How I Did over $945,000 My First Calendar Year on ETSY

what's up guys in this video i'm going to be going over how i did a little bit over 945 000 on etsy in my first calendar year of being open so calendar year meaning from january to december i opened the store a little bit before january of 2020 so i'm referencing the calendar year we did a little bit over 945 000 in revenue not profit in revenue this is going to be a huge value video so you're definitely going to want to stay to the end because i'm going to be showing you and giving you a lot of major key points of why the store saw the success that it did and i've been so nervous about making this video um just because it's i don't know the whole goal of this video is really to help people sharing these numbers has been a really personal thing you know in my business so it is kind of weird to talk about it and share it publicly but i know that my bigger goal is here on this youtube channel and helping other entrepreneurs find success with you know whatever it is online whatever they're trying to do and so i know that this is the next step into my career which is really helping people you know grow their own brands or you know become successful online please enjoy this video and comment down below if you're excited any you know questions you have it would mean the world for me for you to also subscribe to the channel um as i am now fully dedicated to this channel posting videos weekly regularly whereas before i was so you know a lot of my time was really spent growing my brand now i'm able to really focus on my channel and share back you know my whole case study of the store that i built to seven figures in the last three years so please go ahead and subscribe to the channel and let's get into this video [Music] alright guys so as you see here you can see my dashboard from january 1 of 2020 to the end december 31st of uh 2020. you can see we hit a little bit over 945 000 in revenue again that is revenue so that is not actually profit profit for your store is always going to vary depending on what you're selling what your personal costs are etc etc so let me talk about a few reasons why we were able to hit these types of numbers the first thing that i did before i decided you know what types of products i was going to be designing is i did a lot of product research if you're selling something that nobody else is selling that could indicate that there's not enough search volume for it so people aren't looking for it so it's not that it won't work it's just you're going to spend more money on ads and more on marketing to prove yourself to the marketplace now if you're making and designing products that do exist on etsy you really do want to look at before you start launching your first 10 skus you want to see what your competitors are doing and i actually have tools for this in my description that you can use um that help you do a lot of product research but i wanted to happen here and show you this tool that's specifically for competitor analysis and product research this is i'm going to show you real fast literally how i do my competitor analysis and product research and like i mentioned before it is super essential that you get used to doing this because not doing you know this type of intentional work before doing any product launches it's really just not gonna serve you especially as things start becoming more and more competitive in the space because they are um so this chrome extension that i have is called everbee um there's a free plan so no need to worry you can just click the link and you just sign up and then basically it adds to your chrome bar here um and it shows up here at everbee so then every single time that you're on a product page um such like this one it will show up on the side and you can pull analytics but i'm going to just show you how it works um i already searched the word dog bowl but i'm going to show you how i did it again so if i was somebody that was looking at making dog bowls and was either just starting my store for the first time maybe wanting to launch dog bowls or trying to figure out what type of bowls because i want to make some bowls or maybe i already have a dog store and i'm just looking for new product ideas so i searched the really broad key term here dog bold i didn't type in glass dog bowl or you know plastic dog bowl i want to see um you know what's ranking for the keyword dog bowl because that's a really broad key term which means it's probably getting the most searches more than you know a long tail keyword like glass dog bowl or pink dog bowl um which is probably getting less searches so we want to go for the broadest word first and see which product is ranking for you know the keyword that's getting the most search volume so we typed in dog bowl with my ever be chrome extension here i'm going to hit analytics and this is actually going to pull up all of the top selling people with the keyword dog goal so i don't really want to look at this i want to more so look at the estimated i'm sorry right here monthly sales so who's selling the most for the most part this is very very accurate and i've messed around with a lot of different types of softwares and this one is by far the cleanest and the fastest and the cheapest really in um so really really seamless to onboard and get this started so as this loads here you're gonna see that all these dog balls are filing in and it looks like this one here is the winner um and it's also interesting to see who's running as and who's not so we don't want to click on the add one well we can it's the same one but that we really want to find the top one that's not an ad so who's getting the most organic sales so it is this one and so you as somebody looking to launch dog bulls want to take this data and really look at a few different things for your own listing right so why is this the number one seller for the keyword dog holes right so we want to analyze their product image we want to look at the different variations that they offer we want to see that the price that they offer at the product description and even with my ever be chrome extension i can literally click on this and it will show me the exact tags that they're using i'm not saying to copy this listing verbatim obviously but you do want to see like why is this winning why is this such a good product um and so you coming into this space um is you're going to want to make some higher level decisions on okay well maybe i want to offer more variations or more sizes or maybe i can beat their price or maybe if i can't beat them on price i can do better marketing or make better video content um and then i would even suggest you know coming down here because this is the number one you know product listing i hit this little everb chromic little button here and it gave me that the tags that they're using um and maybe emulate some of these tags for keyword product fit for your own listings i am closely connected to this company because i've been using them um literally for all of my product research and i only share software that i personally use so this will be a huge value store check it out the link in my description and let's like hop back into the video when you're doing this type of product research you want to think in your own mind how am i going to beat my competition am i going to beat them in price am i going to beat them in quality am i going to beat them in shipping time what am i going to beat them in and you want to build a spreadsheet of all the things that you're going to do that are going to be the top sales or the top people selling a similar product now again if you're selling a product that doesn't exist yet like at all again that could mean that there may not be a lot of search volume for that product because it's a new made up product if it's something that there's something similar even though yours does something a little bit different or maybe better that could be a really really good thing but you still want to see what other people are doing in your space etsy amazon ebay facebook marketplace is going to only get more competitive so at this point in the game maybe 10 years ago you could just throw up you know a scrunchie and make a bunch of money because there's only three people selling it that's just not the case anymore so you want to be diligent you want to be conscientious you want to be intentional with your marketing with your language that you're using with your keywords with your photos next thing that i did on my etsy store is from the get-go was i was very active in my store so i would spend my entire day in my etsy account when etsy sees that you're a user and you're serious and you're posting products and you're tweaking tags titles descriptions all the time posting new photos taking videos etsy is going to reward you for your efforts because like i think it's like 98 of etsy shops like don't make don't make it or just don't actually make a full-time income from it if this is your business and you're treating it as something that you want to be full-time then you need to treat it like that from the beginning so you want to make sure that you're doing everything you can to show etsy that you are a serious seller so that means filling out your bio putting on video um you know uploading many many products constantly in your your store being active writing descriptions adding tags basically every single place there is a form in etsy that is available for you to fill out you want to fill it out so that is number two number three and this may be difficult for some people that are starting with smaller stores but there is another tip that i'm going to give you after this that's going to help you with this launching mini skus so a lot of people come to me and are like how do you know i'm get more traffic you know i launched this you know these products you know two weeks ago i haven't got any sales i'm getting some likes some favorites but i'm not really getting sales the thing is with this the more skus the better so you want to when you're going to launch your store i would set a goal of getting 50 skus up if 50 skus sorry maybe not 50 skus but 50 listings up right you want to have a lot a lot of skus morris skews the better more listings the better and so this leads me to number four which is say you don't have you know 50 skus because you don't have 50 different products to sell maybe you only have 10. so number four to combat this if you don't have that many skus you can still make mini listings as of today i'm not saying that this is going to be like this forever but as of today on etsy you are able to duplicate sku so you can duplicate listings and you're not just going to duplicate the same listing 10 times you're going to duplicate the same sku but you're going to change things in the listing so say you have 10 skus on your 10th sku you have you know five different main images that you can test what you're going to do is you're going to duplicate that listing you know 5 to 10 times and change the main image or maybe you don't have 10 images to test it out with but you have different keywords that you can try so you can try 10 different titles so the listing stays the same like the description and the product and the option to buy the product but also you can change certain things and test them and see which one performs better and then later you know turn the less performing one off so as of today etsy allows you to do this and it's really really beneficial because if you don't have a lot of skus you can still make more listings by duplicating them but testing them and running them against each other to see you know which one gets better click-through rates with using this picture or using this title so on and so forth so that's one way to fix the issue of not having a lot of skus the second way that you can also do this is by bundling items together so right now i'm helping a girl she's she knits hats and she only has like 15 skus which is not a lot whatsoever so one thing that she can do is she can take a picture you know with two hats in one picture so you can buy one at this price or you can buy two and get a little bit cheaper and then take you know run it against another listing that has a picture of two hats in it and it's in a bundled form and if you want to try this out i can tell you that a lot of my success is because i bundle items i test bundles every single day i'll test four skus bundled together three skus bundled together and now you might be asking me well how do i bundle items without with and still keep track of inventory i actually have a company that i work with it's called sum tracker and it integrates with a shopify store as well but it with your etsy store so if you do bundle skus together you can actually keep track of inventory still so if you sell you know if you have two skus and they both exist in two different bundles if someone buys from this bundle the skew will get deducted from this bundle as well and everything will be tracked for the longest time i was not able to track my inventory but finally now i am able to track my inventory because i not only have duplicate listings but i also have many of the same sku in multiple listings when i bundle items so that's the second way that you can add more skus or more listings to your etsy store to show etsy that you're constantly you know improving and launching more items the next thing that's essential to any e-commerce platform is reviews so with this you always always always want to have some type of insert in your packages that not necessarily asks a reporter review but says if you had a good experience please leave a review so they get their package and then there's a little postcard in there that says if you loved your item you know please share your feedback we would love to hear your feedback just by doing this one little thing you will increase the amount of reviews that you receive so you really really want to make sure that you are getting as many reviews as possible providing a good customer experience obviously good shipping times good products really try to get above the 95 percent five-star reviews it's been difficult for me to hit 95 on five stars we usually sit around 93 to 91 percent um five star but if you can reach that then obviously you know getting the star seller badge is having over 95 percent five star reviews plus having you know shipping times on time which is super easy and then also answering messages the first message within 24 hours so if you can do those three things i would say reviews is getting is the hardest because sometimes you just can't make everybody happy then i would say really really try to get that star seller because i believe it is helping the seo and stores that do have that star cellar badge so unfortunately i have not been able to get it and a lot of most people in my niche can not get it so but if you can that is awesome if they do leave a bad review message them right away try to fix the problem offer a replacement um you know just try to message them you know privately but also answer the review publicly so people see that you're a store that answers their reviews and tries to make things right if something was not right or they didn't demon as right a final thing that is probably the key one of the biggest things that drives traffic to my etsy store is running ppc so this is pay per click so this is the etsy interface of etsy ads i would say that this is very very important and if you are had an essay store you're not running ads you've never even tried to run ads i definitely recommend that you run ads and even if they're not profitable running strong like out the gates which they might not be you still need to run ads because running ads is going to send more traffic to your store and that data is going to tell you a lot of things about what your best sellers are what products are doing the best which ones get the most clicks and when you get that data then you can make more choices about your store to change things to launch new products that are similar to the best seller product so you can make you know more of stuff that's doing well essentially you can start as little as five dollars a day and i would do that for two weeks i would do more than five dollars a day honestly i would probably do like 15 a day but if you are just starting out five dollars a day something is good something is better than nothing the one argument that i make to running ppc if you're somebody that's kind of always been against it one competition is only going to get harder so like if you're not getting the ranks and you're not getting you know the amount of impressions that you think you deserve like not running ppc eventually is not going to be an option you're going to have to do paid traffic because the competition for all products will eventually become super super difficult not saying that that's going to happen to you anytime soon but eventually it will ecommerce is a relatively new on the scale of you know if you compare it to brick and mortar it's you know only in the last you know 20 30 40 years have you been seeing people buy things online so running ppc is not really not an option so i would get used to it now get used to how what it feels like to spend the money and really learning how to run ppc properly so i would recommend that you run it on all your products for at least two weeks and just see what the numbers look like what sold what didn't sell and take some you know some of those data points and make some higher level decisions based off what the data tells you in the marketing stats but with that being said i will say if you don't have you know good photos and good tags and good titles and good descriptions i would say don't even look at ppc until you really do proper competitor research analyze what your competitors doing and really try to beat them again in quality in price and shipping and marketing and something to ensure that you're not just going to waste your money in ppc right so it's kind of like when i used to have e-commerce clients before i had my own brand you know these brands would hire me to do paid traffic for them and they would you know hire me to solve this problem for for them of you know i want more traffic and then when i start really digging into their business i learn oh well you're not even ready for traffic because your marketing sucks or you your product sucks or the quality is not quite there yet or your shipping times are horrible and so me as you know the marketer to doing paid traffic it's kind of like i can't really do my job until you fix these other things first so really really work on you know that 90 of the meat of your business first and then when you say hey i really feel confident in this okay now we're going to invest in my business run some ads and see what happens overall guys i'm telling you those are the main things that really skyrocketed in my store in 2020 this was a really personal video and i'm going to be making more value videos like this about etsy coming up and i'm just i'm overall just like super excited to start this new journey on youtube really sharing my store and the ins and outs of everything that i've done to date so if you guys got any value out of this video please do go ahead and subscribe to the channel and i will see you guys in the next video [Music] hey

Channel: Hannah Gardner

Views: 1,381,062

Keywords: selling on etsy etsy, etsy tips, increase etsy sales, how to start an etsy shop, sell on etsy, how to sell on etsy for beginners, etsy selling tips, selling on etsy for beginners, how to get more sales on etsy, making money online, etsy print on demand, etsy ads, etsy products to sell, how to make money on etsy without making anything, how to make money on etsy 2021, how to sell on etsy, etsy for beginners, how to get more sales on etsy 2021

Id: me5CJpajAHc

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 30 2022