Selling Printables on Etsy Tutorial

hi I'm Julie Brennan and I'm the co-founder of gold city ventures we launched the Etsy principles course back in the summer and we've been having an absolute blast taking our students through the course I've started selling on Etsy two years ago when I was selling temporary tattoos to bachelorette parties you know those gold foil tattoos that people put on their faces or on their wrists when they go out at night for the parties well I absolutely love selling an Etsy but I hated having to ship the tattoos that's when I heard about printables and I realized I have a perfect packs of income product to sell on Etsy I sell bachelorette scavenger hunts there are printable PDFs that people can buy download to their computers print out at home and take around with them when they're bar-hopping for the scavenger hunt party crawl I started making scavenger hunts for bachelorette parties and these are printable PDFs that I create one time I upload them to Etsy and thousands of customers can download them I think this year I only made one new product and last year I worked on it for just a few weekends and I made almost $6,000 this is the perfect passive income side hustle if you are looking for something with a low time investment and something that will be a quick win also it's kind of fun to make the printables now in the training today I'm going to take you through one how to come up with good ideas for printables - how to create your printables and then three some graphic design tips for those of you like me who are not artistically inclined and probably didn't think you could do this starting out we're gonna take you through some quick tips to make your printables look good now don't be discouraged you can do this even if you're not creative if you don't think that people will buy your stuff you'd be totally surprised and if you can't think of an idea I'm here to give you a whole bunch of ideas today let's go so let me show you my shop really fast this is it the swag elephant I sell bachelorette party games and decor my top sellers are bachelorette scavenger hunts these are scavenger hunts that I made using a free tool canva that I'll show you how to use a little later I made them one time it took you know two hours of work for this one particular and I've sold that one over a couple hundred times and I've made over a thousand dollars on that particular product I also bundle my games into packs I know people really like bundles and the idea of buying more helps so that's been really successful in my shop and then recently I've branched out into invitations and other types of decor related to bachelorette parties I love selling printables because it is an amazing passive income stream for me that requires a very little effort I have a podcast and a blog and I'm a new mom and I have a lot going on and I don't have time to invest in this side hustle so I love how I can put a little bit of work in up front and then just kind of let it ride and watch the sales come in so as of this recording I have over 1,000 sales so far on my Etsy shop and I think I've put one listing up in 2019 so this is something that is truly can be passive income as long as you pick the right product and you get started it on the right foot so in this training today I want to take you guys through a really quick how to get started with printables training it's not going to be everything that we cover in the course obviously but it will be something to get your feet wet and get you started thinking about printables so let's start here first let's think of an idea for you three main tips here 1 brainstorm seasonal trends so when you're thinking about picking a product to sell on Etsy remember that buyers are searching for very particular things in each time of year it's November so buyers are probably thinking about hosting Thanksgiving maybe they're hosting a friend's gaming event maybe they're having their family over maybe there's going to someone else's Thanksgiving party what type of printables would a person that's hosting Thanksgiving need right now I can think of place cards I can think of a menu planner maybe there are these fun kind of conversations sparking games like what do you thankful for what are you grateful for things like that maybe they want to put up some Thanksgiving decor in their house and there's a I'm grateful for my family or some type of wall art that you can create that they would print out and frame in their house there are so many seasonal ideas you can think of and as you go throughout the calendar year try to think about what seasonal products would people be searching on Etsy for at that so let's say it was January in January people are thinking I want to get in shape I want to save more money maybe I want to lose weight maybe I want to set certain financial goals you can think of printables that can help people achieve those goals in that year so I'm thinking budgeting spreadsheets I'm thinking debt payoff trackers maybe a weight loss tracker maybe a calendar a 20/20 calendar maybe some type of organizational binder to help them start the year on the right foot the reason that you want to find a seasonal idea is that you want to take advantage of when the masses are searching on certain keywords on Etsy you can pick something that you can sell year-round that's totally fine but if you want to make some quick sales finding a seasonal product will probably be your best bet so second thing you should search Pinterest for ideas Pinterest and Etsy go together like peanut butter and jelly people are always searching for printables on print wrists and also on Etsy now you may think there are so many free printables on Pinterest why would someone go to Etsy it's because it's hard to dig through Pinterest to find printables but when you're trying to think of what type of ideas that may be working on Etsy find ones that are working on Pinterest so let me give you an idea here so if you look on Pinterest I typed in Thanksgiving printables and what autocompletes will help you so kids printables seem pretty popular quotes preschool giving thanks if it autocompletes here that probably means that people are typing it into Pinterest it's an indication that that's maybe a popular printable to pick now I searched Thanksgiving printables here's what came up there's free coloring pages I spy games these look like little cards you can include in food if you're gifting them to friends thanksgiving jokes to start conversation around the dinner table i see thanksgiving planners i see pictures about stuffing and some grateful signs there's so much that you can find on pinterest that can sparks ideas for you to sell on Etsy now sometimes bloggers will give away printables to their audience if someone is interested in giving this away it kind of is a good indicator that there's a demand for this and maybe you can sell that on Etsy now you never want to copy anyone else but perhaps you can draw inspiration from a bunch of different bloggers or resources to create something really unique and you that you can create and upload to Etsy now next you can use Google Trends to find trending topics to sell on Etsy so I'll quickly take you to Google Trends now Google Trends will tell you year-over-year how much something is more popular essentially in the current year so I searched printables and this is showing interest over time in terms of search volume and specifically what what states but as you've seen related queries baby shark printables are up 600 percent year-over-year now having a child who may be crying in the background right now good luck to my husband if it's up 600 percent year-over-year that's a good sign that hey this is a trending topic maybe I should create some type of baby shark printable if you are using pop-culture or some type of thing that is happening in the news or maybe it's sometimes the thing that's happening in the niche or demographic that you're in that's a great printable to create and I'll help you stand out because maybe everyone is creating Christmas planners but maybe you know that Elf on the Shelf is trending and you could do some type of Elf on the Shelf planning kit for parents or something like that and you are your printable will distinguish itself among everyone else and it's a really cool idea next you want to make the product so making the product may seem kind of intimidating but you do not have to be a graphic designer to make your products I promise you my products are not fancy I try my best but they're not the most beautiful things ever but they do sell and you don't need to intimidate yourself you'll get better every single printable the first thing you do need to do is find fonts and graphics that are okay for commercial use so what that means if you are using a font for personal use let's say that your kid is having a birthday party and you're making invitations and you're just gonna give them out to the ten families that are attending the party you can use whatever font you want pretty much and it's okay but if you are using the font in a printable and you're going to upload to ed C and sell it you have to make sure that the font is okay for commercial use all fonts usually come with some sort of instructions or licensing that tell you how you can use the font google fonts is always free you can use goto fonts like google comm and that will give you a whole list of fonts that you can download to your computer and upload them in our course we explain to you exactly how to do this but you will find some great tutorials online if you need help installing a font on your computer one tip that I use is I actually buy my fonts so let me show you where I buy them I go on creative market and this is one of my favorite places to shop as an Etsy seller everything is very inexpensive here but you can buy digital files that you can use in printables so here's a handwritten font collection where you can get it looks like over you know 50 different types of fonts this is a really good place to find scripted fonts it's important in the Bachelorette space for me to have really cutesy fonts that's what the buyers expect so I often have to buy the font to get it but you can find a free font that's okay for commercial use websites such as font squirrel or duh font our places that we will get fonts that we can use that are okay also on creative market and other sites you can find different types of art like PNG s that are okay for commercial use so let's say that you did want to make a Thanksgiving printable you can go and search for pumpkin watercolor like I did and you can download one of these graphic packs that will give you different pictures that you can put in your printable now you can also find some free ones like websites pixabay pixels they have free stock photos they may have free illustrations you need to check to make sure that you can you the graphics again in an end product for resale and that's why here if you click on one of the products they will have different types of licensing options and for this commercial use is okay extended commercial is if you are selling over like a certain amount of copies typically the extended commercial is not something you have to worry about upfront it would be fantastic if you sold over the threshold that they require for extended commercial license but you can always upgrade that later it's kind of rare for you to sell a couple thousand of the same design so I wouldn't worry about that and then personal obviously is not that doesn't apply to you now in terms of font other fonts places I use the free design tool canva and they do have fonts and graphics within Kamath at you can use if it is a free graphic or fawned it's okay to include that in your printable from canva if it is something that you have to pay for in canva like let's say you're paying a dollar for a watercolor pumpkin picture you can't use that in your printable only the free ones for canvas so just a heads up if you decide to use this design tool as so many of us are using it just because it is free that you should only use the free icons within the tool in your printable now that piece of information may seem overwhelming we do cover it in more detail in the course it's something that will become second nature to you as you start becoming familiar with Etsy and you get your shop listed at the beginning it's kind of a learning curve but I promise you you'll get over it you'll understand it and you don't have to be scared about messing up it's okay okay so in terms of making the product so I just showed you canva and I'll quickly take you through how to create a printable in canva in a second but you don't have to get fancy with this if you have any of the Adobe products on your computer that's fantastic like Adobe Photoshop or illustrator or InDesign but if you don't have those don't even worry about it a free tool is totally fine I know people who are crushing it making printables with PowerPoint Microsoft PowerPoint you can make it with Google Docs if you have a Mac you can make it with Apple pages it doesn't have to be fancy learn to use the tool that you have available to you I picky is another great free one that you can use online learn to use these tools that are available to you and you will crush it now over time as your budget grows you may want to upgrade to Adobe but you don't actually have to the printable that I showed you the scavenger hunt that has made me over a thousand dollars I made that in canva that's it was free it wasn't something that I made on a fancy site okay so three graphic design tips really fast before I show you how to make a printable in canva the first one use lots and lots of white space some people like to crowd their printables with a whole bunch of different stuff and it just doesn't look good the less is more approach is something that you should use second use two fonts or less you may get carried away and we all do with a bunch of cool fonts but if you have three different fonts on one page it's going to look a little distracting three limit color in the background so have you ever printed out a piece of paper with a lot of color and then you picked it up and it was soggy and wet and just kind of gross that is not something that you want in a printable that a customer's going to print at home if you think the customer will print it at home make sure that you limit the color in the background what white background will look better probably be very minimal about the color now if they will print it out and a professional print shop it's okay to use color because it's going to be printed typically on maybe cardstock or thicker paper but something that a customer will print at home if even if the baby blue background that you have looks beautiful on your computer screen when they print it out on their home printer it's just not gonna look good I'll quickly show you some examples in my own shop of where I probably should have used a little more white space so even my bestseller here my bachelorette scavenger hunt I honestly would have shrunk in that and done a little bit more white border around the edges another thing too is that things can get cut off so for example my sign here I guess it's supposed to be sort of like a mug shot for bachelorette parties when someone prints this out on a home piece of paper it actually has like a little white line on the end of it and it doesn't look that great so I probably shouldn't have done gold right to the edge now I'm getting better as I go along but this is something that I've learned over time some graphic design hacks that will just make my stuff look just a little bit better and as I mentioned before it's all a learning process so obviously I put stuff up that didn't use the best graphic design and I still got sales on it and I'm just learning as I go so don't be intimidated you don't have to be a graphic designer or have everything figured out right away it's really just about getting started and every week just push the ball forward just a little bit more and soon soon you'll have this profitable Etsy passive income stream coming in that's pretty amazing okay so let's go back to making the product I want to show you guys how I use canva really fast to make printables so I'm going to canva.com I click create a design and click custom dimensions I'm going to go to inches I'll do letter size eight-and-a-half by 11 but you can enter in anything that you want so canva has an artboard and you go to text and you can add your own headings now canva does have templates of printables you can't use one of their templates and edit it and sell it on Etsy it's against their rules you have to make your own you can use one of theirs for inspiration but don't edit theirs and sell theirs as tempting as it is so you change the font you change the font size and the color up the top here so I'm just going to make a quick example here to show you how easy it is to use canva so let's say that you want to change the color I click the a here and I can change it to any color I have some colors saved in my brand kit but if you want to find a color you just click the plus and you do it here now see these numbers this is a hex code you can find hex codes on Google if you just google like purple hex code or gold hex code to find one that you like canva also has a color palette generator where you can upload any picture and it will give you the hex code for that picture what's really cool about using that tool in canva and google it to find it is that you can get a picture on Pinterest usually weddings and like nurseries and rooms are very well coordinated when it comes to colors find a picture of a bunch of colors that you like upload that to the canva color palette generator and it will spit out a bunch of colors for you write down those hex codes or save it and like if you have a Mac you can save it in a shared note or something like that and then you can enter it here and you can find the hex code that matches so I just I knew that white was this but you know whatever you enter in it will find that color for you okay so I'll just go back and do this now if you go under elements there are all these free elements that I mentioned that are okay to use in printables so here's some type of like cool design here you can search I'm gonna search for a box but you can search for anything now I mention here that you can't use these in templates the ones that are paid do not use those you can't use them but anything that's free you can use don't put too many doodads on you printables though I don't think it actually looks good I think keeping it minimal looks better so I showed you the search piece but let's scroll down I want to show you shapes so if you ever want to make some square boxes and by the way you Center in canva by dragging you can see here it shows me what's the center line I'm gonna make some boxes here just make two columns and then I'm control-c control-v in here copy pasting just to get this okay and I'm clicking here and I want to make this white alright so that's a quick way you can make boxes I could obviously make the lines a little bit thinner if I wanted and again control V control V up here I'll show you what these mean so there's the duplicate button so I didn't have to do the control paste if I didn't want to there's positioning or I can move something forward or back so this is I've selected the gray box if I do forward it now comes on top of the white box position I can send it backward again I can do alignments here I can do opacity so let's say that I think that gray is just like too in-your-face I could drag it down to maybe 40% translucent and I think maybe that looks better given the advice I gave you to not use crazy color and your printable especially if it's something that'll be printed at home it might be good to bring down the opacity and just make everything just a little bit lighter okay so there are some shapes here quickly going through so we talked about using elements they have like little icons and things that you can use they have lines if I wanted to add a cool line here if I thought that looked good I could go through and I could make a whole bunch of a whole bunch of sub boxes in here if I wanted to there's so much that you can do in canva now when you're done making your design you click this little arrow here and you download it you now depending on what you wanted to make like let's say that you're making clipart or something you could click transparent background that's only available to people that pay for cama Pro I have upgraded my canva account because I like using canvas so much it's fairly inexpensive but you don't need to do this starting out for most people though if you're making like a printable one pager that's going to be printed let on a letter then you can just do PDF print quality and download the PDF and upload at Etsy now if you are doing something else like maybe you're doing invitations that people will print at Walmart or something like that you can download as a PNG or a jpg typically PNG s are better quality than jpg and PDF print is a better quality than PDF standard the reason that I did PDF print is that I want to print at the highest quality because when the person prints it out at the home I wanted to look as close as it can to the digital image and not be fuzzy and not look like really pixelated or something like that so you want to definitely download the highest quality possible-- and then all you do is you download this to your computer and you upload it to Etsy now it's as simple as that now I say it's simple but there's obviously a lot that goes into it because you need to pick the right product you need to once you have the product you need to upload it to your Etsy shop open your Etsy shop and then you need to use keywords and a whole bunch of things to make sure that your printable is seen and purchased by customers so I am an expert at Etsy search engine optimization or SEO it ensures that when someone from my particular shop when someone types in bachelorette party games into Etsy do my listings appear in the search results you definitely want your listings to appear in the search results that's how it gets found so you have to know how to tag things certain ways how to put your printables in the right categories and also market in places like Pinterest and other places so that leads me to the last step is letting you know about my course so my friend Cody and I have created a course through our business gold City ventures and we're opening the course on Thursday and it'll be available through Sunday along with the course we have a Facebook group that is my favorite part of this course it's only available to members and you get it free for the first 30 days as you're going through the course which are videos and text lessons join the group and we have assignments that you actually do within the Facebook group we have Cody and I in there to answer any questions you have if you get stuck on lesson 2 just write on the Facebook wall hey I'm stuck this is what I'm doing and we'll come and we'll answer for you we have two other Facebook Etsy experts that are in the Facebook group that are there to answer your questions too we have Jenny who's a Pinterest marketing expert and Kevin who actually was one of my se students last year who has since made over $10,000 kevin is crushing it on Etsy and he'll be in there along with Jenny to answer any question you have we also have graphic design and user experience office hours twice per month so mid month at the end of the month we have special threads with Nicole and Jamie who are our UX and graphic design experts and you can put your listings in the comments of that thread a thread is a Facebook group comment and they will go through and they'll give you feedback if you wish this is totally optional but it's really fun and then once a week on Wednesdays Cody and I will go live where we also will answer your questions or we'll just give away prizes and we always give away prizes that are related to your Etsy shop so sometimes we do gift cards to creative market sometimes we'll give away an 100 page Pinterest ebook or we'll give away a canva online course we give away a lot of courses so it's super fun and it's always fun to win but it's we have a good time every week going live with everyone in the course so moral of the story is that we're here to help you in this course and we want you to succeed we have had some students who have had some crazy success in this course Jennifer for example she had I think she's over 150 sales so far on her Etsy shop which is in the wedding invitation space we have another Jennifer actually who joined the course a few weeks ago and she made a hundred dollars in her first three weeks she sells Halloween bingo games and Thanksgiving games so she's crushing it with the printable holiday game thing but we have people in all different niches who are doing really well so we would love to have you join us we have a great time with this course we have a lot of fun and I know that I've found se to be a creative and fun passive income stream I'm almost at over $6,000 so far with very minimal work with this side hustle I absolutely love it and I can't wait to meet you all our course is available for sale just this week through Sunday go to Gold city ventures calm we would absolutely love to have you in the course

Channel: Gold City Ventures

Views: 42,497

Keywords: Etsy, Etsy Printables, selling on etsy, selling printables, how to sell on etsy, how to create printables

Id: 7Rvl4h1ZHu8

Length: 26min 54sec (1614 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019