine that has an inflow of new designs happening right now those 10 items might yield 30 or 40 new listings every single month that we're testing out based off of how we bundle it how we Stage IT how we split test the main image but we have a consistent inflow system of new products happening on a recurring basis right so we've built out that side of our engine that we've sopd out our research and development process to the point that every single time we want to launch something new there is a system of how we get the raw materials how we set up the skew how do we we set up the tracking for it and basically track every single thing that gets input so we can filter out best sellers out of all the new input and out of every 40 new listings that we have maybe only three to five six or seven become best sellers that take off that's a normal occurrence but it's kind of like this filtration system the more you put things into the algorithm run ads collect data the faster you can pull out the best case scenarios and focus on those money-making ones to then optimize for more growth it's like this filtration engine sort of thing which leads me to another Point here which is spending on Etsy ads so Etsy ads is not a game of let me just spend money and waste money right it's about how to spend with more profitability otherwise what are we doing right why am I teaching Etsy ads if it's just like wasting your money right the goal isn't just to increase your Revenue the goal is to increase your profit and if you're somebody that's struggling with Etsy ads and basically isn't seeing that the higher spend or spending isn't yielding a bigger return in my experience again this is my experience from all of my clients 99.9% of the time the reason the seller can't get the ads to work for them it's usually a product of a user error meaning the seller's issue there's some other issue causing their ads not to work whether product sample isn't competitive enough they're not getting clicks or their value proposition or their marketing efforts or their photography or their designs aren't competitive enough but for the most part in the best case scenario for your Etsy shop for the future is to have your ads to the max yielding the max profitability possible Max potential possible right and this is going to make you be more profitable not just increase your Revenue if you're doing it correctly it's a really big if if you're doing it correctly but when it comes to ads we have to think of what does the platform want right they don't only want you to have the highest a the most clicks you know the best conversion rates right they don't want just all of that but on some level when a platform says hey give me money in exchange for traffic they are judging you on how much you're spending and that's going to contribute to how competitive you are in the future when competition arises because even if you're not spending right now 5 years from now you might have a lot of competitors putting their hand up saying that they're actually willing to outbid you in positions and if you look at any top selling product across any platform Amazon Wayfair bear eBay whatever you want to call it I can promise you any viral product has ad money behind it you know it maybe starts organically but then to hold that position you have to lock in that position by spending money in the long term but again this is if you're coming from my perspective of being Ultra ultra competitive and that's a super aggressive approach and if that's not what your goals are you're allowed to have your own goals you're Your Own Boss that's why you chose this all right now let's talk about number three which is building a super strong business engine which is kind of what we talked about before which is building Sops around every single thing that we do sop stands for standard operating procedure and it's things like customer service research and development Inventory management quality control PPC paperclick with Etsy ads how you manage your Etsy ads right and obviously if you're first starting out for the first time building Sops are not your biggest issue by any means but it's not something to overlook either if your business is this wheel here you have all these different compartments of your business right and when you work on your business by the very nature you just are wearing all of the hats you're doing everything but eventually if you want to elevate and delegate as cheesy as that sounded um eventually you want to build out processes for each part of the business so for customer service after you've answered a thousand of your own customer service messages you have a pretty good grasp on your customers needs want spars and goals and how you deal with your customer service so you can build an sop document out basically a sheet out that says if the customer has a complaint about this this is what we do if the the shipment got lost in the mail this is the procedure that we follow right and we start building processes around every single thing that we do so for us right we order raw materials we have a process of what we do when we order raw materials we have a document that says we ordered it on this date we bought it from this Source we spent this much money it's going to yield this many products after we turn it into a product right all of those things so in our case say we're launching a new design right we buy LS of hundreds of thousands of yards of fabric every single year right and that fabric might have a design on it right and that design is going to yield a new product for us to offer right so we have a process of ordering and documenting where the material came from how much we bought after we break down that raw material how much the cost is per unit and we document this on a sheet and then once it gets into our office and we start turning it into a prototype then we can say that this design has this code Associated to it which then that gets pushed into our skew system so then we can create a skew for each size of the design that we make so then if we launch 12 different sizes of that new design that came in we have 12 unique skew codes that just came in and then we know that we're going to go load those SKS into a draft listing which then triggers the marketing department to then first decord inate to get the raw material turned into the finished usable product [Music] right and then the marketing team which is the same person then goes and does a photo shoot and that photo shoot then is finished and those photos are put back into the draft prepped listing and then the same person that ordered it who is also doing research and development for the design will go in and optimize the keywords and finish off the listing and publish the listing and this is a process that is pretty dialed in for our company from inception of the idea of the new design based off research to then getting the final product uploaded into Etsy and then making it a trackable item with a skew code now this is our complex system right and we have a complex product so this is how I know that it's possible for even the most complex items that you're selling and again not everybody wants to go to these lengths to figure out and optimize processes I particularly like it cuz if I don't have these systems then I can't replace myself with someone else doing all these things on my behalf and that is the point of systems is that it's a repeatable scalable system so that even if you're gone or you're sick someone else can take your place and follow those systems and like I said this isn't the most pressing issue when you're first launching your business the most pressing issue when you're first launching is getting product Market fit do people want what you have to sell but once you've made a 50 to 100 sales and you're gaining some momentum right at that point you've kind of gotten a proof of concept that people like what you have to sell and now we can start dialing this up and you know following what the profit tells us which leads me to number four all right and finally the last thing that we have to talk about is letting profit be your guide so it's really common for ety sellers to get caught up in something called vanity metrics these are feel-good metrics like revenue and likes and favorites that feel really good and feels like you're succeeding not that you're not but like they don't actually tell you anything about your business and when it comes to having a North star or something to guide you on your decisions the only thing that actually matters in e-commerce is profit so back in like however long ago it was I posted this video about me making $945,000 my first calendar year on Etsy right that video got literally like over a million views but then when I later posted my net profit on that amount yeah it got not so a million views people like the Feelgood make a million dollars Vibe they don't want to know the real truth about their business business but understanding and getting comfortable and having an honest relationship with your business metrics is what real true success you know that's how true success manifests when you get uncomfortable with the uncomfortable of knowing the truth about your store okay so how do we do this I went on this two-year journey of trying to solve this problem for Etsy Sellers and basically I built a tool called profit Tre and it's the first ever real-time profit tracking solution for Sellers and essentially what you can do with with this is you can input all of your product costs on a per product level so you can see not only your profit on your store level but you can actually see it on each unique item that you sell so remember that situation that we talked about where I particularly love to split test everything so if I'm selling this unique item across 17 other listings which I would right I can see a Consolidated report on how this unique item is selling across multiple listings or just in general like on a listing level right you might have a bestselling listing but you see in that bestselling listing that actually only one option is making 90% of your Revenue right but that one option isn't what's being marketed in the main image or those keywords aren't what's being seen first in the beginning of the title right and and so this is where you let profit make your decisions for you right and the truth of it I've seen people where they're like this is my bestselling product this is my bestselling product but then they look at the profit and it's actually like their seventh product is actually the one that's they should really be giving the most love to and optimizing because that's the one that's making them the most of the dough if you know so overall profit Tre is going to solve this problem for you it's going to give you an honest relationship with your business and yeah I mean again if you're first starting out this is not the main issue for you right now the main issue is getting Market fit product fit the people even want what you have to sell but it's not good to overlook these Concepts or to ignore them right and looking back I spent a lot of my time investing my time in things that I felt like doing instead of what I actually should have been focused on you only have so many hours in the day to do stuff for your business right especially in the beginning when you're one person right so it's the best for you to invest your time and things that you'll do the greatest return right and um yeah you just don't want to be working at random because like I said your time is the most valuable thing in your given work day and I just did things at random and did what I felt like doing instead of what I should have been doing looking back but overall guys I have full an trainings in my channel you guys can check out profit.io there's a link in the description and there's a free trial so even if you hate it just give me some feedback because at this stage that's all we're really looking for is to get feedback from you guys see what you like what your problems are tell me everything blow up that chat bot tell me what you need so we can find a solution for it all right guys thank you so much for staying to the end and I'll see you in the next video bye guys [Music] [Music]

Channel: Hannah Gardner

Views: 5,410

Keywords: how to sell on etsy, how to start an online business, etsy business, how to make money online, best side hustles in 2024, how to sell on etsy for beginners, what to sell on etsy, how to start an etsy shop, online business, etsy 2024, how to make money on etsy, how to get sales on etsy, digital products to sell on etsy, do this to destroy your etsy shop in 2024, digital products to sell online, business ideas, how to sell on etsy 2024, etsy, etsy ads

Id: PuPCcLZIdAE

Length: 25min 15sec (1515 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024