One year ago I launched my Etsy shop on a whim.

It was the year I launched my first coloring book and saw there was an opportunity to create another source of revenue, one that had the potential to become a passive one. Provided that I get things right.

Soon after that I found out I was pregnant, and I spent the next months growing a bump and focusing on my other businesses, so the Etsy shop was demoted to last priority. In other words, I did basically nothing to get it up and running.

However, with basically zero effort, I still got some sales, which was encouraging. And I have to tell you – waking up to money in the bank without putting in time, that’s a priceless feeling.

Long story short, this first year with Mara has taught me how important my time is and how my ultimate goal in life is – freedom. So I started to look at what I was doing in my business and where my revenue was coming from to evaluate what can be automated, and what areas are worth expanding.

I decided to give Etsy a real try. To take this business idea and commit to working on it every single week for the next year. The goal? To get it to generate a minimum of 250 eur per month after one year, all from printables and other digital downloads.

And in doing so, I thought here’s a great chance for others to learn from my experiments. So if you’re a creative, an artist, looking at Etsy as a potential sales channel, but feeling totally lost… I hear you. I’m a marketer and I still have to learn and research it and play with it to find what works best.

So, here’s this new series is where I share the stuff I learn about selling printables on Etsy, to help you learn as well.

Optimizing Etsy, A Seller’s True Story (Part 1)

Here’s where the shop was before November 23rd, 2020:

• launched in May 2019

• had 19 listings, all printables, all coloring pages

• made 58 eur out of 27 orders a 1.4% conversion rate from about 1,800 visits

• most traffic came from social media and ads

• traffic from Etsy search, marketing and SEO was basically inexistent

• the most expensive item in the shop was a coloring book selling for about 5 eur

• the item with most orders was a coloring page selling for about 1 eur

The way I saw it, if I wanted this shop to start generating passive revenue, I would have to make sure that I am getting traffic from SEO, Etsy search and social media. This basically means organic traffic, that I don’t have to pay for.

So, here’s what I changed in the first week:

• Keywords

  One of the biggest mistakes I made when choosing keywords for my listings was not taking into account that Etsy is a search engine itself. While SEO is similar on all platforms, on Etsy I also had to think about how the competition over there would specifically impact me. Which means that I have to start thinking of SEO from the perspective of ecommerce, and not content marketing.

  So initially I chose the keywords in my listings based on results from tools such as Google Keyword Tool and Ubersuggest.

  In the meantime I signed up for erank and it blew my mind when I discovered how easy (and difficult) it can be to find the right keyword (that has enough search traffic on Google and Etsy, and there’s still room to compete for).

  The tool also showed me what terms people are using to search for, which helped me shift from “growth mindset coloring sheet” to “printable coloring page” as the primary keywords to rank for. More about that in another post.

• Headlines

  So, remember when I said I launched Etsy on a whim? Well, I completely disregarded how important SEO is – and for some reason, for the first time EVER I made my headlines without thinking of how search engines work (yes, Etsy listings are indexed my Google, and the platform itself is a search engine).

  Before this week, my listings started with the name of the affirmation used on the design, obviously not a great idea, hence the low traffic from SEO queries.

  So I reworked my headlines to start with keywords such as “printable coloring page” or “downloadable coloring page” instead or “I am strong printable coloring page”.

• Tags

  I found tags on Etsy very confusing. I did my best to kind of populate that field with what I thought would work. After going through the erank dashboard and listing audits I realized some changes were needed.

  So far I have removed one word tags, and tried to be more descriptive (as much as 20 characters allow) to include what the product is, how it can be used and whom is it for.

• Materials

  What materials are used in a printable? Well, that’s a question I still haven’t found the answer for. However, I cleaned all my listings at this section, because for some reason I had a lot of tags in there that just didn’t make any sense.

• Categories

  So this is the biggest mistake I made. I had all my listings under the wrong category. Took me one year to realize that. I had them all under Digital Prints, when in fact they belong under Coloring Books.

  Categories are really important for SEO and discovery from search. Shoppes use categories to filter searches on Etsy, and Etsy itself uses them to match products with searches.

  The good news is that once you’ve selected a category, Etsy will include all the categories that that specific category is nested within.

  These categories also act as tags, so when you select the right one, these and your tags work together to help you get found.

  Categories have different attributes, which explains why I was struggling with that section of the listing as well. As soon as I selected the Coloring Book category, attributes finally looked “normal”.

• Images

  I know that images are essential in e-commerce. Doh! But what I failed to recognize is how images are “framing” and informing the potential buyer at an unconscious level about what your listing is all about. My listings had very beautiful mockups of the coloring pages used as posters, placed in frames, and seated on a desk or hanged on a wall. Which is good for digital art and wall posters, but not for coloring pages.

  Which means that people shopping for coloring pages would scroll forward and ignore my listings because the images did not tell them these were in fact coloring pages.

  At the same time, people looking for printable wall art were confused about my listings because the images looked like they were advertising that type of product, but the headline and product description were saying something else.

  The first thing I did was to create a new mockup, one that would feature crayons, the coloring design and the words “coloring page”.

• Ads

  I tried ads on Etsy before, but I didn’t see good results. Really, no wonder, when you take into account everything I listed above.

  After I implemented everything mentioned previously, I started ads again, and increased the budget to $5 per day, instead of $1. I have made a commitment to run this experiment for 60 days, in order to collect data.

  The way I see it ads will be able to show me what changes work in terms of headlines and imagery to get people who see the listings to convert. And when I find that something works I put it in the long term strategy.

  Ads offer data and results now, whereas working the SEO angle is a long term strategy, hence the one-year goal mentioned in the beginning of this post.

So here you are, this was my first week of optimizing my Etsy shop. Tune back next week to find out what else I’m testing and how this week’s changes are impacting my shop’s visibility and conversion rate.

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