Build a Successful Digital Product Shop on Etsy

1. Introduction: Etsy is a great way to start tapping into the digital product business. There's a lot of opportunity here for creatives and designers to make products that people actually want and need. Making a passive income silent for themselves. So what makes NC so good for this type of product? Well, the answer is organic traffic. There are millions of people searching on NC every single day for digital products. They have a pretty solid keyword algorithm. And that means that if you label your products correctly, there's a good chance they're going to be put in front of people who actually are looking to buy that sort of item. And getting that kind of traffic is the first step to getting a sale. My name is Rebecca. I operate three different FC digital products stores selling wall art, Canva templates and particular software tools in this course are going to go over all the lessons and strategies that I have learned in running a successful digital product store on Etsy. And the content of this course is based on my book, the digital product success plan. So if you prefer a visual format, then this is the lesson for you rather than reading the book. Our first lessons are going to look at the types of products you can create. We're going to start making some prototypes to get you thinking about what it is you actually want to sell after we get some products that you're now we're going to talk about keywords and the different kinds of tools you can use to do your keyword research for Etsy. Next, we will build up your product-based with all the items you need to open your store. Setup the store with lots of technical information on how you should set up your listings. And then we're going to talk about some marketing strategies both within Etsy and Ed side of it. Along with the assignment for this course down below, you're going to find a PDF that includes some ideas for Nietzsche's and products that you might want to try if you're having a hard time figuring out where to get started. So if that sounds good to you, then let's get started the first lesson and learn a little bit more of a digital products on Etsy. 2. Assess Your Skills & Build Samples: Hey there, welcome to Lesson 1 of this course about building your Etsy digital products store. So selling digital products makes for a very interesting game. And there are some significant pros to running this kind of business and also some noteworthy cons. So let's talk about those first. On the upside, these products are enjoyable to make if you're interested in design and creative problem-solving, digital products don't take up physical space, of course. So you don't have to ship anything out and you can resell a single design multiple times. So therefore, the product margins, profit margins are extremely high. As a result, most digital products come with a no returns policy. So you're rarely dealing with customer service issues unless there's something wrong with the product which is helpful to know so you can solve it. So if the customers don't inhabit the same issue, you can adapt your products for other purposes. You can bundle them, you can give them away for promotions, link and share them anywhere and update and adjust them easily in the future. So pretty great. That is a lot to celebrate for sure, but the downsides are important to know too. The main one I've highlighted here, digital products are easier to rip off and physical products, for the most part, this is just an accepted reality of doing the business online. It's not something that you're going to necessarily worry about or that you will necessarily happen. It's just a possibility. But before you worry about any of those sorts of things, the first order of business is to figure out what kind of digital product you're going to create and sell. So take stock of what you're bringing to the party ahead of time. Do you have any design experience, art or illustration talent or competence with a particular software. This could include anything in the Adobe suite, but also Canva or even the Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint sweet. Think broadly about what sorts of types of software or apps that you regularly use that can import files or templates. For example, there are millions of people who use cricket or cricket and not sure the right way to say it, or similar cutting tools. There is a large industry designing SVG files that work for these tools. And these can appeal to everyone from mom's making funny slogan t-shirts for the families to small businesses wanting to use commercially licensed graphics to sports teams who want merged. There's tons of people who are using those types of files. On the other hand, maybe you are a wiz and designing spreadsheets or have created systems over the years that were really well for you, Maybe for budgeting, you can sell Excel or Numbers or Google sheets, templates for many things such as business management, bookkeeping, budgeting, or basically anything you can work on a spreadsheet. If you love working with Microsoft Word, you can create templates there to resume templates are a very popular option. It can be kind of tricky to design well at Microsoft where in my opinion, I'm actually a designer. I have no idea how to make a Word doc look good. The point is that a digital product is not always a printable PDF. That's kind of little people think of first something you just put print off a piece of wall artists can you upload to social media? You can find tools or programs that you already like an RD use and find a way to share your skills profitably. Many platforms even encourage it like Canada, for example, a very popular platform for building templates. They have some tips on their website for selling templates for the platform. So just make sure to check if there are any restrictions or requirements if you are building an asset for a particular tool. For example, if you're going to sell templates on hand, but you need to have a Pro membership to access the template creation feature. So just something to know. Beyond platform specific products, there are a lot of general digital product types that you can create. So I'm just going to show two sides with big lists of some examples. You'll also find a PDF attached to this course that is full of Nietzsche's and ideas for more products that are a bit more specific. What niche down? So here's a non-exhaustive list to get you thinking we could talk about e-books and how-to guides, website templates, social media templates, slideshow, e-book or lead magnet templates, resume or cover letters. Online courses, workbooks, worksheets, planners, meal plans, fitness plans, organizational plans, anything that you can get like a program you can build, you can sell those messy illustrations and graphics, stock photography and thoughts, things that designers can use. You could also do mock-ups and design assets like brushes for Procreate or Photoshop, patterns or craft instructions, just PDFs like that, but covers branding guides or style guides, logo kids can do a business in a box which is kind of a whole design package for businesses ready to brand for somebody. That would be a onetime purchase. If you're something like that, that would be a higher ticket item. You can also do wall art or posters, classroom decor stuff for teachers like activities, little workbooks and guides, worksheets for children. And then any kind of paper goods or planner. So that could be invitations, note cards, lists, forms, anything like that. Then you can print for physical paper goods. So my adviser, picking your first niche, you can always start a second store leader, by the way, as he doesn't have restrictions on the number of stores you use. So you can just start with one nation if you want to change it later, that's fine. I would recommend that you choose something that you've actually used or can use in your own life. It should be something that you find easy and enjoyable maybe to make. And the reason I recommend this is because depending on the nature of the product, you might want to record a tutorial showing your customer how to use it. So you wanna make sure that it's something that you know how to use. When you finally stumble across the product concept that fits with your goals, abilities, and interests, then the next step is to come up with style related inspiration. However, if you saw on the hunt for the right product looking at so at these next inspirational resources might help point you in the right direction. So we'll move on to the next lesson and talk about inspiration. 3. Finding Inspiration: In this lesson, we're going to be talking about where to find inspiration for your digital products and your store concept. When you're trying to find inspiration for a digital product, the first place that you might want to look is at the other products that people are selling. However, I would suggest there's also a lot to learn from looking at current trends in design and seeing all sorts of styles and colors people like at the moment. This can help guide your design work and make to make sure that your products are visually interesting and desirable. Browse through fc by all means I think that's a really good thing to do. This one is a little bit obvious, but since the platform you're trying to sell on Etsy, it's a good idea to know what the general market is doing there. Start by browsing to see what other sellers are in your potential niche and what they're doing. Who is successful and who isn't. Sometimes Etsy sellers leave, they're sold listings available, which is a really great way to find out what selling. So that maybe Insight tool to access the sold listings from a computer. I don't think you can look at them from the phone app, but you can go on to the computer. You can scroll down on a store's front and on the left-hand side in the left column at the bottom, you'll see this graphic here. And it'll say number of sales. And if the his left this feature enabled, it will be underlined like in this picture and you can click on it to see what has sold in their shop. Some people turn it off just for the sake of deterrence competitors, but lucky believe it on. Then you can see what has sold recently and the history of the shop and see if there is a clear superstar product is making up most of their sales. I would say that for most digital products stores, there are a couple of products that do all the heavy lifting. It is great to find some SET role models in your niche. Just make sure that you are still figuring out your style and your take on the product. There's nothing worse than realizing that someone has copied your good keywords or mock-ups or design choices. So still want to be original, but you can get inspiration for people who are succeeding already. We as designers and artists or creators, whenever tunnel you like to put on yourself, we can only work with the same trends and popular styles and create something unique to us and create something with our personal style. It just takes a little bit of grit and a little bit of creativity. So places that you can start to look for inspiration. There are plenty of big design portfolio aggregator sites or social sharing sites for designers and artists are posting their content. So a couple of these showcase galleries are like that. Behance, Dribbble, and Adobe portfolio. Browsing through those things can give you examples of groundbreaking design or kind of what's coming up in terms of design trends in a variety of fields. When you are browsing, considering things like, what sorts of colors am I seeing? What sorts of design trends are being repeated? Are the designs that catch my eye very modern with what, what does this tell you? Like? Retro floral, minimalist, vibrant, beautifully, all these different aesthetics that you might see in design. One of my favorite places to get inspiration is unsurprisingly Pinterest. Everybody on ESI seems to love Pinterest and for good reason, I would highly recommend using the secret board function in Pinterest as you search for items that inspire you, as this will keep your inspiration organized, but also not clutter up your public boards, which should focus on your niche and the products that you offer an SE, things about people who are selling. If you've got a broad idea of what CAN digital product you want to make. Also consider what kind of spaces the person who had purchased that item hangs out in online. So for example, let's take nursery art as our example and I'll show you a little bit more in a second. The kind of person who had by principal wall art for a baby nursery is probably a pregnant person or a new parent decorating a nursery. So where do those people spend their time online? In this case, you could go to Explore mom blogs or new parent Instagram accounts. You could search Pinterest for things like baby's room essentials or nursery decor and see what some of those trending styles are. So I looked up a nursery room decor on Pinterest and this is just what it showed me. If you just kinda scan over these pictures very quickly, we can see a couple of broad design style showing up. So we have a lot of pastels, we have lot of cute animals. There's sort of a minimalist, maybe a woodland theme showing up in a lot of these, we see some greenery. There are warm neutral colors. So pastels as well as neutrals, moons, rainbows, stars, leaves, botanical stuff. Those are all kind of on trend. And you have these would make a great theme for a launch collection of a principal nursery artwork shop. Luckily, most of these styles are actually very simple to create. There's a lot of whitespace, line art, minimalist watercolors, the sort of things. And that means that they typically won't take a long time to design. Of course this will design the depend on your skills and your vision. It's, this is going to be very personal, whether that's easy for you to create or not. But this is just an example of how you can search for a context such as nursery room decor, honest social sharing sites like Pinterest, and extract trending themes from the search results. And you can replicate that for pretty much any niche. Another helpful resource to seek out is a trend guide. So plenty of websites at C included, put out regular trend guys to show their users what sorts of things they perceiving popular. Of course, these sites that sell products specifically want their creators to know what is trending so that they can make more of it. Customer buy it. They say popular, it's in everybody's interest. So this is just a list of a few of the different trend guys that I like to browse for inspiration. So we have the Fc seller handbook. When you go into there on Etsy, you wanted to go to the section called marketplace insights in articles. I also like looking at Pinterest predicts. And the red bubble are as blood red bubbles or print on demand site. A great blog was awesome inspiration. Societies six is another print on demand site with a design blog, Envato design blog as well. And then to trend focus sites that are not specifically about design but have lot of good stuff. But I like our trend book and Trend Hunter. Again, you want to browse through and seek style or designs, but for the type of product you might want to make and take notes, jot down some ideas, and don't be restricted by stereotypes in your specific niche. A good mix of predictable and reliable designs with some more trends. That new stuff can work really well. Even if the type of product you want to design doesn't have main decorative elements. Maybe like a resonator, something. Consider the color choices, the color of the year from Etsy pan tone, and even colors prevalent in high fashion runway shows can be good indicators of what product consumers are going to be seeing in larger retail stores over the upcoming year. So they go to your shop and see those styles and designs mirror therapy and they're going to have a favorable impression of you in terms of being cutting edge and more on trend. 4. Making & Testing Prototypes: Once you have your product tight in mind and a few stylistic ideas, it is time to get started making a prototype. The reason that I recommend you create a couple of prototypes before diving into making your inventory of your Etsy store. Unless you are making something you've done a million times before, of course, in which case, he had to skim through this lesson, is that you want to make sure that you can actually make this product and that you enjoy making it to the best digital product is always going to be one that you can create well, with only a little bit of effort. You may decide that in theory you love running a store, making minimalist principle wall art, which is very popular niche by the way. It looks easy enough, right? That's a niche. That's a lot of abstract blobs and shapes, neutral colors, lines and dots, things like that. However, once you try to make some genuinely makes them not copying other people, but create your own unique artwork. Maybe you'll realize you don't even like abstract art that much. So it's hard to figure out if what you're drawing is actually aesthetically pleasing or just a doodle, if you're not passionate about it. This can be a good indicator that this particular style isn't the right choice for you. But a different style of printable art might be great. It's not always about big pivots. Sometimes it's just a small minor adjustment to get you on the right track. If you are designing a product that works with a specific platform or app, take the time to think about how your customer will use it. When they received the file, what happens next after they make the purchase? Well, they automatically know what to do or what's instructions be helpful. As I mentioned before, instructions can include a video walkthrough or just simple written directions. You can always include a README file in with deliverables for the product that includes some notes on best use, what license they get or whatever else is relevant. I always include a README text file, just basic text file with my digital template products that require a bit of an explanation. And this is as simple as writing out a short note that you can repurpose for each of the products with the wording slightly changed. So let's take a look at an example of what that could be for the Read Me file. This is roughly what one of mine looks like. So the text says, hello, thank you for purchasing the item. I hope it helps you achieve whatever goal they are trying to achieve. You will find the following files in the zip folder you just downloaded from Etsy. And then I list the items to make sure that they know what tip with a lot in order to use whatever this is, this template or whatever. Here is some information, how do you get started? And then I provide a URL to a YouTube tutorial or just some text instructions, something like that. Then I'm always so the customer, if you have any questions, please contact me through Etsy because they can use NC conversations. And then if they liked the product and find it helpful, consider leaving a review. It makes a big difference to my small business. This is part of reminding them that you are human and you are a small business owner. That's important. We'll talk more about that later when we're setting up the shop and just wrap it up, Have a great day your name then your shop, and then just link back in case they want to go visit it. So that's the basics of a Read Me file. I usually stick with a text file. It just a basic one for this information as it's really small and it leaves a lot of room and a zip folder for your project files. However, if you want, you can also design a fancy branded PDF with the same information. You can also include links in there. I've done one of my shops has affiliate links in there for the tool that they need to use to get the type of cheese, the template. So there's lots of possibilities as to what you include in here. You can also include coupons, links to other things. Stuff that's within. Testing out your prototype as if you are a customer, is the best way to locate any bugs ahead of time. The last thing that you want is there to be a hurdle in using your file that you didn't notice and for people to leave you negative reviews. I also recommend doing this prototype tests so that you don't accidently include bug in all of your listings. For example, if you're creating a principal with a very light off-white background and the most generic printers will be able to replicate that precise color. It's important to know that your onscreen version and the design when printed, we'll look a little bit different. Or if the file requires some specific settings to make it look right or work with certain software. You want to be aware of this so that you can include it in the instructions your customer. And a small note if you're creating anything with original art or illustrations, consider putting a signature on the file. If you're licensing it for commercial use, you want to sell a graphic that someone else can put on something that they're selling, then maybe you don't want to do this. But if you're just saying artwork for them to print, enjoy it, you might want to put either your real name on it, like an artist's signature or a digital signature or a graphic or something in the corner. That way it becomes just slightly harder to resell your art in some unscrupulous person happened to get the file somehow. But it also becomes easier for a happy customer to trace the art back to you if they want to purchase something else. So there's two sides to every coin as to why you want to do these things is not always about theft prevention, some habits about returning customers. A lot of digital art print sellers on Etsy, I've researched this are not putting recognizable marks on their principal art, which I think it's a missed opportunity. Then another option would be to create a blend more like a very simple variation of your store logo to put on the bottom corner or somewhere discrete on the print. Wouldn't distract from the beauty of the artwork. I think there's, there's some clever ways to go about this. 5. Licenses & Copyright: So there are plenty of pros and cons to selling a digital product, as we discussed earlier, on the positive side, there are more obvious things that you can create a product once and sell it a thousand times. You don't agree about shipping. Typically don't get as me returns. And you can quickly change the product and innovative as market demands of a new trend or something you want to include. Your digital products can also become assets used in many ways for those giveaways and bundles and freebies. There are some copyright issues that you need to be aware of. Digital products frequently used graphic assets or other digital files to create something new. Your product might need to use some stock photography or artwork. And if you're not an illustrator or an artist or photographer yourself, then you need to acquire these assets from somebody else. It's extremely important that you make sure that you have the right licenses and permissions to use the assets that you find. One option to do this are free stock images because there are no fees attached with using these photos if you're delivering a product to a customer that incorporates photos. So an example of this would be a website template where there's some filler content or premade content or social media templates. We're going if it has like placeholders or do you just use photos to make good examples? Then you want to make sure that your customer has the right to use those images to, if you were to pay for the rights to use an image like you licensed it off a stock photography website, for example. That license is usually not transferable, meaning like you paid for it lists applies to you. You can't then sell it to someone else and the license extensive, that mic doesn't work that way. This is a good thing to keep in mind and also remember that you can't straight up, resell images from other sites. So you can't just use some stock photos and turn that into Walmart, you have to actually do something with it. But I would say more specifically, make sure that you are following the rules of usage from the site where you get the image from all the sides will have their own particular policies. If you want to pay for license photographs for a project that you're doing. Some options. Our Adobe Stock Deposit Photos, Shutterstock, I Stock Getty Images or folia. These are just some different ideas. Look, there are also thousands of these sites on the internet. You can find commercially licensed illustrations if you want my actual illustrations on the photos on websites like Creative Market, creative fabricate, or Etsy itself. And again, remember to read the usage rights when you are looking at these images for either the rights thoroughly machine don't you're buying? So when we talk about those licenses, There's three main kinds that you'll see in these examples on these sites. So you wanna make sure that you are buying the ones appropriate for your usage. So a personal license, usually the lowest cost license, allows you to use that photograph or object for a personal project. That means that you could print off the photographs and hang them on your wall. Or you can use them to decorate birthing invitations. Basically, you can use them for anything as long as you're not making money off the product. Again, you want to be specific about reading each states license. That's generally not for profit. A commercial license, on the other hand, is usually the next tier up and pricing means that you are allowed to use that asset to make money. However, even a commercial license can have limitations. Some of them only allow you to use an asset, a certain number of distributions of an end product. So let's say I bought a graphic, I put it on a t-shirt. How many times can I sell that t-shirt? Typically the product numbers like a 100, thousands. So this is not going to be an issue for most people who are selling stuff online. You typically want to exceed that number. But do you find out what the number is when you're buying a commercial license for an asset. Beyond that, you get into extended Distribution licenses, which means that you are selling a commercial products to a very large number of people. These sorts of latencies are really expensive, will be the most expensive kind, and are typically purchased by agencies with large companies with a very big budget for advertising or design rights. And that will exceed what an individual designer would meet. For most of your purposes, all you're going to want is that men to your commercial license. If you don't have a budget for graphic assets or photos, or you are delivering a product to a customer that gives them access to the graphic where the photo to make that template was a placeholder. Then using royalty-free stock is a great option. Some popular sites for this are Unsplash, pixabay burst, or Pexels. There are also a growing number of smaller royalty-free stock photography sites coming up, especially ones that feature more diverse faces that you may not find in larger stock photography catalogs. They can kind of be a pretty narrow selection of people in the images. So examples of these more interesting sites are nappy dot co create her stock, stock and tonal. Some of these sites are mix of paid and free. So you just know that when you check them out, but lots of great photos there as well that will work great for your projects. Photos and graphic assets that are free for commercial purposes are a really great resource for startups and beginners. It's a, it's a great way to go. The dangerous, of course, that you may find that people using the same photo because there's no limits on who can use them. The way that these photos become free are offered for free is that photographers will put their photographs up on these sites to help gain traction for their skills, maybe their portfolio, or they're paid products. So it's sort of a bit of a lead for them. You're likely to find in a lot of really good looking photos here I will use tons of stock photos we didn't projects. If you're looking through a specific photographers collection, you might find a series or cohesive collection that you can use with a paid option. Ensure that you are looking at what specific licenses these sites offer, even if the products for free, You want to know what is required of you. Especially if it requires attribution as enlisting who took the photo words from some of these larger sites specified that you don't have to credit the photographer. I believe that's the case on Pexels. But you can if you want and you just be aware of that and their rules for the smaller sites, there may be other rules in place that you follow in exchange for using a photograph for asset from your site. Of course, if you are a photographer yourself, you can always take your own photos. If you're an illustrator, you can make your own or you can hire someone to create graphic assets such as illustrations. Doing this, making it yourself for hiring is a sure-fire way to stay at a copyright trouble. The more you are able to do yourself, the more money you can save upfront. And if you have an iPad or a tablet, you can start even by creating simple doodles. Watercolor splashes are colored blocks. These are common design elements that are easy for beginners to create. My favorite app for creating illustrations is Procreate on the iPad. However, they also have a mobile phone version. So if you had very dexterous fingers or a stylus, you would go to make something cool on there too. Specific design platforms might also have acids that you can use. Canvas. For example, it gives you access to their whole library of both free or pro level illustrations and photographs. Just keep in mind whether you are creating an end product or a template. And end-product, as in something that you are exporting to the platform, can use whatever assets they offer you so long as you check the licensing rules. If you are making a template, then you are creating a file that you will share with someone. You need a Pro account to do that, to create a template that you can let someone else access. However, that person may not be able to access the pro assets if they do not also have a Pro account. So you want to be aware of generally when I'm in Canva templates, I don't use any pro assets because I want to make sure that no matter who buys that, they can use everything as they see it, there's not going to be certain items that are watermarks just because they don't have a subscription. So just something to keep in mind if you are designing that kinda template. 6. Keyword Research: Keyword research is a critical part of listing anytime a product online for sale. Keywords are the terms that describe your item, particularly in a way that a customer might search for it online. They help search engines to show the right products to the right people. And search engines includes sites like Google, but also at sees internal search or Amazon search function. Those are all search engines. The two important terms that you will encounter when looking at keywords are long tail and short tail keywords. These are actually pretty simple concepts. So a long-tail keyword is more like a phrase, whereas a short tail is just one or two words. For example, sustain a hat that was pink and fluffy and probably worn by little girls. And I would list it online using the short tail keywords, pink, fluffy, cat, and for girls. Or I could list it using the long-tail keyword, pink fluffy hat for girls. The second option is more like what someone would type into a search engine, right? And this is why long-tail keywords are useful to us when listing items on XY. They also have another advantage. The fragments inside them countess are terms to. So if my product listing was labeled as pink fluffy hat for girls, but it would show up when someone searched for pink fluffy hat or just hat for girls, as well as the individual words themselves. So kind of a neutral long-tail keywords with our Nc listings. There are three main places where you can include keywords in your listing. They are the title, the product description, and the 13 keyword slots provided for you on your listing. There is some debate as to whether the product description really not as for the algorithm, I think it certainly does from my perspective, anytime we get to enter more information or formerly metadata for our product, I think that's all the better. I like to make sure that the language I'm using, my product descriptions include some keywords. But 1300 slots are where you can put in some highly targeted keywords that might not look so hot. And the tables listing, maybe they're a bit kind of boring keywords. These keywords have to be less than 20 and 20 characters or less. Sorry, they usually aren't long-tail keywords. Then put the long-tail keywords in the title or the prescription. So let's talk more about product titles specifically, forget what you thought you knew of a running a good product listing title. You might be inclined to write the title that provides a concise and accurate description of what you're selling. And this would make sense on any other platform. But on Etsy, you want to avoid using highly emotionally evocative language for your titles in favor of a series of relevant and targeted keywords. You want to specify what the product is rather than what someone might perceive it to be. So I'll elaborate with an example. Let's say that you are selling a principal artwork that depicts a beach at sunset. You wouldn't want to title it each at sunset art print or something worse, like something that more artistically, the view from my window at Palm Palm Beach in 2017. This may be true, but that is not what people are typing into the search bar to find to back this up. I wanted to prove them. I'm telling you through at this, I searched, I typed in Egypt sunset into my keyword and tool, which I'll explain shortly. And there are fewer than 20 people per month searching for that term. Beach at sunset on Etsy. However, there are over 50 thousand listings that show up when you search for it. Low search volume. Few people looking at up with high competition is an undesirable keyword. You don't want that. This phrase wouldn't help you show up in front customers because those 20 people who are searching aren't going to be shown 50 thousand listings. So you really hard for you to be the first one. So now we understand what keywords are and where they go. How do we know which ones to pick? So this is where keyword research comes in. He read research is an important part of running any e-commerce business no matter what you're selling. Since keywords are what increase search visibility in search engines, it means that good keywords can help reduce the cost of advertising. You don't have to pay for people to see your items because they're showing it naturally organically in the searches. Any opportunity to avoid paying for traffic is worth pursuing. In my opinion, when you are coming up with keywords for your listing, there are a lot of angles that you can look at. Don't be afraid to step into the customer's shoes and think about how they would find a store like yours. In this example, I'm going to keep going with the printable sunset picture. You would want to first reference the fact that your item is principled wall art or downloadable art. Next, consider the subject, sunset or Beach. These are very common search terms and will therefore be very competitive. But this is just the first step in generating keywords. So bear with me on this and I'll get to this image in a second. Consider if the item has a specific color scheme or design aspect, burnt orange or pastel and collected. These words can relate back to some of the design trends that you came across during your product development research. The point here isn't to stuff a bunch of keywords awkwardly into your listing title. Rather the goal is to use these characteristics. Frequently search long-tail keywords that suit your product. Remember that no one's searching for that. The view from my window at Palm Beach in 2017, right? But plenty of people that are searching for a principal orange well, art, once the keyword title puts your listing in front of that person, the product image itself will be what makes them click on it. So once you've completed that list of the short tail keywords you want like the colors that the styles, the descriptions they uses, the short tail keywords, one or two words. Then you can go over to the key wording tools to explore the terms further. So there are three tools for doing this I'm going to cover here. And she's own search bar, which you can see on the slide here. There's also marmalade, an earache. Lets you search far is a surprisingly helpful tool for keyword research. The best part is that it's totally free. So when you start to type something into the search bar on this website, you will see some suggestions pop up, and this is what you can see in the image here. There aren't. These are words that people type in commonly that follow the term you've entered according to all their search engine history. So you can see from this example that typing in Sunset suggests that people are looking for some terms related to Walmart. So since I print some set painting, canvas and sunset wall art, these could all be good keywords for your printable design. So the downside of using the NCBI search engine for keywords is that they don't provide you with any analytics, like the number of times that these had been searched, don't get any data, but you can't be the fact that this is easy and free. So it's a great place to start. You can use this to confirm that the keywords you're using art completely in the dark. For example, the other two keyword and tools that I mentioned, marmalade and E rank our third-party sites and they are not affiliated with Etsy directly. However, they have fantastic tools. They operate on subscription-based models and allow you to connect your Etsy store. They're supported integrations needing the xi's. Okay with you doing this. Then you can monitor your own listings, do keyword research, you trends, you can spy on your competitors and z valuable information there. So you don't have to use these. But if you want to gain, maybe after you fill those success, you certainly can. Information that these sites provide you with far surpass what else he gives you on their dashboard. I certainly don't want to suggest that you can't run a very successful store without using either of these tools. You certainly can. I just wanted to give you some information about them just so you have that purpose. These tools can simply speed up this process by informing you, for example, whether anybody's actually looking for the keywords that you have put on your listings. Without these tools, you have to do a lot more trial and error, which is still a really great way to learn. Of course, my personal preference and of those two marmalade, an IRAC is a rank, which is what you can see in the slide here. That's just the way you search for a term as is the container gives you. The reason that I'm hooked on this platform is because they actually do offer some free keyword searches to users before you ever have to pay for the service. So I would highly recommend you go check it out, even just to get started understanding how keywords work. Or if you're just curious to see what kind of data you can access, I appreciate that They do some free search terms for everybody. So each of these inscription platforms have their own instructions and tutorials. So I won't go into them too much here because you could just go to those sites even now I'm still discovering new features that make my job easier. Most recently I've learned how to track competitor stores to see how many sales they're making each day for a week at a time. And he studied at theta. This is really fantastic music shows how many products they have for sale, how many total sales they've made that they open their shop and how long they've been operating. This is just data that if you get a little bit further along, you may actually want to research this. You can start to be a bit more competitive with your store. It's not necessarily important for beginners. It will give you some clear data on what it takes to become a top seller in your particular niche. You rank lets you track up to 50 stores at a time, which is really helpful for me since I run multiple stores. You can put a note on each of those stores are tracking as well to say why you're tracking them in case you're forgetful like I am, it's very helpful. So going back to the keywords, when you scroll down that page on Iraq, this is the rest of it. And it shows you all sorts of data on different terms related to what you searched for. So when you go into the tool or any of them, you can take that short basic keyword list that you made of the colors or styles or anything like that. I start to type them in and see what comes up. In many cases, you'll find that those simple keywords like sunset or pastel will yield thousands of results. Rank maxes out at 500000. Competition listings. There may in fact be more, but they just sort of have a limit how many they generate. However, the keyword new tool will provide you with many similar or related keywords. And many of these are long-tail keywords, which is really great. This is where you're gonna start to see the value in those tools. Specifically, at this point in your research, you should be building that running list of keywords or related terms that might make sense for your product. So you want to explore it and be objective and keep your customer in mind all the way. So here on the graphic, you can see on the left hand side is all the keywords related to the term I searched for, which I believe the sunset just for the example, then you can see how the search trends peak. So if there's a time of year when it sends tends to research more the character count, which is helpful to know because as I said, the 13 keyword slots that you get on your listing have a cap of 20 characters. So they'll just tell you if you can put that in the keyword slot or if it'll have to go in the title or description. The average searches per month in us that tells you people are actually looking for it. Averaged clicks is how many of those people that are searching for it click through on the link. So intent to purchase, It's kinda put that tells you. And then it tells you that CTR click-through rate. Then it tells you the competition and how many other listings are showing up. So that search term, beyond that, there's some additional data, but it'll tell you if it's a long tail or short tail keywords as well. So once you have your keywords selected from your research, no matter what method you choose, of course, you need to assign them to different sections of your listing. The title of your listing has a maximum of a 140 characters. And I find that typically three to five long-tail keywords work well here, but do try and use as much space as possible with relevant keywords. You can add more if needed. Make sure that you put your best keywords first. This doesn't necessarily mean the highest traffic keyword, but instead the one that most accurately, this is simply represents your product. Because if you have a long title, that first little bit is going to be what shows up when it's being shortened on other places on the site. Any keywords that are 20 characters or less, you can pop those into those 13 different keyword slots we talked about. And if you have any leftover terms after that, work them into the product description. There was a little bit of an art to this of, of getting the keywords into the text without it being kind of clunky, just realizing some good general copywriting skills. The key is not to stuff your keywords into the box. Don't just like lists them or anything like that, but organically work them into the conversation. So for example, you can see the text here I've bolded what is a keyword, a long-tail keyword in the sentence, this burnt orange sunset wall art. There's the keyword would look great in a colorful gallery wall collection. And the keyword in your retro but her living room, no keyword right there. So that's an example of how you can weave it in. And of course he did without the bold text. So make it look natural. And remember that customers with a high intention to buy are very specific about they want what they want. A busy parent hosting a unicorn themed birthday party isn't just searching for unicorns because that would bring up way too many things that are relevant. They would be searching for a unicorn party invitations or a unicorn first day party games. So you want to figure out who it is you're trying to adhere to, what they're looking for and how to meet them there. When you can give somebody who has a very clear idea of what they want, a product and matches their desire. See, we see much higher conversions for those sales. And you're stuck thinking of angles for your keywords. There's a couple of things you can think about in some questions you can ask. So what type of item is it? Is in a template of printable, a flashcard and organized type of item. Then what style or theme is that? Half is there's, if there's a decorative element, BCCI, rainbow, retro, pink and blue, whatever the theme is. And think about who is it for? The user could be teachers or busy moms are entrepreneurs and bloggers. Then think about what problem does it solve? Because most people who are buying a digital product are doing it because they have a problem that needs to be solved that are not typically frivolous purchases. It can be impulsive, but they're generally not just what happened. Planner, I guess I'll just get a planner. They want, they will start the journey already wanting a planner. So some examples of problems could be getting organized, planning meals, setting prices, hosting a party, designing something really good, saving time, anything like that. Think broadly at that. The person who will use traditional product, how will they use it? What features will stand out to them that makes them want your specificly? Again, you can go back to this trend reports and design blogs to find ideas of how to position your product. If you sell, for example, principal greeting cards, there are seasonal trends and funny new holidays being invented all the time that you can capitalize on Pancake Day. Now that's a normal one. Cat holidays, things like that. If you sell a wedding invitations, checkout, new bridle, or even anti bridle styles that are coming up this year. Those trends sites are doing the exact same keyword research as you. So don't be afraid to borrow their phrasing, especially if it's for a niche or a trend that hasn't hit yet. Like when cottage core wasn't really a thing yet, people started using cottage core and more design spaces or niches, and then a category became more mainstream. So you can find a keyword like that, start using it ahead of time, then you could the onset. Now with all this being said, you are certainly able to create a digital product that simply makes you happy. You don't have to do all this research and backstory stuff if you don't want to, it's completely optional. You don't have to research things to death. In my experience, using these keyword research methods leads to faster store growth. However, that's not everybody's goal. If you're more passionate about selling something that you uniquely create, then focus on these aspects of the store that is most enjoyable to you. Some people prefer to follow their heart may cool stuff and then figure out the keywords apply afterwards. And others prefer to start by identifying underserved keywords and making products that filled that gap. There's different approaches and there's no wrong way to do it as long as you are enjoying the process and you are very clear on what your goals are out of it. And remember that if you aren't seeing the results that you want from your listings, you can always change your keywords around later. Listings are infinitely editable. 7. Building Your Product Base: As you success in any niche can be boiled down to three things. Great products with great keywords, with in great numbers. Volume is important because the more products that you have on the platform, the more leaves you'll be able to generate for your store, it becomes more likely that someone will stumble across your work when there is more to stumble across. Of course, when you are showing up in your search results, you are going to have more clicks on your product and more views in your store. A customer who likes one thing you make will probably like more if your store is focused on specific niche. This is why it's important to build up a court inventory prior to your store launch. You should have several products that are ready to go at the start so that anytime someone looks at your store, they aren't just seeing one or two products sitting there, which indicates a new store or someone who isn't very serious about your business. You want to show them a variety of things that makes it clear this is what you do and who are excellent at it. A beautifully designed and curated store will be appealing even if your count show 0 sales so far. Strategy and thought around your collection will give your customer confidence that even though you're new and don't have any reviews, the person behind the scenes have made a lot of effort. Then when they make a purchase and they find a beautifully designed file, there'll be happy and with their purchase and potentially returns for another one. So how many products should you start with? This isn't really good question. And one that I did a bit of research into before I started my first digital product store. It was something that I saw come up in pockets, interviews and blogs, new courses that people are selling about Etsy. So for my research and my personal experience, you can expect higher traffic and initial sales to start right around the time you have 25 items in your store. Depending on what sort of product you're selling, that might seem like a lot or we've not very many. Truthfully your aim should be even higher. Most digital products stores that are successful have an inventory of over 100 products and egg doing quality products, not just, not just thanks you throw together very quickly. You'll see this for yourself once you start to explore competitor's stores in your niche, ever store is going to be unique. However, we can observe these sorts of trends and use them to guide our store strategies. Over time, you're going to likely see the 80, 20 rule in action. This is a sales rule that says that 80% of your profit will come from 20 percent of your inventory. Don't be surprised if you see a couple of your items really take off while others sit there seemingly neglected. Leave those booming cost alone. Their keywords are clearly working and focus on improving those other listing. Of course, wireless things did not automatically equals sales. Volume strategy has to be combined with great products and keeping breaking words as mentioned above. Excellent listing photos will help too, and we're going to talk about those in upcoming lesson. But generally, the more products you have in the ecosystem of FC, the more likely it is you'll be seen by intrusted customer. Remember that a quality product does not have to be massive or massively labor-intensive. Your starting inventory can be varied and I will give you some examples to further illustrate this. My recommendation is that you have three pricing tiers of product in your store as low, medium, and high ticket items. So let's go over each of those terms to figure out exactly what that means. Low ticket items are small, affordable products, inkling a couple dollars at most. This could be a single template that is quick and easy to use, something that no one would blink an eye at paying for because the price is right and it solves a problem for them in a pinch. For example, a cute simple birthday party invitation for a child. Pdf day planner or meal planner like a single page PDF, text-based SVG graphics for cricket devices, these items are great because the low cost makes them really easy to impulse purchase. And the simplicity of the products means that you should be able to create many of them and therefore show up in a lot more keywords and categories on Etsy. Remember again that simplicity and quality can go hand in hand. Next, we have medium ticket items. Now these are going to be your main type of product in your store. These are useful items within moderate price based on the scale of your offerings. For example, an ebook template with like 48 page variations would be more expensive than a single PDF symbol page, but less expensive than a template with over a 100 variations. These are products that take a little bit longish design or maybe have more artistic elements that makes a value of them clear to the customer. Think about things that would help them solve a problem, but would take them a bit of time to create. They might prefer to simply buy a template or a resource or tool instead of investing the time to learn or creative themselves. Then we have high ticket items, typically high ticket items for digital products on Etsy are bundles. These are collections of your work offered at a discount for by multiples. For example, a collection of six or nine or even 12 art prints that look good together. And the bundle, a master bundle of templates for business planning. If you sell on them individually, you can create a bundle of them. Social media bundle for entrepreneurs, maybe it's a variety of products that have a semicolon palette or a collection of graphic assets. In many source, these bundles are what cell most frequently and get the best reviews. This is due to the high perceived value of bundles. When a customer looks at your store and sees one item they like for $5, but that same item plus nine others in for $20. They'll do the math and see the value. Since your inventory is entirely digital assets, it makes a difference when a customer purchases one or 10, except it makes you more money for them buying the upsell bundle, Creative Market. Another website I mentioned is that is similar to add c, but cells exclusively digital products. Has a thriving bundle economy. So you'll see that many illustrators have a whole store graphic pack or a host or bundle, which is priced at a ridiculously low rate. And you consider the cost of buying each other individually for sometimes even as little as $50, you can purchase a commercial license for thousands of images that individually would have cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. It's a fantastic deal for those who are using licensed illustrations in their work. And I've purchased many of these bundles myself just to get access to one collection, I actually want to keep all the others for future projects. So I know people do buy them because I'm one of them. These stores thrive on these bundles. They are hugely profitable and you can build similar bundles into your own store inventory over time. Just focus on getting that core collection together first. So creating a list of 25 products for your store might feel intimidating at first, but here we have an example for you. I would encourage you to create a list of specific products and you can make and break it down into numbers. For example, we were trying to build a store here that is a ebook template store. That's the concept of running with this example. So the launch collection plan has one general purpose ebook template and five color variations that we medium ticket item C, but five props right there. Five different cookbook templates, maybe five to six pages long. And again, they can be variations in each other with color or theme or mix up a few pages or something, but that can be another medium ticket. So now we're at 10 items, five quick and simple lead magnet files, each three-page pages, each, which could be a low ticket item. So we've got another five products, there's about 15. Then we could do three coursework, but templates, those are kind of a bit more labor-intensive. So three different products for a high ticket. Then we have for pricing guide templates for entrepreneurs. That's something again, more research goes into building something like that. So under high ticket item. And then after that we could do three different bundles. So I've suggested maybe an entrepreneur bundle with lead magnets, workbooks, and pricing guide templates from those things you've already made, right? And then maybe a cookbook template that are starting to cope of bundle that includes all five of those templates you made. And then maybe a whole store bundle with everything on it, including all of those variations. And there you have it, 25 items, so you can see it. You're not reinventing the wheel each time you create one of these products, they are distinct because there are things about them that will appeal to different people may be somewhat prefer a blue cookbook. Others would prefer a minimalist cookbook right there. The theme and the design of it can be different, but the concept could be very similar. You're just looking for ways that you can create variations that are tangibly different, but allows you to revisit some of the best aspects of your previous designs. So after you get your core products ready, what happens next? Well, you're going to want to make sure that your customer files are prepared and organized for the listing. This is just a preference that I have and I'm just sharing my method with you on this, but essential, but I like to keep things organized because it's very easy to lose all those little files frenzy. So this is where you're going to consider the customer experience when someone makes a purchase from your store, what happens next? What do they receive? Do they get instructions? What kinda things come with the file? If you think through the process, start to finish, you can ensure that there are no snags along the way. I prefer to organize all of my Etsy store files on my desktop in a particular format so that the main folder with the name of the store. And then inside I have a sub folder for every product in the store. So I was up in naming conventions such as template, weekly planner with daisies, whatever the type of product is and then the name of the specific design of it. So I remember what sort of vitamin is an inside that Prague folder, I've put three subfolders, customer files, design files, and listing files. This way I know where each component of the listing is stored and I can easily find them again if they need to be updated. Inside the customer file, I put the exact deliverables that I'm going to attach the Etsy listing. So just what they receive, make sure that I named them very clearly as well because as with the customer, so the readme is labeled and the design files are also labeled appropriately. In the design file, I put the rough files that went into making the product, especially for making something that's in Adobe or something I need that, the rough files for it. This could also include earlier versions of the item, working drafts, etc. This is not stuff you share, but its resources you might need. If you're ever going to edit the file. In the listing file, I put all the photos are mockups that I created for that listing as well as the text file with the product descriptions and keywords that can easily paste it into the listing what I'm uploading to Etsy. If I'm creating many similar products, for example, variations of one design, I don't always include a separate text file here, but you've got to go by what product you're making. Note that Etsy accepts quite a lot of different file types for digital products. They will allow you to upload five digital products to a listing. So you're going to want to use the slots very wisely, especially if you are selling a bundle or a large collection, you can always put your files into a zip file and upload that in order to save space or to provide access to an unsupportive file type. There is a size limit of 20 megabytes per item. If you're selling a big collection of graphics, for example, then an alternative to upload them here, as you would very quickly see, and that might be to sell them a PDF with a link to a Dropbox file where they can go to download the larger files. You'd want to provide instructions for this as well. Of course, sumproduct types will require you to give customers a URL. So like a Dropbox link or a canvas template. When you, when you export a template from Canva, you get a URL that you can share. So you'll want to deliver a file to the customer with instructions on how to access that template and that URL. Keep in mind, as I said before, if you remember, he was Canva, logo designers evil, neither pro subscription to create templates. Thinking through the customer experience here, what would you prefer to receive? Would you prefer to receive a plain text document with a URL to the template or received a nice branded PDF with some instructions, Vimeo link to a tutorial, a thank you note and that URL, different customers have different preferences, but making a nice PDF can make a big difference. And you can create these handy PDF designs right within Canada with clickable hyperlinks, which is how I deliver my products. I recommend doing this for any digital product that you are delivering via an external link. Remember that any digital product that requires a little navigation, like clicking on a link in a PDF to access that might confuse some customers. Make sure that you're really clear in your messaging both in the listing and in the deliverables, and invite you to contact me with any questions they may have. That way you will minimize the risk of potential negative feedback if people are confused. 8. Setting Up Your Shop: If you've never owned or built an Etsy store before. This next section will help you navigate the basics of the platform and the sort of process. If you have a store already, you may still want to skim through to see if there's anything you haven't considered about setup and how you orient your information or areas where you could improve your current store. You want to construct it by simply creating your ESI count according to the instructions on the website, you will need to link your bank accounts. So have that information ready. You'll have to do this upfront because FC will direct deposit money from your sales range, your bank account. You also have the option to connect a PayPal account. This is as if the current time in mid 2021. Note that you can use a credit card or other payment methods to pay for the expenses of your store, such as the listing fee for items. They don't take that money directly out of your bank account. However, if you do have an income and profit from the sale and you have an imbalanced mirror county will deduct that bounce from your profit before deposing the rest into your account. This is just handy to know as you start to make sales on the platform, as you navigate through the store setup, you'll see that you need to upload your first item in order to proceed. This is why it's great to have your core inventory prepared ahead of time, just like we talked about in this course. The SE system will help you navigate the listing process by explaining all the different aspects. I will go through all of this in more detail in the next lesson as well. You will have to pick a store name. If you're tying your storage would brand you already have, then that would be the obvious choice. You could pick a name that ties into social media handle that you already use to. However, you will probably want a unique name for your shop. I would recommend something that gives your customers an idea of what you sell. For example, if you sell art prints with a mystical Bohemian vibe, you want to call it something like beau ho design studio or mystic dreams are just some kind of sound corny, but they didn't communicate that this door is, but he's very specific thing. You should also check if your desired store name is available on social media platforms, even if you don't plan on growing your store to other channels right now. So hearing the handles as a smart move to avoid confusion down the road. This is optional, but you might also want to pick up a domain name for your website or a URL for your shopping. This does two things for you. Number 1, if you want to run your own store down the road on Shopify or WooCommerce from other platform that you've already secured your name. This will also allow you to create a branded email address, and you can do that sooner rather than later. You can always create a simple a Gmail address for your store, which I usually recommend having one just dedicated to that shop just to keep your inboxes tiny, but this goes the extra mile. And if this piques your interest, but you're not too techie, don't worry, it's not too complicated. And there are plenty of YouTube tutorials out there that can walk you through the process step-by-step better than I can here with words alone. If you want to do this, I would recommend that you pick up a domain name like www dot your shock name.com or whatever extension you want from the website name cheap. That is the place where I buy most of my namesake. They do live up to the name of their site if they are affordable. And I purchase all of my domains for BI website business here, you're going to get a domain for no more than about $10 a year. And they automatically come with domain privacy, which is a feature that basically means that your personal information isn't published publicly. When anyone buys a domain is does go into a large database to say who owns the domain unless you pay for domain privacy. This feature comes free with mean cheap, which is why I like using them. I made the mistake a few years ago, way back in the day of using a company that didn't offer this and I opted out of paying for the domain privacy. But I'm still receiving spam phone calls from companies because of it. So once you have your domain, you don't need to have a website to make use of it. You can connect it to an email service to generate a professional looking email address like hello at your name.com. I like to use a service called Zoho mail for this as they allow you to connect to your own domain and how up to five business emails for free, their website can provide you with walk-throughs to connect your domain. As I said, this is totally optional. You don't have to do this. You just may want to consider it if your store grows or if you have aspirations of taking it beyond Etsy in the future. Now back to setting up your own shop, you'll want to set up your store policies, which is made simple things to xi's guidelines. And they have some templates for you to use. The main policy that you want to ensure you've reviewed is your returns policy. And he suggests that you do not offer returns on digital products. And I do agree with this. There is no way to track whether a customer who has purchased a digital listing is actually using it or not, you don't know whether they didn't open it or didn't like it or what. In addition to putting that in your policy section and you're shopping, you set it up. I also recommend that you include a note about no returns in the product listing. Be sure to soften it by mentioning that you're happy to help with any problems or concerns that come up. Make your policies really clear, but keep the friendly customer experience. Now, there are two main image sections on your store when you're actually setting up the design of the page, that is your store logo and the heading, which is the banner at the top. These photos should be JPEG or PNG files. And I will say you want to avoid using transparent images like a transparent PNG, because the transparent areas will just show black if you were transparent logo. So make sure it's not. If you don't have a logo for your shop, you can quickly whip up a simple one in Canva or another logo template site. I would encourage you to avoid doing anything too amateurish, lower played pre-made ones are free that you can kinda tell they're made from a candidate template. Even if logo design isn't your jam though, I would just say like customize those templates and try and make it a little bit unique. You want to present yourself as a professional designer or artist or whenever the appropriate label is for your niche. The logo is a very small detail. It will not make and break your shop, but do try and find a little bit of a style for it that suits what your shop is about. Even as simple image with your shop initials can be a good place to start if you'd been gets the job done. So Etsy recommends that your logo is 500 by 500 pixels. You might want to jot that down for reference. And it does tell you on the setup as well. It tells you the appropriate spec so you don't have to remember it from here. You may store header. Rather than store header has two sizes. You can be many, which is sort of a shorter, narrow one or a wider one are big. And the specs are there on the slide for you to take a look at. There are also two other options for your header, which is carousel or collage. But those are features that are only available if you have an xy plus subscription. And I've never found the need for that. So I would say that's only something that's very experienced. Sellers would go for just for the extra features they provide, but it's not necessary. Now there are many interesting strategies that stores used to leverage the header space on their shock. Sometimes it can show sale items or celebrates, holidays perhaps. Again, Canva has some templates for you to explore on that. I make my shock headers in Canada just so I can easily swap them out for different occasions or different sales and running. My preference for headers is to include a few mock-ups of the images, like the products I used up in the listing photos, the display my digital products, and then I uses short tagline for my shock. For example, if I was selling printable party invitations, my tagline might be something like make every party special with pretty invitations or something like that. And I would just put that on the banner, kind of grab people's attention. And then you just add a few coordinated images and colors from your logo and your store look a little bit professional already. Now feel free to use the announcements or update section of your store. You can promote sales and that's the project. So we'll just put a positive message there. It helps customers realize that your store is run by an actual human being and not a faceless robot. I strongly encourage you to fill out as many sections as possible on the store front. It really does convey that every purchase, of course, an actual person that's kinda the drug at Z, of course, is that you buying from a small creator or an artist. Shoppers know this. They know that this would confine on Etsy and they really value the difference. So sellers who are offering a physical product, not a lot of human touches in their packaging, right? Like, like handwritten notes or extra little gifts. So when you receive the product, That's kind of specialists experience. So as a digital product seller, we don't get that kind of hand-off that physical product sellers can. So we have to do what we can to create a pleasant customer experience up front. So I recommend filling of the about section of your shop, providing a description of who you are and why you make the product. A little bit of insight as to how you started the store to it's, it's all good. You don't have to give away all your secrets or get too personal. But a nice smiling photograph, a friendly message, that kind of stuff goes a long way in building customer trust. It's still possible for you to include a small freebie or something when someone buys from you, of course, in the same way that you would include a free gift in a physical package, it would just be included in your deliverables. So be aware of whether you have space for it. If you have more than five files for you need to use a zip file to contain all your deliverables. For example, if you are selling a large bumble, you might want to throw in an extra small design for free or a bonus file that provides some value. If you're including a README file as well in the section I would say note in that file back there is a bonus item is to avoid confusion so that people would receive an extra item and not be sure why they got the extra file. It's just note that it's a free gift. You could also include a discount code for future purchases in your store or an incentive to visit your social media or a website. I generally don't mention these bonuses in the product listing itself as adult think at C likes the ambiguity that what's being delivered. I just treat it like a nice little surprise. So when they open, it'll find it. Once you have your store up and running with your first product live, then you can start to populate the rest of your prepared core inventory. Keep in mind that you can't go back and edit the original listing if you're not happy with your first attempt or you want to change your sales copy strategy, you're not locked into your first attempt. In the next lesson, we're going to go over product listings in more detail and cover some strategies for filling out the many options available on your page. 9. Listing Essentials: So far we've covered topics about assembling the pieces that go into making up a listing, the concept of the digital product files and the keywords. The product listing itself is the most important aspect of your store because it's your sales page. And so it makes the difference between a product that gathers virtual dust and something that shows up in search results and make some money. In this lesson, we're going to look at a few of the different parts of an Etsy listing and what should go in them. Of course, every product is different and I can't predict exactly what you'll be creating, but you can adapt this advice to see just about any kind of digital product. So let's start with the text areas of your product listing, starting with the title. As we discussed in the keyword section, this should be a series of highly applicable long-tail keywords. Clearly convey what this item is about, who it's for and uses terms that people are actively searching for on Etsy. Some of the sections that follow are a little bit self-explanatory, such as indicating who made the item, which is you, and the timeframe in which it was made. Unless the item requires customization, like adding custom names or dates, for example, I don't select the major order, just pick them up here that you designed it, which is probably the current year. You can't identify other features such as the primary colors, special occasions for the product, or other features that are particular to your type of item. At C, we'll adjust the information it asks for based on the type of product you're selling. So for example, if you're selling clothes, ETC, which show you like listings, sizes. And, and if you're selling artwork, you will ask for dimensions. In the case of principle wall art, I generally don't fill out the dimensions because on the one hand, the customer can scale the file to whatever size they like. So there's no one fixed size. On the other hand, I never want to mislead the customer into thinking they are purchasing a physical product. So that's just my preference to avoid including that. Even with SEs clear flags on listings that specify when something's a digital product, confusion can sometimes still happen. This is more case with the higher ticket digital products. Customers seem to have this expectation that digital products from the lower end of the scale with larger digital bundles are complex offerings being the exception rather than the norm. So when you get to the product description, you are given a large blank box to work with. Keeps the most important information about your listing at the top, this would be the part of the text that is shown in snippets to customers and where it's cut off or it's a sample of the text. So you want to make sure that they are seeing the critical stuff first, your product description will vary depending on the type of product. Of course, there is no one size fits all formula. However, I have developed a list of eight points of that digital product listings usually include, and I always try to hit these points when I'm running a new description. This is the information that customers typically want prior to making a purchase. So let's go over those eight different points right now. Number 1 is the product description. Must start with a brief description of what the product actually is, an outline of the unique aspects. Like we've said before, consider how the customer by b, using the product, include any long-tail keywords that might not fit in the product title here. So for example, if you're listing a wedding invitation design that has a blue watercolor theme with flowers. Mentioned how the invitation might be suited to a blue thin coating or contrast against pink and peaches or whatever is on trend. If you were selling an art print, you could describe what's in the picture, suggests how it might be displayed against a dark wall in a gallery format, in a child's nursery, maybe hanging above your desk. If you're selling multiples of the same item within your store, such as multiple art prints or variations on a template. And this is the section of the listing that you'll want to change every time. The information that follows may be relevant to all the items. You don't want to double check that to be sure. But if you have, for example, three different ebook templates that are all generally the same, but they're different color motifs. You might want to keep all the information the same except modify that first paragraph or section of texts couple sentences in the description to keep them unique when they are being searched and snippets. Not sure if snippet it as a word, but we're going to roll with that. The second section that I recommend is the technical specifications for the product. Provide the customer with the must know info about what you're offering. This could include the size, format, quantity, colors, et cetera. If there's a specific software or tools, you might need to open it. Explain what the customer will receive when they purchased the listing. So we're talking really technical information here. Do you need to unzip the file? Will they be getting a PDF with the link? You can also mention if instructions will be included after the purchase or a theorist instruction file in the download. If this is a bundle, this is where you could also list all the items that are included in the bundle. And you can also link to the individual items on Etsy. Just know that if you're providing a link is not clickable and description they would have to copy and paste it. Point number three is about providing digital product clarity. You want to tell them that no physical item will be shipped once the customer has purchased the list, you can't force people to read, so some may still end up purchasing accidentally. However, I will say I've never had this problem with any of my stores because I'm very clear about it on all friends. I've only heard about it from other people. So I suspect this is only an issue with digital products like artwork or paper goods that look like physical products due to the mockups. So we just want to be clear. I know I keep emphasizing this point. Not let people think that it's a physical product, but it is important. Again, we want to keep people happy and answer all the questions if they come our way. So number 4, I recommend covering outlining the license terms for the product. It's important to let them know what they can and can't do with your product and the files that they thought. Are you selling your product for commercial use or for personal use only? We did talk about licenses in an earlier lesson. So it's the same about your product and what can they do with it? How can they use the file? Can they share it on social media? Do you require credit? Can they resell the file or can they sell a physical product designed using your item? Clarity is key. So for example, here on the screen you can see if someone is selling an art print, they might want to say, purchasing this print entitles you to print and enjoy this design in your home. You may not resell the digital file or any physical products with this image on it. That makes it pretty clear that you can use it personally. You can't make a profit from it. Another example would be admitting pattern. If someone is receiving something that is basically a tool to help them create something. So in this case, you might want to say, purchasing this pattern grants you a commercial license for the end product. You may sell the finished product for profit. You may not resell the pattern itself. So again, very clear and just be very specific about what they can and can't do with your design. Number 5 is contact information. Of course, you want to provide clear information on how the customer can get a hold of you to ask for questions or get some help. Directs them to the ETC. Conversation feature if that's your preferred method, I think it's certainly the easiest because it stays right on the platform. You can use this opportunity to convey a really friendly customers oriented attitude. If a customer feels like there is a real human available to help, they will feel more comfortable making a purchase, especially from a new store. So if you don't have any sales yet, you want to make sure that you're giving that really friendly attitude on all fronts. Number 6 is your returns policy. So again, you want to reiterate it here. It may already be on your main Shoppe page, but you can include a little note about it here. This will just help reduce some of the confusion down the road. So an example of the statement could be, please note that as this is a digital product, returns are not accepted. If you have any issues with the product, please contact me directly for assistance. Again, really friendly, straightforward, but, you know, set some boundaries there. Number seven is product-specific advice. So this obviously will depend on your type of product, but include a section with some helpful information as to how to use the product, especially if the digital file isn't tended to be printed for art prints. And you want to recommend a few get prints done that you've personally used before. Maybe there's an online printer that you recommend for invitations, business cards, or flyers. You could suggest where they could upload the finished template if you order them online. If your product is for a specific app or tool, you may want to be clear what is required to fully use the product. So if it's a designed specifically for a kind of software, you'll make sure that they have that software and know that it may be it's software they had to have purchased ahead of time. The template doesn't give them access to the software. So little minor detail, but again, clarity is really key to getting consistent singles and it has not steered me wrong in my experience. Finally, you want to include a friendly message. I keep repeating it, but really this is all about the customer service. At the bottom of your listing, we usually put it last thing, just include a short cheerful message. This is just a nice way to remind the customers again, Hello, I'm a human being, not a robot. Please be nice to me if you send me messages. So consider statements just like what I've included here on the slide. Thanks for stopping by if you like this product chicken, the rest of my listing through other options or just a simple thank you for supporting my small business. Have a great day and thanks. Particular necrotic. Anything like dy is just going to add a little bit of that extra touch at the end. So after sorting through your product description and you're going to want to set your price. This can be a challenge and it's something that I find a lot of first-time sellers do struggle with. So some of the things you want to consider when setting your price, obviously, I can't tell you what to sell things out because that's very dependent on the product. But you might want to consider what your competitors are charging for similar products. Also consider how much value your product has to the end-user and how much time you took to create it versus how much time you are saving somebody, buy them buying it instead. So you can always change the price later. And you can experiment with putting items on sale using the sale feature and coupons. If you think perhaps you've overprice your inventory. So remember again that low, medium, and high ticket structure that we talked about earlier, until you'd have a handful of sales under your belt. Don't worry too much about the price. Just do your best with it. If you feel like you've done everything right and you still haven't seen any sales, consider that the price may be too high. However, if it's on par with your competitors, there may be other factors you want to look at, such as keywords or listing photos. The listing will ask you whether you are selling a physical or digital product as well and you whether you want to automatically renew the listing when it sells, that, that that's a handy feature, especially for digital product. You can also set the quantity of items in stock. So that's just a little bit of technical set of stuff. It's fairly easy to navigate at that point when you're getting to the listing. So now the only major thing you're listening is missing are a few awesome images. So we're going to cover that in the next lesson. 10. Product Photos and Mockups: Digital files are going to need images to your product. Photos are one of the most important aspects of the listing. Pictures are what capture people's attention when schooling through a long list of problems. When it comes to digital files though, you want to make sure that you are not showing your product in photos in a way that would allow someone to screenshot your piece of art or your design or use it without paying. This is frequently an issue I see with people selling wall art, where they simply upload the image itself as the product photo. It's very easy to steal that way. The best solution to avoid this is to use mockups. Mockups are digital assets that allow you to insert your design in a way that previews how it looks in use. There are tons of different kinds of mockups out there that you can superimpose your products on. So there are mockups for wall art that they look like a frame hanging on a real walls. And as these are real photo, but you just drop your photo in there or your artwork and it looks like it's hanging in the room. And you can also get mockups for book covers, no cards, stationery, clothing, packaging, and so many more. When you insert your mock-ups, your image into these mock-ups, it will actually look at the design is printed right on the object. So this actually saves you a lot of money and a lot of time as you don't have to pay for these NMC produced yourself and then worry about photographing them properly. It also prevents your design house from being stolen from the listing, which obviously is a big pro. You can find lots of free mockups on the Internet. And you don't necessarily need any fancy software to make them. Of course, there are options for Photoshop if you prefer to use that program. I find that graphic Burger is a good website. They offer some free mockup files for Photoshop. You can also purchase very stylized branded, beautiful mockups from designers on Creative Market and NC as well. So as you can buy a multi-pack. But again, they're mostly for Photoshop. An alternative to that is to use popular web-based platform for mockups called place it. This is a subscription-based website. They do offer a free trial, but you can upload the product image and then it will display on a variety of mockups free to download. So it's really efficient and it creates quite good results. The obvious downside is that it's not free. So you can also create mockups in Canvas as a rather new feature, close Smartmockups, the offer, their selection of objects is a bit limited and they don't have a ton of things, but they cover the base. Thanks Dave. Images for computer screens and phones and tablets, books, clothing, a couple of paper goods and mugs. I'm an upside to using Canva free mockups is that it's really easy to add other text and graphics and illustrations from Brown's those images, mockups, which is really helpful if a headline would help capture your audience's attention. Another option for creating mock-ups for artwork specifically is an app called I think you just VO un. It has both free and paid options and it allows you to upload an image and virtually hanging on a wall. There are some very good customization options here, and I find it does look pretty realistic. This is a tool that I use myself. I really like it. You can pay onetime cost to unlock all the different options, but there's some good free ones too. So just specifically for wall art for that one. Now when I'm making my listings, I generally try and add at least three items per listing or three images for item. This is easier if you develop a formula of mockup templates that you use in each listing. So this could be as simple as having multiple backgrounds for the product to be displayed against. If you're using a mock-up. If you're unsure of how to style your product. If you're unsure of how to style your products, simply look through others in your knees to get inspired with how they're setting up their listings. If a digital file is a simple rectangular PDF, maybe you're selling up a template like a planner or something like that was just a rectangle. And you might want to just put it on a colourful or neutral background in Photoshop or Canada and add a drop shadow that kinda makes it look like it's popping off the page a little bit and it kind of makes it look like an actual object. It helps translate the idea that there's value behind what you're purchasing as tangible and not just digital. You can then add text or information onto the image to create a very simple graphic for your customers. If there is an interactive or a customizable aspect of your product, like it's a template and you want to show you how to use it. You can include screenshots of your file in US, show it being uploaded to an applicable programmer website or being edited as if you were the customer changing it up. Highlight some of the variations that come with the product. Etsy actually allows you to upload a video in your listings. Now, as with most online platforms, users are often rewarded for using new features. So adding a video can be a good idea. The idea is that you can show a physical product in use or perhaps show it from all angles if you were selling an object for scale or things like that. So consider how you could still use a video for some of your listings, even though the digital. Now this isn't as important as the rest of the information and listing, so don't let this whole job was getting your store going. But it may be something you want to consider when you're updating your listings in the future. The video can be really simple. Consider making like a slideshow with pictures. Canva, iMovie or apps like kept cut, all really easily concrete this. You could also show a short video of the template being edited or a file being uploaded to a relevant service. It doesn't have to be really fancy. So if you're inclined to try and use every tool that provides, you can still find a way to make it video even for digital product. Now you're listing photos should be either horizontal or square. Keep in mind that they are cropped is thumbnails anytime they're shown to a customer prior to them viewing the listing like the search results. So you'll be able to see a small preview of the thumbnail when creating the listing, it will show you right when you upload the picture, what it'll look like when they display it to customers. The ideal aspect ratio for listing photos is four to three. So for example, 2700 by 2025 pixels, that works really well. After all of this information is uploaded to the listing, you simply have to attach your customer files. Now you're ready to publish your product listings. In the next lesson, we're going to look at some more tips and marketing advice for your shop. 11. Marketing Beyond Keywords: Once you've finished building a great store concept, doing your keyword research, building awesome products, and getting all of those products online. Your work is essentially done. If you're keen to rely on the Etsy algorithms to promote your product and your great keywords to get it in front of customers, then you'll simply want to repeat the process of creating new products whenever you have time and he's at a 100 inventory in mind. Now if you investigate your Etsy stats on the dashboard, you can actually see what people are searching to find your listings. You just want to go into NCBI search under the how people found you section, I would recommend investigating this after you start seeing some regular traffic to your shop. This will tell you what keywords are working for you and how people are finding your store, as well as which items are actually being seen. If you find that some of your items are never getting any traffic, this could be a good indicator that your keepers need to be reworked. Well, as he definitely has enough organic traffic to provide consistent sales for pretty much anybody. There are also a lot of potential buyers Browsing internet elsewhere. Many of them will be happy to be redirected to the ASC platform to make a purchase. So we'll talk about getting them onto our store soon. But before we get into those different marketing options, Let's take a quick look at C's advertising features. They have two services called SE ads and off-site ads. As he adds, is your standard pay for promotion add service. You set up a campaign, set your goals and your budget, and then your listing will appear in a priority location for specific searches. As he adds our pay-per-click ads, that means that if someone sees your ad but doesn't click on it, you're not going to get charged anything. If they do click, then a little bit of your daily budget is going to be used up. This doesn't necessarily mean that every click will lead to a sale, but a click is the first step in making one. Now offsite ADS is a relatively new feature as he rolled it out in 2020. This is a program where NC advertises your products elsewhere on the internet, specifically on Facebook, instagram, Pinterest, Google, and Bing. And they do it on your behalf. It doesn't cost you anything upfront. But if one of these ads is successful in getting you a sale, so nothing to do with clicks, just a full on sale. Then you will be charged for the advertising just a very small amount. This program has been a little bit controversial as initially it was unclear how everything was calculated and whether you can opt out. So the rules actually are that stores that have earned less than $10 thousand USD over the last year are allowed to opt out. And stores that have earned more than that are required to be in the program. As he promises that this program benefits these larger stores. The amount that you are charged per ad generated sale also varies depending on your stores income level. So if you're not a big story, you don't get charged very much. If you're a big store, you charge more. So you can explore your shops offsite ad settings if you want to turn that on or off by going to shop manager and then settings and off-site ads. Now in my opinion, so that's those are the facts that my opinion about this is that it's really great for digital product sellers because we're making a product and selling it an infinite number of times. So any sale is a good sale even if it's a discounted sale, the MapReduce from your listings and exchange won't really matter all that much to us based on not making a sale apple. So physical products, sellers, opinions. But in this case, I think it is a good thing for us and I would leave it on. In my digital products stores. I certainly have made sales because of offsite ads that I probably wouldn't have made otherwise. Now the first marketing platform that you'll find recommended to Etsy sellers anywhere is Pinterest. Pinterest is at his best marketing friend and creating a Pinterest account for your store isn't very good option for diversifying your traffic channels. Pinterest is useful because it's not actually a social media platform. That's a common misconception, is actually a content curation tool and a search engine. The demographic that uses Pinterest is very broad and users on this platform have shown to have a higher intention to buy on other non commerce websites. Then we said plenty people are browsing Pinterest looking for a product or solution to a problem that they can purchase. This is really great for us digital sellers, because digital products do exactly that. They solve problems. So if you already have a personal Pinterest account, I would encourage you to just create a separate account just for your store if you have that business e-mail at recommended, even just the Gmail version, you can set it up with with that e-mail address. I recommend that you start searching on Pinterest as you may have already done during the research phase of your product development, to see what sort of pins are being shared in your niche. Or an, a broader but similar area. Look beyond the actual content of the pen to see how the graphic is designed. Consider the language that other creators are using. Maybe what sort of colors are popular, whether the product is being shown in US or in progress from the final mock-up. The most common platform for creating Pinterest pins is unsurprisingly Canada. We talk about that a lot in this course. They have many templates that you can try. So you can get started right away. You can also buy interest templates off of FC. It's actually a very popular digital product offering. So there you go, circular economy. The key is to create a variety of graphics for the same product. Explore using different images, photos, or mock-ups. Headlines, color palettes, calls to action, and other eye-catching features. You can also create video pins using either animations of your product. You can just add little gifts or stickers right on there to turn your photos into videos. In terms of actual account setup, start by creating Pinterest boards that are relevant to your niche. So if they started with a new account, I recommend starting out with 10 different boards that you're having a hard time coming up with. 10 unique for ideas for your product would fit in here just a couple of examples for three different niches. So for wall art, you may want boards for different rooms of the house where you could put the art specific design or style aesthetics that your art might fit in with cottage core, whoa, whoa, whatever. You can also do different boards for the type of people who might want to buy it. Lifestyle occasions where the art would look appropriate, anything like that. For a resume template shop, maybe making them for business. You could do boards about interview skills, confidence building entrepreneurship. Even entrepreneurs need resumes and test to apply to grants and things like that. Different types of industries might require different boards. So again, just think broadly about who is the person who's buying this and what are their concerns right now? How can I build the board for all those concerns? For a wedding principle shop, you've got a lot of choice with with wedding contents. So you can build boards for different aspects of the wedding ceremony, the resection, the different events within a wedding, different styles and pallets based on trends, destinations, maybe weddings and certain locations. Budget tips, often people who are buying printables and DIY stuff for weddings are on a budget so you want to make sure that that is also accommodated. So once your boards are built, you're going to start populating them with content on a regular basis. So if doing that, pitting all the time, it seems kinda like a hassle. You are in luck because there are a lot of automation tools that you can use. There are both free and subscription options out there that can help me Pinterest more manageable. Pinterest itself has an internal scheduling tool. It's a little bit limited, but you can use as a good starting point. You need to convert your account to a business account first and then Pinterest business account, then you are limited to scheduling 30 pins at a time. So depending on your output in your schedule, 30 pins like as you will be making just two weeks or maybe a full mouth if you only pinning once a day. A more sophisticated tool is called tailwind. You'll probably hear this a lot if you are doing anything with Pinterest, it's a platform that is very popular and it is endorsed by contrast, the biggest perk to using Tailwind and our subscription service, of course, is that you can, in addition to scheduling your pins in advance, you can actually have the software determine the best time of day to post or pin them in a loop, which just means it'll read pin them on a schedule automatically. This is like I said, it's a paid tool. There is a free trial if you're curious about it. Pinterest marketing is a very broad topic and there's a lot to it. So a lot people do prefer to use an automation tool to help me get a little bit easier. Most social media scheduling tools are starting to support Pinterest as well. Even Canva has a tool where you can pin scheduled pins directly after you create them in there. But of course that is a feature of Canva pro exclusively. So if a scheduling tool sounds appealing to you and that way of marketing kind of appeals to you. But I recommend that you browse around and find one of these tools that is at a price point you can afford. And now that we've covered some different ways to market your shop with ads and contrast. Let's move on to talk about social media for your shop. 12. Social Media For Your Shop: One of the first things that NC sellers often do to promote their stores is create social media profiles. In my experience, I actually wouldn't recommend this as a first-year marketing strategy, especially when you're just getting started. Unlike social media platforms, Pinterest and C, both have a large number of people browsing with the intention of finding something to me. So it's a lot easier to sell a product to someone who already knows that they want to purchase or who has a product they want to solve with the purchase. Social media platform users aren't always thinking about buying something. They usually open up the app to connect with others or to kill time. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok also require multiple touch points to make a sale. So that means that the customer or potential customer has to see something that catches their eye. Click through to find a link, especially on Instagram and TikTok where you just have a link in the bio. Then you, they could find your store and browse. They can see the price and all those steps, right? So don't get me wrong. Social media can totally be an effective way to generate traffic for your Etsy store. Plenty of sellers have made it work for them. It's simply requires much more time astrology than the other methods that we've discussed out here. So I would strongly recommend that you start with the keyword optimization as your priority, then move into Pinterest marketing and then move on to social media. If you want to continue to find traction, of course, you can make those accounts ahead of time, but be aware about where you want to spend your time first. So if you do want to use social, one of the struggles that you will encounter is that creating content is a little bit difficult. You don't want to just keep showcasing your products over and over again. It can be a little repetitive, especially if the digital products kind of public the same. So of course, mockups are photos of your product are very effective. That is one great tip of content you can post. But you can broaden what you share with the aim of creating content that is noteworthy, shareable, and capable and receivable might not be a burden, but you know what I mean? Some ideas you might want to consider, you could share quotes about your business, testimonials, reviews from your customer when they start to come in. You can share photos of yourself if you are branding your store as I am a designer and use my business, if you're comfortable with that, you can share your workspace and how you use it. Images that are relevant to you or inspire you. Things that your audience might find relevant to your interests. You can share a little video clips if your products in action or you designing them. Little hacks and tips share a little gains, challenges, would you rather any sort of thing that encourages people to engage with your account that helps it keeps showing up in their feeds. If you're working in a nice, it has a very clear visual accompaniments, then you want to find some appropriate stock images Navy to share. In addition with your captions. For example, if you're in the wedding niche, you may want to share photos of ceremonies or decor or winning activities. As always, like we said before in the other lesson about licensing and copyright, make sure that you are using photos with permission and are providing credit where it is required. The key for creating social media content is to keep in mind who your specific customer is, what sort of content they like, and what will keep them engaging and being curious. But what you're offering, what if social media is challenges is that your wonderful creative content has an expiration date. You might make a very clever posts with a great image, really cool graphic, great caption. But people are only going to see that for a day or two before it just becomes another square in your feed. So many people who are running SE stores, especially digital products doors, they're doing this as a side hustle, right? You may be the index U2. You're not just doing this for fun, it's because you actually want to make some profit off of it. So I suspect that is the case, that your time is very precious and limited. You want to make sure that you're spending it wisely and you're investing in marketing efforts that are actually going to pay off. That's why I really recommend evergreen marketing tactics. Evergreen, this simply refers to content that never really expires. Pinterest is a platform that cultivates a lot of evergreen content. And I know this from my own experience. Back in 2017, I ran a blog where I posted lifestyle content. It wasn't a very strategic blood, but it was just a personal passion project. Edit, enjoy it. So I started using Pinterest around the same time and it created a couple of pins, my blog, those shared them a few times that I stopped working on that blog and I got busy with other things and forgot about it. However, Pinterest never forgot my content. Five blog posts from that era are still bringing in a lot of traffic on a daily basis thanks to how well pinterest has shared that content. So I ended up putting up some affiliate products on those blog posts and now they generate a small budget income. So that's pretty cool in my opinion. This is not a foolproof system and successes definitely not guaranteed. I don't want to promise anything false. Now all of my blog perspect collection have seen that kind of success. However, I never cease to be amazed that like four plus years later, Pinterest is still generating traffic for my family abandoned block. So this brings me to suggest that creating a website or blog seemed around your store or niche could be a good idea. This is a great way to create evergreen content that is helpful, relatable, and promote your products as a solution. So in the next lesson, we're going to discuss websites a little bit further, along with some other platforms where you can sell your digital products. 13. Beyond Etsy: Hopefully now it's clear to you why Etsy is a great place to test out your digital product business concept. So low cost of entry and organic traffic make it really easy to get started there. If you tap into a great niche and you find some success, you might start thinking about expanding onto other sales channels. There maybe some nice specific marketplaces that you can discover. For example, certain website providers offer libraries or stores for designers can sell their tablets to consumers. Even though these platforms might be small, they're highly specialized and they're already selling the same product that you create. Everyone browsing for them will be looking for that exact thing. So that's one option. In these cases, the differentiator, how you stand out from the crowd, becomes the uniqueness and aesthetic appeal of your product. Another general website for some digital products is one that we've touched on a few times in this course called Creative Market. This is a large marketplace, specifically for digital assets, and you may see more high-quality products here then on Etsy just mentioned digital things. However, it is slightly more difficult to create a store on Creative Market, you have to provide a portfolio or link to an existing store during the application process. Luckily, a successful Etsy store makes a great case for you. Email. So wanted to create a basic portfolio, maybe social media page that acts as a portfolio for you as a designer. You don't necessarily have to link name of the page with social account. You'll see that Creative Market has a lot of categories for you to list under and a thriving economy of product bundles, as we talked about, this platform targets designers and other people looking for assets for commercial purposes. So things like planners or worksheets might not be as successful here as templates, custom files, illustrations, or stock photography. So aside from marketplaces like that, another approach to selling online with your digital products is to create your own website or online store. If you purchase a domain, as I recommended before, you can connect that domain to a website via a number of different cyclin platforms. There are two main ways to build a website. You can either use a site builder that comes with templates in an easy to build, or you can build a website from scratch. So the first option is easier, but will cost you more month to month. And there isn't as many customization options typically. The second option is typically more affordable and can get you a much more custom website, but it requires time and knowledge to build or a budget to hire a web designer. So examples of site builder websites includes Shopify, Squarespace, WIX, and square up. The most common self-hosted option is WordPress. Wordpress sites can be turned into e-commerce platforms using plugins. Most popular option is called WooCommerce. All of these options have associated costs. Builders with e-commerce functionality usually cost 30 to $50 per month. Self-hosted websites are usually paid for a couple years in advance. You get a bigger discount for the longer you select. These services can break down anywhere from three to $10 a month paid up front. Other fees you may incur are the domain name which sometimes comes with the hosting package, pay-to-play plugins, site building tools. My favorite is called Elementor, SSL certificates or analytics for marketing tools that integrate with your website to make it run smoothly and efficiently. So there's a lot that goes into building website. Of course, if you've no experience in this thing, going with this site builder option could be better. But again, I recommend doing this once you have quite a lot of sales and Etsy don't kinda before you've proven your concept. Now no matter which platform and method of building offset you choose is really important that you have a sound marketing plan. Unlike the platforms with organic traffic like Etsy and Creative Market, you won't have any initial traffic to your website. It's up to you to figure out how you will get people to see it. So setting up your website with good keywords and metadata is still just as important as on the platform, but it does work a little bit differently. For example, you want actual product titles on your own store rather than that string of keywords that you use for antsy, your copywriting skills, which basically just means all the text on your website is to serve a dual purpose of connecting with your customers and providing the right keywords for search engines to index your site. Your marketing plan needs to include an SEO strategy. Now the SEO stands for search engine optimization. To put it really simply, this is how easy it is for search engines like Google to find your site and figure out how to categorize it. A good way to improve your SEO and your website is to add a blog. This provides the search engines with lots of keyword rich content to examine, to help them understand better how to promote your website to people. Now creating a blog to accompany your ESI storable generally rely on the same principles as social media that we talked about. Your content should engage your target audience, should demonstrate the benefits of your digital product and show them how to use it. For example, if you are selling wall art, you might want to write a post about where you go to a custom framing done or review some framing or printing services, right at those revenues for arranging a gallery wall or how to decorate awkward spaces like hallways or stairways with artwork. If you sell printables for children, you can write about rainy day activities such as products as one option. So if you have a cohesive brand, a great range of proven products and the drive and time to market your store. Setting up an independent online shop could be a great investment. It's definitely a bigger job and just running an Etsy store because it's simply requires more hands-on management and promotion. So that's why I recommend starting with Etsy and staying alert and measuring your stores potential for becoming a bigger brand. Now we have reached the end of my guidance on this subject, and I want to end with some words of encouragement for you. As I've mentioned, perseverance is truly the key for finding success. The products continue to try new things, adjust your listings and research new keywords, niches, and product types for your store. A digital product store is not a set it and forget it kind of business. However, if you have gotten this far in the course and have found anything we've found exciting or interesting, then you'll probably find that this is the type of business that you enjoyed developing a scene grow. So thank you very much for joining me here on this course. If you enjoyed it, I would really appreciate if you left me a review or if you have any feedback, you can send that my way. Now I wish you all the success in the world with your digital product business or whatever you decide to do with these skills that you learned here, happy creating, and good luck.