How I made $141,000 Selling Planners on Etsy to become fully self employed

hello hello karen here uh how you doing today i am going to spend some time today talking about how i got my start uh selling planners on etsy which basically has allowed me to go from working full-time which i had done for 30 years i worked in higher education i was an academic i was in academic advising first i was a hall director actually when i graduated from college and then i was in academic advising for about 25 years in a small liberal arts college in madison wisconsin and i started in about 2017 i found this course that i'm going to show you about i'm going to show you more specifically what the course was and i found it in 2017 i took the course i set up some planners i really didn't get very active on etsy until about fall of 2018 because i was doing it as a hobby i kind of wanted to start something but i was working full-time and you know how much energy that is and i don't have any kids so i had a little bit more time in the evenings than a lot of people do and so um basically i started getting serious about it in 2018 fall of 2018 and started driving traffic to my shop and um it started to pick up and i was really happy about it and you can see depending on when you're watching this at least today i am at 8 200 sales and pleasantly self-employed at this point um it's quite wonderful so if this is something you're looking to do to become self-employed i am going to give you the down and dirty this is not a get get rich quick opportunity at all i don't believe in that um you do have to do the work but eventually it does become i have a video um in my channel on what it means to be really what passive income actually means um so you can go ahead and watch that but um i do not i'm not interested at all in you in tricking you into thinking that you're going to sign up for something and you're going to start making money right away so because i want you to learn what you need to do in order to fully have a business going and to be self-employed eventually but it does absolutely take some work it is not an overnight thing it is maybe for some people but i certainly had a huge learning curve but it was fun and i enjoyed it so so let's get started so this is my current shop it's called loving mondays it is on etsy i also have a website and i have a shop on there as well where i say i sell the same planners and i currently i i also opened recently a shop i have to sign in and sign out here hey by the way do you like my mug it's winter here in wisconsin and i just pulled this out of my christmas box we'll use these all winter just because it's fun so so um you might sorry it takes a little while to get signed in there um just because this video i don't edit these videos you kind of get who i am um whatever comes out of my mouth at the time i don't really edit or script these so hopefully you don't mind that style um it's just not something i'm interested in but so if you want to just relax kick back get your warm cup of whatever you want to drink and and enjoy this with me as i go through this that'd be awesome and in the meantime give me a thumbs up uh and subscribe to this channel and i also down below for those of you who actually do have planners already that you're selling and you're wanting sort of the behind the scenes exactly what i do have done to to make have the success that i've had um i am going to be i'm in the process of creating this course it's called planners to profits i'm not sure this will be the design i use so it might look a little different but if you are interested in when this comes out i'm hoping in a month or two in january 2022 go ahead down below i will link to the sign up form that you can be notified obviously there's no obligation for you to sign up once it's live i'm looking for the sign up form um i had it open but i guess it's not oh here there it is um not that you needed to see that but so if you want to go ahead it'll just i'll send you course updates if you want to go ahead and click on the link below to sign up for this and i'll let you know when it's ready anyways and you can decide if you're interested okay so here's my other shop a planner to remember let's see it looks like this and really uh this is just started i only have i just started it this year and um these are all digital planners i do have some printable planners actually in here as well and some sticker packets that i'm working on and i have right now i'm selling this bundle pretty inexpensive at this point i have 11 planners in there right now but i'm trying to get this shop going and so that price is probably going to go up um and you know early next year probably but for right now i'm trying to you know just get get some momentum working in the shop so all right so that's a little bit about me and let's go back to loving mondays and i'll just show you some quick stats and then i'm going to show you how i got started in this process okay so basically um this is so again i opened the shop in 2017. it's currently 2021 and uh that is those are my stats of how much revenue i've made which looks awesome doesn't it you're like yeah well considering and i'm again i'm going to tell you the truth behind this because this is where i people do not tell you the truth behind this this is revenue there's a difference between revenue and net income and net income is what i've actually earned so i have spent a significant amount of money on etsy ads which will be part of the class planners to profits that i'm going to be teaching people exactly how to use etsy ads so that it is profitable for you because there there's a way to set up your shop that that's that will work with etsy ads and without losing money so um that is plan that's a part of planners to profits the course that i'm developing and so basically let's see this year so if you see this number that's all time right so this year you can see the the momentum so half of that more than half of that was earned this year alone and so it again you know you start you got to start somewhere and then eventually it starts to pick up steam and now i would say i'm to the point where it is more passive this is definitely more passive but i've had to bring um traffic to the shop besides use etsy ads i've had to bring my own traffic to the shop i've had to change things around as i got customer feedback i've had to described i change my description quite a bit so that i was really clear what people were getting as i got feedback from my customers and so there was a lot of that upfront work and now i don't get too many people who are are concerned who have who have complaints or didn't think they were getting what you know or bought something that they didn't think they were buying because i'm really clear now because i've done a lot of that adjusting over time so but let's be clear about what my income really is and so on on ads you will see that i spend 350 a day on ads which actually is you know during most of the year etsy doesn't spend that much but um but my shop is set up in a way that i will make money on that and the higher the higher the ad spend in my opinion the better so uh let's see so all time we'll go 2017 whoops 2017 until today and so on etsy ads you can see it's about 50 it's a little under 50 percent look at how much i've spent on etsy ads and so don't let that freak you out um you just said you want to be careful and you certainly in the beginning wouldn't spend that much on etsy ads i'm not spending that much 350 a day in my other shop right now until i see that it's working and that people are happy with my products so um but this is the kind of thing i'll be teaching folks in my planners to profit class and so um so you can see the difference this came from etsy ads that amount of revenue came from etsy ads and then you could see the difference then of how much uh traffic i've had to bring to my shop so uh between whoops and so that was 96 so a little you know so i've obviously haven't paid for the difference between 141 and 96 and i'm not gonna do the math in my head i could get the calculator out but you could do the math real quick so okay so the reason i'm showing you these numbers is because i want i want you to know that the course that i originally took which is what i'm going to go through with you right now um because i think it's super helpful to get started if you're looking for something to help you get started on starting a small business i wanted you to see the number so that you knew that it was absolutely possible i'm not just um offering you an a course to take and then not proving to you that you can actually make money um with this course okay but even if you sign up for this course you still have to do work and so and be patient and um keep going even though sometimes that you feel like you're not making any progress and eventually you will get there okay so this is the class and i will link it below i am an affiliate to this class so if you purchase through my affiliate link i will make a commission on this but i'm showing it i i'm only showing it because i've taken it and i still to this day three or four years later they're still adding content to this class where i'm still learning and so um when they have new updates i go in and i learn more and more from them and so the small amount of money i've paid for this class to get me started with developing planners and um selling on etsy is absolutely amazing i mean nobody can start a business for the little amount that they are charging for this class so but i wanted to be upfront i am an affiliate for it but i absolutely do never ever talk about anything unless i'm a part of that program um and that i support it so so basically if you go in this is what it will look like on the inside of the class so it's called passive income planner girl and it's not just for women but that's their that's their focus and men can learn just as much uh going through this program as as women can and so basically what i love about this is it's also excuse me it's not just developing planners sorry it's not just developing planners but it's also about a personal development journey and developing something that's near and dear to your heart okay so they're going to show you the nuts and bolts of how to do the planners how to put them together but it's also about how to create something that's unique to you because there are a lot of planners on etsy but you want to create something that's unique to you because that particular planner that's coming out of you is not currently for sale on etsy and we need that the world needs what you're going to develop so i'm really excited for you if you decide to go this path because it's really fun so basically there's a little journey you're going to go on and they're going to talk about that journey with you they have different they use different planner girls with different styles so you can kind of pick your style of what kind of planner girl you might be when it helps you kind of tap into who you are again bringing your gifts to the planner that you're going to develop they have a section on capturing your vision um what do you you know what kind of business do you want to develop and put that into you know your first product which would generally be a planner tapping into your zone of genius which is what i've been talking about and here's where you get into the nuts and bolts creating your zone of genius planner and i'll click into that in a minute they have a whole section on launching your etsy shop so you don't have to feel lost on doing that marketing on pinterest they've got download pinterest canva templates for you to use which are amazing and extremely helpful uh and then it goes into so that's kind of the beginning stages and the nice thing about this is this is milestone five six seven eight there's uh four more milestones that help you build to the next level of a business so um you're not just they don't just stop with you at the stage of where you you know you develop your planner and then they kind of let you go it's what else can i do and this is kind of where i'm at um at this phase and it's been so helpful that i signed up for this one planner class and they're helping me go from having my etsy shop to the next level and so i'm really excited about that so but let's go into the nuts and bolts of creating your zone of genius planner just so you can see what you would get here and uh when i took this class actually they were teaching printable planners okay now it's now it's it's digital so that's their focus is digital planners but i want to tell you that i would actually recommend that you sell both and because if i can go into my stats real quick let's go into my stats so now granted i've been selling i've been selling printable planners much longer and so the stats are going to be higher anyways because they've been in my shop longer so here's digital 28 000 digital it's the second printable that i um bundle that have in my shop 30 000. uh these are some smaller ones let me go and then where's the digital okay so these again i've only had the digital bundles up for about a year and so that's really good for a year and so i am making money on both printable and digital so i would encourage you to think about if you're going to do something like this to think about having printable and digital in your shop it's super easy in fact i would start digital now that i know how to do digital planners i would start digital and then all you got to do is once you have your digital planner set up you just remove the hyperlinks and basically you have your printable pages and so you can offer both um even if it's the same planner which miner you can offer the same planner printable and digital and it just gives you more products and more offerings for people because there's a lot of people still like printable so i wouldn't take that off the table for yourself unless you were completely opposed to selling uh printable so uh let's see so basically they've got bringing your planner to life there's a whole series this is 49 minutes a whole series of videos now on how to create your digital planners you can either use keynote which is what i use or a finish affinity publisher which i am just about learning to do but i currently use keynote and so they have tutorials for both which is really nice and so and again you're going to go through each of these tutorials choosing fonts clip art patterns and texture they don't they just get they take you through every single step that by the time you're done all of a sudden you have this digital planner that you're just totally in love with and you're ready to start selling it and it's there's no guesswork you just they take you through the entire thing step by step compressing creating textured covers for your planner uh setting up apple keynote okay so this is where we're getting into apple keynote setting up your master slides and i'm gonna tell you a little hint in a second designing the background of your planner adding in layered effects adding in tabs again every single step is covered here for you so you don't need to figure out how to do any of it setting the color scheme placing text on your planner tabs uh placing your urls in the bottom designing your divider pages designing your front cover as you can see i'm just kind of going through this just so you see exactly because this is inside so you can't really see this unless you've paid for the course designing the back cover welcome page i don't have a welcome page on mine but i think that's a great idea and so on and so on working with lines working with tables now you're creating the pages in your planner hyperlinking exporting what do you do next so again step by step super super helpful now the one tip i would suggest and i did this when they came out with the digital planner before i started i think i have it here yeah so they have also when you buy the course you can also choose and i believe it might be a little bit of a discount if you buy it right away it might not be but it's super cheap anyways but they have a digital um here the epic digital planner template kit so they have actually developed let me see if i can click on here so you can see it there's an actual template and you can get one with a white background or see-through boxes um i don't know what it's going to look like if here if i download it so i purchased this and it's basically a a whole digital planner set up for you and you just have to add your fonts your paper your digital paper your pages although the pages are all set up for you you just have to change things to fit your style and so i would highly recommend this because it saved me probably weeks and weeks and weeks of work so basically it looks like this see the tabs are all set up i took this and i created more tabs along the top because that fit my style and i changed a lot of stuff in the planner but it gave me a place to start and so this is the template that comes along that you can purchase separately from the course but i would highly recommend this because again it gives you a starting point which is extremely helpful so you don't have to be doing it just from scratch so give that some consideration if you're if you're thinking about this course so so i think that is all i wanted to go over um let me know if you have any comments or questions leave them in the comments i respond to all of them and don't forget to click on the links below i put my shop links in there if you want to check them out don't forget if you are already selling planners to sign up for the um the planners to profits course that will be coming out and i'll just notify you when it's available and i think that's it let me know if you have any questions thanks so much have a great day

Channel: Loving Mondays with Karen

Views: 2,241

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Id: ovD0m89_DBU

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021