How To Make Passive Income On Etsy In 2019
What Is Etsy ?
Etsy is an e-commerce platform that focus on handmade and vintage items as well as unique manufactured items.However,you can sell a lot of things besides handmade and vintage for example beauty products,toys, digital downloads.You can see more details on Etsy seller policy .It’s very similar to Ebay and Amazon.
Now some statistics
Number of member:54 million
Number of active buyer:35.8 Million
Number of active seller:1.9 Million
Percentage of seller that are women:86%
As you can see Etsy is a big platform and it’s not saturated with sellers and I genuinely think if you spend some time researching your niche,no platform is saturated.
Etsy is dominated with women users,so keep that in mind.
The platform is relatively clean and easy to use and you can use Paypal or credit& debit card for payment.It has a build in shipping system that provides shipping label for sellers and you can give feedback to sellers just like amazon and ebay.The Customer support from Etsy it’s fairly decent or at least in my opinion.
Why Sell on Etsy?
I’ll be speaking on selling digital downloads only because selling physical items did not felt as appealing compare to digital to me plus, I never sold physical items on Etsy so it’s not practical for me to touch on it.
Easy entry
Anyone can start selling digital downloads on Etsy within ten minutes.You will need to open a shop,enter your basic info,bank account and your ready to start listing on Etsy.You can sell any kind of designs that you created and trust me you don’t need to be Picasso or a Photoshop god.You can do simple designs like quotes or motivation lines. Check out elasticcolor shop to get some idea.
Use Canva to get start.
Canva is a graphic-design tool website, founded in 2012. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to over a million photographs, graphics, and fonts. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals. The tools can be used for both web and print media design and graphics.
Optional :If you want to step up your game a bit,put your design in a mock up photo.You can download mock up images on Unsplashand use photoshop to insert you design.See the video below on how to Insert your art work in a mock up image by White Hart Design Co.
Drake Juventus Poster. More Life Drake Minimal Poster. Print By JacksPosters
Low Fees
Its $0.20 USD for each item that you list for sale and another 8% of the total sale in addition.Listings expire after four months.If you list multiple quantities of the same item, the initial listing fee will be $0.20, and the listing will be automatically renewed at $0.20 after each of the items sells .See more details on Fee .The 20 cent per listing should be the last thing you worry about because the traffic,google ranking and the automate digital download system Etsy has implement outweigh the fee enormously.
Automation
This is the best part of the whole entire blog post.Once you finish your art work and fill in all the information in the listing,you are done.Let me elaborate,Etsy will take care of the payment and delivering of the download.Once a buyer paid for the item,Etsy will send out an email with a download link of your digital product and it will be available to download on the purchase&review tab as well.Let me make this simple,every time you get a sale there’s nothing you have to do.
Great! but what about customer service?Right,so when you first get started answer all your DM.Find out what are the most Frequent asked questions and what your buyers are having trouble with.For example,they might not be sure how to print your design out or put it on a T shirt.You can answer these FAQs by writing them out in your shop FAQs session this way you can reply to these questions by directing your buyers to your FAQs session.Another Tip is letting your customer know you have a FAQ by stating it on your shop bio and a note when they download the digital file.I rarely have to answer any DMs and if I ever need to I just direct them to my FAQs because it just covers everything.
Optional:You can use Fiverr or Freelancer.com to outsource customer service but look I spend 5 mins on customer service over 200 sales.If a buyer is taking more than 2 mins of my time to reply I simply just issue a full refund.
How To be Successful On Etsy ?
Being consistent
Try to make at least two new design per day or spend at least a hour a day making new designs.Understand that having 25 designs won’t pay the bills.
Tags
You can use up to 13 tags for your listing.Use all of them,it works the same way like Instagram Hashtag.Do trial and error with the tags see and with time and data you can adjust the right tags to use for your listings.
By the way,Etsy have amazing data analysis tools that can track traffic of each listing and other variation factors.
Copyright
You do not want to use a google image that is not label as reuse-able or someone else’s design and upload it as your own listing because it only takes one report from the owner of design for you to have one strike on your account.Most of the time three strike is permanent ban and it’s extreme hard to reopen another shop because they will ban your IP and if any of your information(bank account ,address, name)shows up on their system the bot will pick it up.
Conclusion
I’m going to share the all time best kept secret on how to make a fortune selling digital downloads on Etsy HERE
Aright,now that you have a competitive edge against all the other sellers I want to see you taking action.Put your first listing on Instagram and hashtag #roadtofinancialfreedom or tag me however you want and I’ll be supporting you on this journey.
Here is my results on selling digital downloads on Etsy for one month.
