MASTERCLASS - HOW TO MAKE & SELL DIGITAL FILES on ETSY - SVG, EPS, DXF, PNG Creation & Sales

etsy is one of the world's leading platforms for selling both physical goods and also digital goods and that's what we're going to be talking about in this video check this one out this is a digital download when it rains look for rainbows when it's dark look for stars this is a cut file it's an svg dxf eps png bundle you can add it to the basket it's four dollars this person's made 120 sales so far here's one this is a custom listing and this person's got 54 000 sales and they've got a whole section down here and they've got 77 svg files and you can see here this person's got them all listed they're you know relatively good price point and they're instant shipping because if i click on this one and let's say i want to buy it i can add to the basket and once i pay for it i instantly get it it's just a zip file so how do you make files like this that's what i'm going to be talking about in some pretty deep dive detail in this video i'm going to cover how to make these using completely free software and then how to actually list it on etsy so if you're interested in learning about the mechanics of this then this video is for you all right welcome welcome i hope you're having a great day it can be intimidating to go on to etsy and see huge stores that are selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of digital goods and you're like where do i even start so in this video i'm going to cover exactly how to make the files how to bundle them and then how to get them listed on etsy so let's start why are people buying digital files well there's typically four or five types of digital files that people buy and the most popular one is called an svg file that stands for scalable vector graphic the reason that this is a good file is because it does not get pixelated when it gets really large so they're good for stencils on walls people use them for really large posters an svg file has an infinite level of crispness when you're you know when you download that file and you use it in an application like a photoshop or an inkscape the second type of file is a png file these are really good for if you're making like t-shirts or coffee mugs or some sort of print on demand item and the reason a png file works is because a png file has a transparent background so you can throw that design onto a t-shirt and then whatever color the t-shirt is it's just the text or just the image that will be on the t-shirt you won't have a white background unless you choose to have that the third type of file is a dxf file and that's like a cutting file so there's two ones that i've run into i'm sure there's more reasons but a dx dxf file is typically used if you have a cre-cut machine and a creek cut machine is like a high-end cutting machine so you can cut like really intricate patterns into paper [Music] or other materials the other reason that i've seen dxf files used is for woodworking machines and like laser cutting and so it's really cool [Music] now all of this would be the same design mind you you would just have it in different formats so you might have like a flower as an svg and a flower as a png and a flower as a dxf the fourth one is an eps file and this is like an svg file but it can be used in photoshop so it's like a it's like a vector in the sense that it's it's like a i think it was like a hybrid between a png file and an svg file it looks like a png but it acts like an svg so an eps file is really useful if you're in photoshop and you're using it for you know really high resolution photos and then the last one is the good old jpeg file and the jpeg file is just sort of the most robust file type and so people can use that for anything they want if they want to make a poster or a print so when you're bundling digital files for sale on etsy you'd want to at least include these four svg png dxf and eps you may want to also include the jpeg if you want but you don't have to because people can just use the png but it's your choice here's an example of what you can list on etsy so this is just a made up example and this says 30 svg png dxf and eps and the theme here is summer beach and these are silhouettes that are simple so you could use them in a creek cut or you could use them on a t-shirt the you know there's tons of options for using these files this is just going on because i've got 30 here listed so here's an umbrella sunglasses a fan and so somebody would purchase this and then they could use them one of those file types so they would download all 30 files meaning that you would have 30 svgs in the bundle 30 pngs 30 dxfs and 30 eps so this one bundle would be about 120 files and then they would download a zip file or two zip files maybe even four zip files here of 30 each and then they would use whatever file type they need to use so the big question becomes how do you actually make these digital files where do you get the images what programs do you use what are the different paths to success so that's what i'm going to cover right now the first thing when you're making a digital file is you could in theory just draw the actual picture so let's say for example you're a relatively good artist you could sit down at a table and you could physically draw 30 arrows or 30 stars 30 handmade hearts you could draw you know aces and diamonds and clubs and hearts like you know suits of cards you can just physically draw them take a picture of those drawings you know basically you're scanning them into digital format and then you use something like inkscape which is a free vector tool to render them into svgs and the other types of files that's one option you can also draw them digitally as well and i'll go through an example of how to do that right in inkscape the second way you can make digital files is to trace the images and so you could basically pull public domain pictures and then use inkscape for example a vector software free vector software and you can just trace the image and just create an svg file and the other file types off of that as well i'll go through an example of that too the third one is to modify existing images so you might have a free svg public domain file and then you may want to modify it remove some elements add some elements so you're basically combining different pieces of art together to make your own t-shirt graphic for example and i'll go through an example of that so let's start off with the first one which is drawing images now i'm going to go to inkscape and we'll get started on actually drawing our own svg file okay so if you're wondering what is this inkscape this guy keeps talking about the answer is go to inkscape.org and check out this free software it's completely free and you can just click the little download button over in the bottom left and you can see how easy it is to install and use now i'm going to be using inkscape in this it's completely free so if you're worried about buying some high-end software in order to create these svg files do not worry about that i'm going to open up inkscape now and we'll get started drawing an svg file i remember the first time i ever opened up inkscape and i just went whoa it's a little intimidating there's a whole bunch of menu items along the left-hand side there's a menu along the top there's menu items along the right hand side and then there's this color palette down at the bottom that just goes on forever and ever and ever so it's like where's the instructions on how to use this right so don't worry it's not that difficult especially if we're just going to create simple svg files and that's really what we're doing we're not creating some complicated for our piece of artwork here this is just nice and easy so what we're going to do is start over on the left hand side and any menu item that i hover over a little description box pops up so you can see here over the circle it says create circles ellipses and arcs and as i just go on down i can see there's different items here this one says create spirals there's a pen tool here a pencil tool a calligraphy pen and so on and so on so we're just going to get started really easily i'm just going to click this little circle and it says create circles ellipses and arcs i'm just going to click that now down at the bottom there's your color palette so if i wanted to create a black circle i'll just click the little black which is in the left hand side and then i'll just drag my mouse and that's my circle that i create that's it that's all there is to it now that's my circle that's created i can select it on the top left and i can stretch it if i want i can make it larger or smaller i can do all sorts of weird and wild stuff to it now this is an actual svg file so we've already created one when i click the second little arrow down it says edit paths by node and when i click on that you'll see there's four little paths that come up actually only three that come up and because the circle is so simplistic i can actually edit these paths i can actually go in and i can change how they interact and we're going to get into more into that about moving around these little little nodes because you can edit items by note there's also a calligraphy pen for exam just for example i'm just picking stuff here at random this calligraphy pen you can draw a line and then that also becomes a vector so now i can zoom in i'm just going to hold the control key down and just scroll up with my mouse wheel and i can scroll right in i can actually edit these nodes so i can make them as weird and as wild as i want so it's very easy and intuitive to use inkscape and to create an svg file it's actually pretty easy i can do the same thing here with this one i can select it i can stretch it i can do all sorts of stuff to it so if you want to create a simple svg file it's pretty easy to do so the first example i'm going to cover is how to draw these svgs so i'm just going to delete these two out and now let's draw for example an arrow by the way this page that's set up here in the middle we don't really care about that we're just going to be using whatever white space we've got here so what i'm going to do is actually select my calligraphy pen and i'm just going to draw a line just like that and then i'm going to draw another line like that and another line like that and then i'll just draw an arrow like that now i'm just using my mouse to do it but there you go i drew an arrow now it's not that great mind you but there's a lot of demand on etsy for hand-drawn items so there's really two ways you could do this you could just draw this with a piece of paper and a pencil like in real life forget about the computer or you can draw it in the computer itself if you have a touch screen and a stylus you can actually draw really nice hand drawn images so obviously i'm not doing that great here with the pen but i can use a pencil for example and i could try that again let's say i want to draw a rocket i can draw a rocket design using a pen and now i've got you know i'd have to clean it up but i could basically use the pencil design as well so you could draw like you know circles hearts is a really common one check marks so there's a lot of really really simple things you can do right and the idea here is that your your drawing these things that they don't look computer generated so let's say you wanted to bundle a whole bunch of hearts together so i'm in the little pencil tool and i'm just going to draw a heart just like that and that's going to be my vector now you can see the one side of it is a vector and when i select the other side of it it's also a vector so i could actually move it a tiny bit if i wanted i'm happy with the way that looks and then i can just simply save that now i can just go file save as and i can save it as an svg file so it's very easy to do so i'm just going to call it heart and i'll just call it zero one and then i'll just save it i'll save it in my little digital downloads folder and i'll just save it as that now what that means is that the next time i go in and i open it up if i open up inkscape i go in here and there's a heart file and it actually says in my my computer says html document but it's basically a vector file so i click on it and there it opens up so now you can edit it you can click on the link and you can see there's a couple points inside the vector it's a very simple vector so this would be one that you would want to use if you're say creating 30 hearts and you could create all sorts of different styles of them just using just the pencil you'll see there's a smoothing option when i click on the pencil you'll see there's a there's different things up here at the top there's different styles so i'm just going to change the smoothing up to higher and i'm going to make like a really exaggerated heart here and you could have that as well now if you want to merge this into one svg you just simply hold down the shift key and select both sides of it and then go up to path and then you go to union and that makes the whole thing now one vector file so you can see now there's all the little vector nodes in there and i can scroll in and see how crisp it is it's not getting pixelated at all so it's actually very easy to create simple shapes like hearts circles squares check marks arrows you know all sorts of designs but it's very easy to do so once i've got this done i'm just going to delete this one out so now i'm going to select this and i'm going to go file save as and then this one will be heart02 so now we've created two svg files now if we want to create different types of files because of course we want to bundle them out right we want to create svg then the next one i'm going to create would be a dxf so i just go to file save as and i've got a drop down list of all the different types of files that i can save this as and you'll see one of them is called desktop cutting plotter dxf and i would just hit save and now it will save that file as a cutting file so if you were say a woodworker or a metal worker and you wanted to create a heart burned into wood or burned into metal this is how you would do it you can also save this file as a png and you save it as a png by going over to the right hand side and you'll see there's a little export you'll see there's an arrow coming in and an arrow going out and we want the arrow going out it says export this document or a selection as a png image so i'm going to hit that button and that will give me this export piece and i can export the page which i don't want to do because see how the page sale that my image is bigger than the page i can export the drawing which would be fine or the selection i'm just going to export the selection and then it will give me the width and the height and then i would make that the size that i want to make it so i could make it really large if i wanted really small i can change the dpi settings to 300 that's typical it's pretty high resolution so i could then export that file as my heart and i'm going to click export as and that's going to give me my folder and then i can have i'm going to write heart 0 2 and that's going to save it as a png file so i'll hit save and then export down at the bottom and that's it so now when i go into my folder i'm just going to open up my folder here you'll see that i've got my heart 0 2 is a dxf my heart 0 2 is a png and my heart02 is now an svg file i'm just going to make those bigger i've got my first heart that i would need to do the same thing on but now i've got these three now saved as well so let's make an esp file that's the other type that we'd be doing so i've got it selected here in inkscape i just go to file save as and i would scroll on down and i see encapsulated postscript eps file that's it i just hit save now it saves it as an eps file it's going to ask me for a couple different defaults i just leave all this defaulted it says embed fonts rasterize filter effects hit ok and that's it so now i've got my four set up for my heart number two they're all there you can't see this one just because my computer's acting up here but it's a esp or it's a png file if i double click it it'll actually open up in in paint i could just use that just as an example and we can see here when i open up paint there's my beautiful png file it's pretty high res too right now when i when i really really go in you'll see it's pixelated because that's a png it won't do that if you use an svg file that's the difference when you go really big see how it gets pixelated but most people like a png because they can use it on a t-shirt so i could import this into printful or i could upload it onto redbubble or i could create a design with it and it would be totally fine so a really easy way to pull images and then sell them on etsy is you go to a free website like rawpixel.com up at the top you'll see there's a public domain little filter i'll click that and i'll start to just scroll through and see if there's something that tickles my fancy here so i can see here there's this julie degrad collection and this is a compilation of human portraits sketches and graphic arts from the 19th century so let's see if there's something in here that i would like to use and maybe we can make a vector from it here's one you'll see that there's a little rooster here i'm going to click on that and you'll see how pixelated it is right it's on some graphic paper it's a nice little picture but if i wanted to make it a vector i would need to run this through inkscape so this is a free download it's a public domain image i'm going to click the free download button and it's going to just let me download the rooster easy so now i'm going to get out of raw pixel and i'll open up inkscape so now i'm back in inkscape i'll open up my picture of my little rooster it'll ask me import the dpi from the file image rendering mode smooth which is optimizing the quality i'll click ok all right and i've got my rooster now imported into inkscape now when i scroll in see how pixelated it gets that's not going to be great if i wanted to make a high-end print and i wanted to make it really high resolution so what i'll do is i'll trace over this and it's super easy to do i'll just select the image and then i'll just go up to path and then trace bitmap and when i do that i get a little trace bitmap window that pops up i'm going to click update which gives me a screenshot of what i'm dealing with here and i have a few different options when i trace a bitmap i can do brightness cut off edge detection color auto trace or center line tracing i just use brightness cutoff for these black and white images and if i made it really really heavy then what'll happen is it'll just make the whole image really super dark and if i make the image too light if i were to bring it right down to say you know 12 and update it's going to be a little bit grainy so what you typically will do is just find a happy middle ground i like to go around say 65 click update and there it is you'll see there's a couple dots on his chest here if i make it a bit more i click update those dots are now starting to disappear i'm going to let a couple dots go through because i want to clean them up i'll show you how to do that and now i'm just going to click ok and i'll just do a trace of the image so now that's my original image here with the craft paper i'm going to delete that just by clicking the delete key and now this is my actual vector and when i click on the second arrow down it says edit paths by node you'll see there's all the different vectors that make up the rooster so this would be good now because it has infinite level of resolution now notice inside there's a couple of these little dots it's really easy to clean them up what you do is you go to the second little arrow which says edit paths by node and you'll see that paths are now highlighted you just literally just use your mouse to make a little square i'm just dragging my mouse to make a square i've highlighted those now i'll just click the delete key and they just disappear so now it's cleaned up same thing say here i don't want this let's say i don't want that little one there i'll just click right over it like basically i'm just using my mouse to go over it and i'll click delete that's it how about this one over here get rid of that so you can clean up a really crappy old photograph and you can make it look really nice and new because you're removing all the little dots so it would take some time right you'd have to go around the foot for example but you can get pretty good at it pretty quickly i'll just go through here and just remove these obviously you'd spend some more time on this but you could go through and you could clean them up so it just works like that pretty easy to do and then from there you would then export this file so i can click file save as and now i'll call this one rooster 01 because i might have 30 rooster files for example that's my svg file i'll click save then i can also save it as a dxf file i can also save it as an eps file i can also export it as a png file and then you bundle those together and you can list them on etsy and sell them as a digital download another way that you can gather up images to bundle and sell on etsy is to go to a free website like svgsilh which is the short form for silhouettes and this is a free svg image and icon site all the contents are released under creative commons cc0 which means that their public domain so for example if you really like angel wings i'll just pop that open in a new tab and we can see this angel wings item it says right here public domain and you could download this as is you could get all the angel wings and you could bundle them and you could sell them on etsy now you may be wondering why would somebody pay you four dollars on etsy when they can just come to this website for free and it's a good question and it's actually a question i had when i first started doing this and the answer is one of two things i well three things first they either don't know that these free websites exist and so they're paying you four dollars because they like etsy they trust etsy and they trust you and they say okay i want to buy from you and if there's a problem you can help me deal with it number two they may not have an interest in trying to track down all of these images on a free website because you might gather up 10 from this website and 10 from another to public domain website you might have a bundle of 600 ribbons for example and somebody says look i'm not spending the next three days hunting down 600 ribbons i'll just pay you three dollars and be done with it so you're sort of hunting around the internet and making value for people because you're providing simple svg files the third reason somebody may want to pay you money is you'll notice this is an svg file and it's also a png file there is no eps file and there is no dxf file and there's no jpeg for what it's worth so this is an option if somebody's really searching for a dxf file they might not have the technical expertise to understand how to use inkscape so that's an option so i'm going to download this wing and i'm going to download it as an svg file just going to say do you want to save it i'll say save file as and then it will ask me save it as my digital download so i'm going to put it in here and i'm just going to call it angel wings and that'll be my my scalable vector graphic so i'm going to use this now in inkscape so i'll pop open inkscape and now i'll open up the file that i just grabbed from the free website okay there it is we can see that it's a scalable vector graphic because when i click the second little arrow down on the left hand side i can edit the paths by node so i can hover over and i can see each individual little wing is its own little graphic and i could actually edit those graphics if i wanted to i could actually make it you know i could stretch it out and i could make it different if that's what i wanted to do so you don't have to but if you wanted to it's very easy to do and again it's infinitely crisp there's no pixelation when you zoom in especially extreme zoom in there's there's just no pixelation so that's it so now i've got this image and now i can just save it as a png file or a dxf file i can just go file save as and that gives me my options down here i can save it as an eps file or a dxf file that's my other option or i can also export this as a png file and that's over on the right hand side that little out arrow button and that will now give me the dimensions for me to export this as a png very easy to grab and modify public domain images from the internet so once you've got all of your designs created you're going to want to bundle them together and that's the file you're going to upload onto etsy to sell so let's pretend for example that i really want to sell my heart design here and i'm just going to sell it singularly i don't want to sell it all as a bundle so i'm just going to have my heart dxf file my heart esp file my heart png file and my heart svg file those four i'm just going to list as one listing on etsy so all i'm going to do is create a new folder i'm just right clicking inside of windows explorer i'm going to right click go to new and then i'm going to go folder that's going to create a new folder i'm just going to call it heart so that's where i'm going to put my designs here so heart number two dxf you go in there heart eps you go in there heart png and heart svg so now inside of the heart folder i've got my heart 0 2 design which is this png picture now you're not going to upload all four of these although you could etsy gives you a maximum of five files you can upload so how do you do like 120 files in one listing well the answer is zip files i could have four files in this folder i could have 400 files in this folder and i'll just go back a level i'll right click on this folder and i'll click send to compressed folder so what that means is whatever is inside this folder it will essentially become one file i can upload so i'm going to right click on the folder send to compressed folder this is the file that i upload onto etsy it's one file it just happens to be a zip folder so if you ever need to upload let's say you have a listing of a hundred designs put them all into one two three four or five zip folders and that's what you upload onto etsy for creating the thumbnail you can use any graphics design software you could use i just used photoshop you know to create my thumbs but here you can see there's a wood background this one's got a mock-up this one's got a brick wall design the idea here is you want to specify somewhere the types of files that you're saving so here you can see it's at the bottom of the thumb here you can see it's at the top and you want some sort of consistency and it all comes down to really personal preference like i happen to really like this style where it's just at the top because the little heart will sometimes cover but again it's total personal preference so what i've done here is i've just typed in racing flag svg so if you want to see what thumbnails look like just type in any sort of you know i'll say summer svg you know you just type in a phrase and then whatever svg is and then you'll just see it'll come up with a bunch of you know different designs so to create the thumbnail the very first time one of the things you might find helpful is just i'm in powerpoint right now and i'm just going to use a template i just grabbed the image off of etsy i'm not in any way suggesting that you just rip off the image and you use that as your own but i just picked a thumbnail that i liked and i'm just going to try to recreate it here really quickly in powerpoint so i'm just going to create a bar at the top and then inside the bar i'll type in svg eps three spaces jpeg i'm actually not going to sell a jpeg so i'll do dbxf and then png and then from there i'll just change the font i'll just make it a bit bigger and then i can leave that at the top i'll remove this now because i know what i'm doing here and then i'll just import my image of my heart and so that'll be my heart image that i'll put on here so again i mean this is one design right so you may want to have a mock-up of a it on a t-shirt for example uh you may want to have you know a couple pictures i just like something simple like this and then you could list this for like 99 cents or you could have a whole bundle of hearts in which case if that were the case if you had like say 30 hearts then you make them all you know you you import them all and then you just copy and paste them so then heart number two is sitting here and heart number 12 is sitting over here these would all be different by the way but you would have like all of your hearts listed here and then you could have you know a big number 80 in the middle it's 80 hearts and then somebody goes wow 80 hearts for four dollars that's amazing so it's kind of like the convenience store aspect of it like when you go to the convenience store and you buy a pop or a soda and it's like two dollars and you go man i could go to the supermarket and get it for half that yeah but the 7-eleven's right there and they're convenient it's the same thing with etsy you're going to get a lot of cre-cut people and a lot of crafty people that aren't necessarily computer people so they'd rather just pay you four dollars and have all their problems go away rather than have them take hours and hours trying to recreate all these themselves so that's really the value you can provide if you can make 80 hearts or 100 arrows or 200 racing flags or a bunch of faces silhouettes the the opportunities are endless i would be totally doing you a disservice if i didn't mention about copyrighted and trademarked stuff on etsy you type in princess svg and 25 000 results come up you're gonna see a ton of trademarked and copyrighted items i would strongly recommend that you avoid anything that has trademark or copyright implications so for example something like this birthday princess that's a great looking thumbnail it's a great looking design two different types of fonts very easy a pre-cut machine could cut this out of paper or cloth no problem but i would totally recommend avoiding anything that involves trademarked items you're going to do all this work you're going to be up for years and then all of a sudden your shop is going to get shut down because of trademark infringement you definitely don't want that so if you've never been on etsy before the first thing i would encourage you to do is go in and search for any search term and then svg is the search term so you would type in something like mother's day and then svg and what will happen is you'll see a whole bunch of designs that pop up but you can scroll through and you can find different downloadable files and then you can just basically take a look at something that you like it's maybe this one here mom bundles and then you can see the way it's listed how their tags are at the top what they say here for digital download learn more about this item when i first started i just copied this disclaimer and i just put it into a little word document and then i just you know basically copied stuff that i liked so i would just use that as an example i'm not saying you have to take this one but any of them you would do that now to actually do a listing you'll see over on the right you'll see favorites updates and then here's your shop manager so wherever your shop manager logo icon is you want to click that and then it'll give you an opportunity now to create a listing in etsy so you would just click the add listing button and you can start selling so it's going to ask you to add a photo and that's typically going to be your thumbnail that you would have created either in powerpoint or paint or photoshop or canva you would just create a thumbnail of your item and it would look similar to any one of these so again i don't want to drill down and say it must look exactly like this but i like the wood on the background i like the t-shirt sometimes it's just black or just white that looks cool too as you scroll on down you're going to see an option you'll see your listing details who made it that sort of thing and then this is the piece right here it says type a physical item or a digital item and you want to make sure to select the digital item then you can just do a listing you can put your tags put your price down i like to do stuff that's either like two dollars three dollars four dollars that sort of thing for your quantity it's up to you but i would typically put in like 999 that sort of thing and then when it starts getting down into the 800s and 700s you can just always top it back up that's an option there's really no reason to have like one listed now you will get charged a fee to re-list it each time it you know each time you sell something so you got to keep that in mind but hey you're playing with house money at that point right and then here at the bottom it says digital files they can download these files so this is where you would upload your file so there's my heart compressed folder and now it's uploading it so when somebody pays me the two dollars they'll be able to download that heart file and that heart file will contain the svg the eps the dxf and the png file so that's it so it's very easy to do you can upload more files if you're doing large groups of files let's say i had 40 heart designs i would probably upload five zip files and only one file like one zip folder would contain all the svg files and then the second folder would contain all the dxf files it just makes it more convenient for the client if you're dealing with hundreds of files it's nice to have them somewhat organized that can be really helpful as well so i hope you found that helpful again a very big picture overview here of how to do this i do encourage you to you'll like and follow and subscribe on this channel craftystacks because we're going to be doing some more deep dives about creating digital files specifically on inkscape and i love escape there's so much you can do on it so feel free to subscribe and join the ride as we get more and more into the world of digital files thank you so so much for watching

Channel: Crafty Stax

Views: 9,420

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: etsy, how to sell on etsy, how to sell digital products, how to sell digital products online, how to sell digital products on etsy, how to sell digital downloads on etsy, how to sell svg files, how to sell digital art online, how to list on etsy, etsy tips, etsy tips and tricks, crafty stax, etsy tips for beginners, etsy help, print on demand, passive income, how to set up an etsy shop, how to set up an etsy shop step by step, how to use inkscape, etsy shop, inkscape

Id: LjIDlqWKowY

Length: 40min 5sec (2405 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021