hey what's up guys today we're talking
about selling on etsy with a specific
focus on five common mistakes that etsy
sellers are making and i've actually got
two bonus mistakes because i called my
girlfriend marielle who's an etsy seller
herself and said hey give me some common
mistakes that you think people may run
into when selling on etsy so you
actually get seven mistakes in this
video not only am i gonna highlight them
for you but i'm gonna show you
easy ways to improve on them okay like
i'm not just gonna tell you hey you're
doing this wrong fix it i'm going to say
here is how i would go about improving
those processes now my specific favorite
one of these is number three so make
sure you stay for number three at a
minimum all right let's get started
real quick reminder i put together some
free resources for you all linked in the
description i've got my free weekly
print on demand giveaway i've got my
free eight day print on demand mini
course delivered via email and i've got
a great print on demand facebook
community that i'd love to have you in
so all those are linked in the
description so we are talking about
selling on etsy it is a major e-commerce
marketplace with strong year-over-year
growth with customers and sellers and of
course smart sellers follow the
customers so it makes a lot of sense
now with regards to etsy by the way if
you're not selling on etsy yet i'll put
a link that you can use to open your
shop and you get 40 free listings why
pay for 40 listings when you can get
them for free all you got to do is use
that link so i'll put that in the
description but guys like if you've been
watching my channel lately you know i've
been putting a lot of time and effort
behind the scenes into planning my new
automated etsy shop that i'm splitting
with my girlfriend because i need
somebody to help me with the customer
service when you scale up an etsy shop
and it gets big you do tend to get a lot
of people that reach out etsy customers
are not shy about communicating with the
sellers so that's one thing that you
should definitely plan on when you open
your shop anyways we are focusing on
five mistakes that we all need to avoid
and improve on when selling on etsy
now i'm trying to go through these in
sort of a linear way that makes sense
and i'll kind of talk you through my
logic as we go but listing number or
mistake number one sorry mistake number
one is we need to make sure that we
improve our listing titles now etsy in
their help resources tells us the
significance of our titles they say that
we need to basically include the most
relevant search terms and phrases in our
title and basically front load the title
with the most important keywords that we
would like to rank on
this is true for both etsy search and
google search because don't forget when
we show up in google search results when
they index our product listings
yeah the customer's gonna see like the
beginning of a title i mean we've all
used google before right
the title starts with what our listing
title starts with so if we were to see
this listing in google the first thing
you would see is american mama shirt so
that's like the main phrase they're
trying to rank on and then it says
fourth of july shirt fourth of july
shirts
they spelled it differently by the way
four th and then the next one they said
f-o-u-r-t-h
then they say patriotic red white and
blue t-shirt
america women's graphic tee outfit for
so you see what i'm saying they're
sprinkling in phrases that they think
customers that this is a relevant
product for will search for they're also
assisting
the etsy algorithm in understanding what
this product listing is all about keep
in mind guys like whether it's etsy
amazon ebay redbubble it doesn't matter
where we're uploading to
until we have sales
the algorithm doesn't actually know like
what we've uploaded
you could argue that maybe there's some
like image
a.i like recognition but i don't think
that really any of these are using those
to try to
comprehend what what uh what we're
selling okay like i know ai could
probably figure out this is a t-shirt
that says american mama like it
definitely can but i don't think etsy's
using ai so where do they look well
they're gonna look at our title okay so
this to me is an example and by the way
i don't think it's coincidence i think
this is a pretty well optimized listing
etsy ended up putting this listing right
in front of me when i went to the
homepage after having previously
searched for like july 4th shirts okay
so etsy said based on your previous
searches check these out and of all the
tens of thousands hundreds of thousands
of july 4th shirts on etsy this was one
of the ones that made its way in like
into the etsy hand-picked
algorithmically hand-picked shirts well
let me guess you know not only has it
converted well and it's sold by a shop
with over 50 000 sales but they also
know what they're doing when it comes to
keywords so take a hint utilize the
title put phrases that people are
searching for
that are associated with your listing
assist the algorithm and understanding
that and over time they'll also start to
learn what your listing is about as
customers type things into the search
bar click your listing and purchase it
now i'm also going to show you a tool
that will assist you with your title and
your tags because you may be saying
that's great advice ryan but you said
you're going to help us with solving
these issues well i've actually got a
pretty cool solution for you but we need
to improve both our title
and our tags now
maybe i could have combined this into us
one mistake but the reality is they're
two separate
sections that us sellers need to address
when we're creating a product listing on
etsy
and they're both very similar right look
what are we trying to do with our title
what are we trying to do with our tags
we're trying to help etsy's uh search
algorithm understand what our listing is
before we have sales you know obviously
when it has sales that that definitely
outranks
um the keywords that we've sprinkled
into the listing because sales are like
the ultimate confirmation from the
customer that spent their money to
purchase our product
when it comes to tags though etsy gives
us 13 tags per product listing up to 20
characters okay you can't exceed 20
characters so i know it can be hard to
jam in like long words or
phrases right so that's why i recommend
putting your phrases in the title
okay and i think you have um what is it
like 140 or 160 characters for the title
i don't remember exactly but it's 140 or
160.
uh and then when it comes to your tags
again 20 characters per tag 13 tags
now you can definitely manually like
kind of hand pick your tags that's
something that i did for a couple
thousand listings when i had my very
first etsy print on demand shop now
today i'm kind of leaning more on
automation so i'm gonna show you a
couple different solutions i'm gonna
show you one now and then i'm gonna show
you one after i talk about mistake
number three but i wanted to share
insight factory with you now let me show
you a tool called insight factory that
you can use for free right now to access
their etsy keyword tool that'll give us
access to relevant phrases we can use in
our listings okay across any niche so
i'll put a link to it in the description
so when you open up insight factory go
ahead and click etsy keyword tool
now
it has some default stuff like i had
recently before i fired up this video
searched for um fireworks shirt okay so
what if we just go up here and we type
in like fireworks shirt
and hit search
now you'll notice that right up here at
the top it says fireworks shirts in etsy
united states market
right here we can just click copy
bestsellers uh best selling tags so we
can literally just copy the most
prevalent tags
um generated by insight factory based on
them looking at the top best selling
fireworks shirts on etsy and you can
just copy paste those okay they're
straight from etsy so you already know
that it'll give you 13 tags and it'll be
20 characters and you won't have any
issues with like them not fitting or
anything like that uh you can also maybe
find a similar looking listing here okay
like a lot of these firework shirts are
in the same niche the fireworks director
if i run you run we know that's a
popular shirt every july 4th
you can actually just copy the tags from
the best-selling shirts in one click
right you just click copy tags and then
you've got them on your keyword your
keyboard and you can just paste them
into etsy and move on to the next um
next section and just to show you guys
here these are the tags that it copied
for me when i clicked copy tags on that
bestseller so when it comes to copying
tags we are literally just copying
behind the scenes keywords that are
relevant phrases that we want to rank on
in search terms we're not copying
designs okay we're just copying keywords
okay i think it's okay
mistake number three this is a big big
one as far as
i really think the success or failure of
your entire shop could be dictated by
your thumbnails are your thumbnails good
enough keep in mind that when etsy
customers perform a keyword search
etsy shows them i think last time i
counted it was like 90 products on page
one of search results so let's say that
you are let's say you're running an ad
so if you're running an ad you're still
occupying two spots of 90.
two spots and that's if you're running
an ad if you're not it's one spot of 90
and that's if you're on page one but
let's assume you are okay
you need to convince the customer to
click you instead of all your
competition
on all of page one so your thumbnails
need to be good now you can go ahead and
like manually create thumbnails i've
done videos on this in the past there's
nothing wrong with that i did it for
thousands of listings in my first etsy
shop
whatever you need to do to make sure
your thumbnails are good enough please
make sure you do it like doing custom
thumbnails that really highlight the
design on your product in a way that
somebody at a glance
sees it and knows what it is if it has
text they need to be able to read the
text
and remember customers aren't going to
stop and squint and figure it out right
they're literally gonna keep scrolling
and scroll right past yours if they
don't know what the design says
so make it easy to read etsy has a cool
feature where when you add your um
images to a listing you can click adjust
thumbnail there's a button there
and they can actually like they allow
you to crop your thumbnail so if you
have a really big image but you only
want to zoom in on the the one part of
it you can do that inside of etsy so
make sure you take advantage of these
things and i wanted to show you how you
can use my designs right now for free
because it's still in beta okay i think
they're gonna go live at some point guys
so make sure if you don't have a free
account open a free account i'll put a
link at the top of the description
because you don't want to miss this one
they have a free
mock-up generator built in oh and by the
way it works in bulk okay now i know not
everybody needs automation most people
watching this probably don't need a bulk
solution yet um you will when you're
trying to really scale
but let me just show you really quickly
on my designs how we can create mockups
at scale and then download them and then
all you have to do is upload them to
your etsy listings
all right so i'm assuming you've already
used the link in the description to open
your free my designs account and then
all you need to do is go over to the
listings tab on the menu and upload some
designs okay now i've uploaded six demo
designs that i've actually used in a
previous video of these black cats and
i'm going to show you how we can create
mock-ups with these black cats on them
very quickly okay
all we need to do is number one where we
have this selection uh in the top left
corner i'm going to go ahead and say
select all okay now if you've uploaded
more than 24 listings you actually just
want to hit select current page because
it can only do 24 at a time right now
and then go to more actions
and then click mockups
now what i'm gonna do and you can see it
has some default mockups here like wall
art is the default but you can actually
search so i'm gonna type in shirt okay
so i'm gonna sell some cat shirts why
not uh and then what i'm gonna do is go
ahead and just click one of these um
templates that they've got built out so
i'll click the very first one
and i'm gonna go it says write image to
slot i'm gonna go to mock up one okay so
it's gonna write these to the first slot
and then i'm gonna hit generate preview
now what's cool is you can actually
change the color you can put a color
code right here
and it'll change the color of the shirt
for you but it actually defaults to
white and since i've got black graphics
as you can see behind me here uh i'm
just going to use a white shirt okay so
this is perfect look at that this this
thumbnail is definitely much better than
if you're just using like default
printful mockup or default printify
mockup that have like white backgrounds
that are super simplistic um they don't
look good like definitely just go a
little bit extra put in a little bit of
extra effort
you'll be rewarded for it over time for
instance let's just check out one more
different one okay so i'm going to
switch it to this folded t-shirt preview
all right how about that it also loaded
extremely quickly so i'm going to go
ahead and behind me here if i hide
myself really quickly in the bottom
right corner it says create mockups i'm
going to click create mockups you'll
also see on the right hand side that it
is queued up underneath the active jobs
and just like that all six of them
are uh finished okay so here we go i can
go ahead and click like mock up one and
i can see that it's created these
mock-ups
for all of my products that quickly okay
and then here's the last step guys we
still have all six of them selected uh
but here's the thing if you generate
mockups for let's say a hundred
different designs remember how i said
you can do the mockups 24 at a time well
if you have all 100 mockups created you
can then go to the top left and click
select all and instead of selecting 24
at a time you can select all 100 okay
just so you know then go to more actions
and click download as zip
and then um switch from the primary file
slot go to mockup one thumbnail okay
well i mean mine says thumbnail because
i created a template that where i
labeled it thumbnail but just go to that
mock-up one slot where you had it right
the um those mock-ups that you created
and then click download as zip and check
it out i've got all the mock-ups right
here so i mean these look great and
these would look really great on etsy
and again you can use the adjust
thumbnail button and zoom in and crop it
however you want mistake number four is
you need to incentivize customers to
convert
okay now this can be and this is very
broad but etsy does put a lot of tools
at our disposal that are very easy to
use for instance
you can run a sale okay just go to your
shop manager go to marketing and then go
to sales and literally click the run a
sales button when you run a sale
customers that have like favorited your
products receive an alert hey this
product's on sale also when you are in
search results and when they click your
listing it says on sale you know x
percent off sale ends in and then it has
a timer and the timer only shows up i
believe if your sale is going to end in
like the next 30 hours or less
but there's nothing stopping you from
running a sale every day you can even
use the nsail early button every day and
then just restart the sale okay this
these are things that the top shops do
so it's just a question of like how
serious are you about competing with the
top shop and becoming you know joining
the ranks of a top shop
um there's more you can do but like
that's just a quick easy example
incentivize them to convert instead of
just oh i'm going to favorite or i'm
going to add to cart but i'll come back
later no make them make them check out
right now because a lot of people never
come back
mistake number five brought to you by uh
marielle
respond within 24 hours when you get uh
questions from customers number one i
believe like etsy you know the service
level agreement like the standard
response time is supposed to be about 24
hours i know it is on amazon as well
so for good customer service and to lock
in potential conversions you do want to
be very active when customers reach out
to you etsy will email you but also i do
recommend like
as a best practice in your web browser
just default a tab to etsy so every time
you open your web browser you've got a
tab open to etsy and then when you click
your etsy tab you know they have a
little like notification counter on your
shop manager icon so just pay attention
to that
bonus mistake uh six and seven so
marielle said bonus mistake uh number
six is
don't piss off your customers as she
learned the hard way she was selling an
auntie justin trudeau hat which i mean
honestly i designed i mean i just sent
her the hat because it was selling
really well um anyways it was an
anti-justin trudeau hat by the way we
don't actually care right we sell to the
people who love justin trudeau we sell
to the people who hate justin truba
trudeau we sell to everybody because we
just want to make money okay but the
anti-justin trudeau hat really pissed
off a canadian lady
enough that she reported it to etsy and
then etsy thought the necessary response
was to ban all of marielle's shops which
she had three
one one was print on demand the other
two were like her actual businesses so i
mean it really sucks but um yeah so
anything that's a little too edgy you
may want to
err on the side of caution as we learned
um the hard way she learned it really
wasn't me it was her uh mistake number
seven is understanding your margins and
this is a bonus mistake but this is one
that must be reiterated
make sure you understand how much money
you're making per sale understand that
etsy takes fees every time you make a
sale on their platform they take
a referral fee they take a processing
fee they charge you a 20 renewal fee so
etsy's taking money out okay and then if
you're doing print on demand don't
forget you have to pay your production
partner to actually produce the product
and fulfill the order and ship it so
make sure you've done the math and you
understand your margins and if you're
running ads again you need to factor
those in as well
alright guys that's it for this video
let me know if you enjoyed it if you had
feedback if i missed anything if you
want a request for a future video i'm
thinking about doing a another like
hour-long in-depth etsy print on demand
tutorial for 2022 plus because i got
such a great response in 2020 when i did
the first one that was weird my webcam
shut off in the middle of recording but
hey if there's enough interest in me
doing that video again for 2022 i will
strongly consider it because it does
take quite a long time to record an hour
long video so please let me know also as
i sign off just wanted to remind you i
have a full print on demand course you
can find the link in the description the
etsy modules included but also there's
modules for amazon ebay design niche
research automation uh much much more i
mean honestly it's the best
print-on-demand course out there so
check that out thank you so much guys
for watching please hit the like and
subscribe button if you haven't already
and i will see you tomorrow with a new
video