Two ways to get sales on Etsy

I think I've realized that when you get down to basics, there are only two ways to get sales:

1) You can find people for your products
2) You can make products for your people

In 2011 during my first three months on etsy, I had two sales. Last month I had 100. I think a lot of people focus on item #1: they spend a lot of time trying to get views.... I never really did that. I used social media (twitter, facebook, pinterest) just for fun... never posted my own items there unless I made something that my friends might truly appreciate. I didn't consider my social media followers to be my target audience... I assumed that the people who visit etsy and search around to buy stuff were my target audience.

The only "item 1" thing I did was make sure that if someone did happen to run across my item on a search screen, they'd be tempted to click it... I asked for shop critiques, checked titles, read about SEO, made sure I'd show up in the search. I tried to make my photos look nice in thumbnail, landscape orientation.

Once that was done, I focused on #2: making products people might be interested in. To a point, of course... I wasn't going to make something just because it would sell, I had to be my authentic self and list designs that made me happy. But I made lots of product line my first year. I read everything Etsy published about merchandizing and trends. I joined EtsyTrades.com to see which items in my shop were a bit more "in demand", and paid lots of attention to those "favorite item from the shop above you" type threads that teams sometimes start.

I purposefully avoided any team promotion games that promised me automatic hearts or views. I wanted to look at my shop stats and know what people REALLY liked in my shop, on their own without any requests. In fact now I have way more sales than favorites, because I've never worked for favorites... I worked for sales. I was obsessed with stats, taking an example from Etsy admins here who are always answering our questions about tests with their results of what's going on with the data. I considered every listing to be a new experiment.

I looked up the best selling shops to see what they were selling. Any time I ran across a shop that seemed overwhelmed, whose announcement said "I've got so many orders my Christmas deadline is in August" sort of thing, I made a mental note of what they were selling. I avoided flooded markets.

And in the end, slowly, it paid off! One listing at a time, one sale at a time, I felt out this place and learned what worked... and now that I've got a few thousand sales under my belt I feel really good about my shop and the time I spend every night packing up orders for people all around the world.

I'd like to hear from some other successful shops... how did you change your product line from the time you started? What resources did you use to find out what would sell?

Or maybe someone wants to debate me :) Is there some trick to the "find people" objective that I missed, maybe it really does work, maybe it worked for you?

There's no way that works for everyone, that's why I love hearing from others... what worked for you?

Lots of views, no sales: Why Etsy promotion can hurt you

I know... you work hard on your art. It's nicely photographed. You want to tell someone about it so it's not just sitting out there lonely on the internet. So if you're like a lot of Etsy sellers you first turn to one of these places to quickly & easily broadcast your new listing to the world:

1) Your own social media pages - twitter, pinterest, facebook, your blog
2) An Etsy team with a "post your new item here" thread

But I'm going to recommend that you avoid all that, for a moment, and think about who you're truly reaching out to when you use those methods to "promote" your listings. For example, your own social media pages are probably stocked with your own family and friends, people who've already discovered your shop, and "easy followers"... the ones who followed you only because you followed them. The odds of any of those people logging on to go shopping today is pretty low. Your family is on facebook to see baby pictures. Your former customers appreciate staying connected, but they won't buy things every day. The easy reciprocal followers are too busy selling their own stuff to buy yours.

What's the harm, you say? The problem is that you'll be getting lots of views and favorites from people who are not your potential customers, and in the noise, you'll lose sight of the research opportunity that you get every time you list something. I've written before about how adding a listing is the best thing you can ever do to promote your shop because it increases your odds of being found in Etsy's search, and Etsy searchers should always be your target audience. They're shopping, for something to buy... that's who you want to get to!

So when you post a new listing you have another test case to see what gets the most attention, you can use a new combination of title words, tags, a different photo orientation, maybe even a whole new product. You can compare two different kinds of titles, and see which one gets the most views. UNLESS you're getting views from other Etsy team members. These legions of non-customers will never tell you anything about what works and what doesn't, they're pulled in by you, not comparing your item to a page of competitors. They're not real. They increase the views, and make it harder for you to see how real customers see you, but that's it.

I like etsy teams, they're great places to get valuable feedback or just chill with other artists and make some friends. But I don't like them for promotion, in fact I think they can hurt you. Before you post your item in a team, think about what you're really getting. That increase in mis-targeted views just isn't worth it.

The #1 way to promote your etsy shop

Last week I caused a bit of controvery by shutting down the "promotion" threads in the etsy contest team. You know... the threads with titles like "Show me your flowers!" and "Post new listings here!" and "July items that are BLUE!". It felt to me like we had almost two teams going on within our team, passing unnoticed like ships in the night... we had people who discussed interesting ideas in unique topics and got to know each other, and we had people who ignored all that, came in for five seconds to post their new listings, and then move on to their next team. Hit and run. So I ran a test, not just in our team but in other promotion teams. I found their "post new items" thread and posted a simple question: Who is reading this? And guess what I was answered with? A bunch of posts of people's new listings. Never a reply to the question. Nobody read my post, and nobody was going to see those new items that everyone was blindly and carelessly posting.

Here's what I told my team... when you post in those threads you feel like you're doing something to promote your shop. Hey, it's called a "promotion" thread right? It's promoting! You log ten minutes and think "I did ten minutes of work to help my shop". But the effect is zero, because nobody's paying attention to those threads... like you, everyone is posting and then running off into the next room, it's like a giant echo chamber.

You think you're reaching out and touching your audience? The reality is, you're only touching yourself. We might as well call it etsy-baiting.

So what's the BEST way to promote your items? Ready? Here's the secret...

GET OFF THE INTERNET AND MAKE SOMETHING.

Seriously. Every time you post up another new item in your shop, your shop becomes more legitimate, more active, and you have another thing that some buyer might run across. You want to sell that green zipper pouch? Make a blue one! You'll now have something to grab the attention of someone searching for blue, and they'll see your green pouch when they check out the rest of your shop because they're SO impressed with the blue one they made.

Buyers are constantly searching for random things you might never think of... every color, every theme, every weird little item. The more different things you have up, the more likely they are to run across your shop in their searches. And that is your target audience: people searching etsy for something to buy. Not other shop owners who spam teams. Not people who add you to their circle if you circle them in return. Not the echo chamber.

What are they searching for today? Maybe something purple, maybe something with mermaids, maybe a a necklace with purple flowers, you never know. But they won't buy it from you if they don't see it. And if they do find it from you, they very well might check out the rest of your shop.

I've been blogging for years and I always tell people that the best thing you can do to promote a blog or website is to post often and for a long time. You can read up on search engine strategies until you're blue in the face, but the bottom line is that search engines are looking for content that's just plain good and not trying to fool them. When they crawl a website they're asking two huge questions that can't be easily faked: 1) how much content is on there? 2) how long has it been around? 3) has it been updated recently?

Same story with an etsy shop. How many items do you have, and when was the most recent one posted? If your answers are "a lot of items, and the newest went up today!" then your shop is going to do a million times better than someone who has eight items but spent four hours today etsy-baiting in promotion threads (they might even go blind)!

So people, stop posting in teams, stop annoying me on twitter with your repeatitive boring tweets about the same new item over and over again. Stop blogging, if your heart's not in it. Get back to creating! Make something, post it up, see if it sells... isn't that what got you into etsy in the first place? Quit trying to outsmart the system and just be good, and your shop will do so much better.