Transcripts
1. Introduction: We've all received greeting
cards over the years. My special occasions
are all around. Chances are pretty good that
if you're a creative person, you've looked at these cards and thought I could design
something like this. Well, thanks for the thriving
digital product economy. It's really easy to
get started creating and selling printable
greeting cards yourself. Whether you are an artist
or an illustrator or just someone with really good
design skills or a Design. I, then there are
some great tools and methods out there that can
help you get started today. In this course, we're
gonna be looking at both the technical
design skills behind these products and
covering the basics of running this kind of
business on Etsy specifically, by the end of this course,
you should have a ton of inspiration and understand the step-by-step method
for making these products. All that's left is to start uploading them onto
your online store. My name is Rebecca and I'll be your instructor
for this class. I'm a graphic designer and owner of multiple online stores. And they also have a
huge passion for helping creatives find ways to make money from their unique skills. I also designed and sell
greeting cards both as printables and as physical
cards online and in stores. So if you're ready
to get started and dive into the world of
printable greeting cards. And let's head into
the course together.
2. Market Overview: The greeting card
industry is huge. In 2020, this market
was estimated at $6.2 billion in just the USA. As consumers, we can think of lots of occasions
when it would be appropriate to buy and send a card like
birthdays. Thank you. Notes, invitation,
sympathy cards, just e.g. but a problem that most
consumers are noticing is that greeting cards are
getting so expensive. It's not uncommon to
find them priced upwards of six to $10 in
your local stores. And this has given
rise to the industry of downloadable
printed home cards, which are a common products
sold on websites like Etsy. There are a lot of advantages
to these kind of cards. They are usually
more cost-effective than the printed
store-bought ones. They will usually have more unique designs and you can use search features to find really niche cars that
suit your purpose. You're also supporting
a small business owner and an artist when
you buy these cards. So that's a good,
feel-good aspect. And really importantly,
you can print and reuse the current design as a consumer as many times as you
like in the future. So you're not just
buying one card, you're buying a
multi-purpose cart. Because of all of
these advantages, the market on Etsy
for principal cars is big and demand is high. Now when it comes to selling
your products on Etsy, There are a few ways that people approach running their stores. Most people won't focus on a single to kind of
design or card. They'll offer them for a lot
of occasions or purposes. However, it's more common to specialize in one
sort of art style, especially if you are doing
the illustrations yourself. So this could be line
art, watercolor. It can be acute animal is your focus or another
kind of signature style. And of course, there are lots
of exceptions to this rule, but this is just
something to consider when deciding how to
approach your collection. Most cards are sold as singles, meaning one card per listing. However, a really
good way to build out your store inventory and to capitalize on big fans of your work is to
create card bundles. This means creating a listing, selling multiple cards at once. These appeal to customers
who are looking for value and are willing
to spend a little more to get a lot in return. You can group these
bundles by occasion, by theme, or some other
kind of determiner. E.g. you could list all your birthday cards
and omega birthday bundle. The buyer would never
have to worry about buying another
birthday card again. Alternately, you could bundle all your cards with
ducks on the front. If you had a customer
who really like stocks and wants to give
them out for every occasion. Adding these bundles
will not only help to appeal to a certain
kind of value shopper, but will also help you extend your store's inventory
in a practical way. This is helpful if
you're starting out with a new shop and don't have
a ton of products to list. The more products in your
store generally means you'll show up in more
search results on Etsy. It's also easier and more
cost-effective to run ads for products with
a higher price point. So a bundle of cards selling
for a higher overall price than a single card could make your advertising
more competitive. Now let's move on and talk about some of the
different niches and styles of cards
that you could consider designing and selling.
3. Styles and Occasions: Let's go over some of
the popular kinds of principle cards that you
might want to try selling. You might want to think about the kinds of cards
that you'd see in a supermarket or a shop where they
sell greeting cards. So we'll have the
usual suspects. Birthday, graduation, thank you. Cards, sympathy cards, new baby, new house, new anything really? Wedding cards and
blank anytime just because carts generally
we're looking at any kind of life event
or annual milestone that people celebrate within
each of these categories. You can also get
more specific by narrowing down on
different demographics. E.g. birthday cards can
be for specific ages or milestone birthdays
for different members of the family like mom, dad, brother,
grandma, et cetera. There are lots of different
kinds of graduations. We have kindergarten,
elementary or middle school, high school, college,
university, grad school. Wedding cards can
be tailored for different kinds of couples
based on their genders, ages, if this is the first or second wedding,
anything like that. So there's a lot of diversity
within these categories. Printable greeting cards offer a really specific advantage that commercially
printed cards do not. You can target very niche
kinds of occasions. A lot of overhead like
printing and shipping. Niche occasion cards can
be a great thing to offer. And this is where you need to
do a little bit of research combined with reflecting on
your own life experiences. For inspiration. E.g. a. Congrats on your new
French bulldog card, might be a bit too nice
to find in the store, but someone looking for this exact kind of occasion would be delighted to find
the perfect card on, on your Etsy store. You can also target more
humorous events or create a card to make light of an inconvenient or
annoying situation. Like a sore you got dumped card or that job didn't
deserve you anyway card. These more humorous
or snarky cards can be really trendy and
have some advantages. Marketing as they
are inherently very shareable on social
media or on Pinterest. When you're just getting
started with design work, it could be easier to focus
on the basics like birthday, thank you and condolences
to get a feel for the practice before diving into more complex card concepts. For our class project, I'm going to recommend
that you start with a birthday card. So keep that in mind as we get started on the
design lessons next.
4. Designing in Canva: We're going to be using Canva to design our cards
because it's free, accessible online and really
easy to get started quickly. If you've used Canvas before, then you should be familiar
with the setup steps. But if you haven't, we'll go through the steps
one at a time. Feel free to pause the
course video to complete each step if you're creating
with me in real time. So let's go over to a screenshare
and set up in Canada. I have Canvas open here
in my web browser. And to get started,
we're going to go up to create a design in
the top right corner. Now since everybody
who's gonna be purchasing these
printable cards, probably printing it on
their home computer. We want to use a
really standard size so that it'll be very
consistent for them. And that's usually going to be a standard eight-and-a-half
by 11 inch paper. Because we're going to be making a card that folds in half. We want to make sure
that we're designing this in a horizontal position. So I'm going to go
down to custom size. I'm going to pick inches. Then we're going to do 11
" wide and 8.5 " tall. When I click on
create new design, you'll see that this gives us a horizontal piece
of paper to work on, which is the size of a
sheet of printer paper. And just as a matter
of good practice, I'm going to name this
file birthday card. So now let's set up
this document so that it's ready to
put a design in. In our next lesson, the first thing we need
to do is decide what size of card we're
going to be making. And I'll just write this
on the screen here. The most popular card sizes
are going to either be five by 7 " or four by 6 ". Most cars that you
get at the store will be five by seven, but four by six are
also popular and it's very easy to get envelopes
for both these sizes. So it's up to you what
you want to design. But in most cases, I go with a five by
seven inch card. Now to further demonstrate you don't have to do
this on your screen. I'm just going to show
you a rectangle here. So we want to have our
card with two sides on it. So this is going to be, I'm going to pull
this down to 7 ". If you can see the
little black box there, it shouldn't be the size. I want this to be 5 ". There we go. So this is roughly the
size of the front of our card or not even roughly, it's exactly the size. And we're going to be designing something
with a front and a back so that
one-to-one prints it. They can cut out
along the shape, fold it in half, and
you have a card, you have to remember that the front of the card is going to be on the right and the
back is on the left. I'll put these two
boxes side-by-side. And we'll change this one
just to a different color. And now select both
and center them. This is just for
demonstration purposes. We'll show you the
first step in a second. So to clarify, front of
the card is going to be on this side and the back of
the card is on this side. This is how we're
going to be designing our card when it comes
to the next step. But we need to visualize
this in order to set up our template
for the customer. So I'm going to erase all this and this is where we're
gonna get started together. What we wanna do is create a box that is a dashed
line to show where the cut lines are that measures the full size of
that big rectangle, including the front and back. I'll close that some more room. So the way to build that rectangle is
first I'm going to tap R on the keyboard that
brings up a rectangle shape. Now to make this into
a dashed line box, we're going to go up to
the left-hand corner. We have first the color. This is the fill color of the document or the
rather the shape. And we want it to be invisible, so I'll just pick colors, none. Then we go over to the next
one is the border style. And I'm going to pick
this wide dashed line. And I'll pick the thinnest
weight, which is one. So y dashed line, border weight one,
no corner rounding. We have a box that pops up
here that is the border color. I'm going to click on that
and pick a medium gray. I don't want it to
obscure the image, but I do want it to be present for cutting guides if needed. Now you may see I added
a second page here, but that's just for
my own reference. I have the finished design
below for me to reference. So don't worry about that. We have your shape right here. If we zoom in on it or make
it bigger rather you can see it has dashed
lines all around it. So now we need to
make it the size of the front and back
greeting card combined, which is going to be 7
" tall and 10 " wide. So the same height, but double the width. So I will just grab these nodes here and make it the right size using that little
black box as my guide. So this one needs to
be 7 " right there. And this is going to be
10 " wide, like that. Now, I will just
drag and center this until those pink lines
tell me it's centered. There we go. So now we have the shape that is the full greeting
card laid out flat. And in order to see
where the middle is, we're going to do this just
for our own reference. And you see that
I have the ruler here at the top
inside of my design. If this isn't showing
up on your design, then just go up to File here in Canva view settings and click
on Show rulers and guides. I'm going to go to
the left-hand ruler here you see my arrow. My cursor turns into
a double arrow. Click and drag, and you
get this purple line, which if I drag to the middle, we'll turn pink and snap to
the center of our design. So this is going to just give us a reference point as to where the middle is and dividing the front from the
back of the card. It won't show up when we export the file and it won't be
in the final product. At this point, we are basically ready to put your
card design in, but there is some space
around the outside of this card and I like
to use it advantageous. The two things I like to
put in this space are my shop name or where they
should go to find me. And then a quick instruction
on what to do here. Most people can figure it out, but it is nice to just
be a little bit clear. I'm going to tap T to add text. And I'm going to type in
my business name first. So there's lots of ways
you could do this. You could put my shop name.z.com if you want to redirect people
back to your Etsy. If you want them to go to
your Instagram account, you could go at Sharpe name on Instagram or if you have your own website
with the URL there, whatever you like, really
you can customize this if you have a logo that would
fit in this space up here, maybe you could do that instead. I'm just going to go with
this text right here. I will make it a
little bit bigger. And I'm just going
to put it on top of this one or this side rather than I will duplicate it and I'm gonna put it
down here as well. I just think it looks
nice and balanced. Style this however you like. I'm going to add a second
text box and I'm going to just write some really
quick instructions. Cut along the dotted line, and fold your card in half. And I'll pop that right there. Duplicate it and put
it down below as well. You can feel free to
get very creative with this and make this branded, make it colorful
however you like. Just remember that this is
the part that's gonna get discarded when they cut
off the card design. So you don't need to make it
too precious at this point, ready to start putting in
your artwork or your text. So let's move on
to the next lesson and start decorating this card.
5. Design Your Card Exterior: In this lesson, it's time
to design our actual card. And before we get started, a couple of notes on how we're going to be exporting
this later. You can design multiple cards in one can for document
if you like. All you need to do at this
point is just duplicate the page and you can make
multiple cards in one document, which is very quick and easy, especially if you're doing
variations on the same one. But note that it is often
easiest to export these cars as a PDF document
because they're very compressed and easy
to deliver via Etsy. But if you were to go
to share, download, export as a PDF right now, it's going to export all
of these in one document, which is often not
what you want. You'll want these
cards to be saved as individual files so you can
sell them individually. In order to work around this, you either can
create your cards in separate Canvas documents
or when you go to export, you're just going to
select the pages 1 at a time and export them
individually like that. It's a little bit more
time-consuming either way. But in most cases you're
not going to want to have all of your cards in a
single PDF document. You'll want them individually. So with that in mind, we're
just going to create one card here today and it's going
to be a birthday card. Now in order to make
sure that I don't accidentally move
around these elements. I'm going to select
them. All right, here. I'm going to group them. And I'm going to lock them with this button right here
at the top, right. That way I don't accidentally
drag them around. Actually, I just move
the guide in the middle. There we go, but I can't
move these elements around. So that's just going to help us stay on track for
our design work. Let's work on the front
of the card first. Now this dashed line
is really helpful, the one that we put
in the last lesson, because if your card is white or even the back
of your card is white, There's no cutting
lines around the shape. But if your card has a
solid color background, then you don't really
need the dotted lines. But there's no harm
in having them there. So let's say that our
front of the card is solid and the back of the card is going to be white
just to save on ink. Because remember that if people are printing these at home, they are using their home
printers most of the path, the kind that ink is a
little bit expensive, so we don't want to be wasting
a ton of ink if necessary. I will start by filling in
the background by adding another rectangle with the
R button on the keyboard. And I'm going to
fill this one to be springtime green color. I think I'm gonna do a
rabbit on this card. So first, I'm going to line it up the front
of the card here. And I will make
it five by seven, just watching the guides in that little black box,
a little too wide. So I'm just going to
zoom in on the design. 5.7. Here we go. So now we can see it is
just barely peaking around. You can see the
dotted line around the edge of that design
and that's okay. It's going to be the
part that gets cut off. I will just drag that so it's
a little bit more centered. And now you can see the
very faint gray dotted line around all the
edges of that box. Remember this guy in the middle
is just for our purpose. It's not going to show up
when we export the file. So zooming back out, now, our front of the card is
green, the back is white. If you are an artist
or an illustrator, or you have design assets
you want to bring in. And this is a great
time to upload canva, drag and drop them in. Personally, I do
a lot of my card designs on Procreate
on the iPad. I like to do the
illustrations there, and I just draw them in a five by seven inch
canvas on Procreate. And then I import that artwork. You can then place it into
the template like this. But you don't have
to be an artist to make a greeting
card really cute. You can use the
elements within Canada. So that's what I'm gonna
do for this demonstration. And remember, the Canvas
licenses do allow you to use their
elements, their pictures. But you just need to know
if you have a free or a Pro account and you can totally do this
with a free account. I'm just going to search
for bunny, rabbit. And I'm going to go to
graphics right here. And so we have a bunch
of options here, and some of them have
the little crown icon, which means Pro. Now I personally do have
a Pro account so I can use this particular
image in my design. The thing to know about using Canvas licensed
graphics is that you can create products to
sell using free or pro, if you have the
Prime membership, as long as they are an editable. And what that means
is a printable, like a greeting card
is an editable. You're not selling
something that a client is going to open up, modify, and then edit. If you were selling something
that they could edit, you can only use
the free assets. Okay. So that's a point of confusion
that some people have. And I see it come up
a lot in my classes. So I just wanted to clarify. The free assets. They're good for everything. You can make products
to sell with them. You can make templates with
them, whatever you like. Canva templates specifically. But the pro elements
with the little crown, you can only use if you have
a Pro membership like I do. And then only if you're making items that
they can't edit. So I hope that's clear. This bunny rabbit in
this case is good to go, but I'm going to stick
with free elements just because I want it to be a tutorial that everybody
could follow if they like. For our cute little phrase. For this, I have the phrase
happy birthday in mind. And I see these little peaks almost like marshmallow Peeps. I'm going to try and
use this design. This is. Colorful picture, but
I think it's cute and definitely eye-catching and will be nice when I make
a mockup of it later. And I want to add
another design. I think I want to add a rainbow
just because we're doing such a colorful design
like this right here. That was kinda the
idea I was thinking. Actually, I don't
like that at all. And I have a better idea how
to incorporate the rainbow. So I'm gonna get
rid of this and I'm gonna go with texts
from here on out. So I'm going to
hit the T button. And this is my first textbook. I'm going to write
the word happy. All in caps. I want to find a really
bold font for it. So I really like
league Spartans, one of my favorite
fonts in Canada. So I'm going to make
it a bit bigger. I'm going to increase
the spacing slightly. And I'm gonna put it right
on top of our bunnies. Here we go. I'm going to just duplicate
this and write birthday. Want that in all caps as well. I'm going to just shrink
it down to fit it into the space. There we go. This is just a really basic
idea, just to show you guys. So I'm going to add in my rainbow effect
by changing each of these letters individually. I'm going to borrow
the colors from this set of bunnies here. So I'm going to select that one. Click on the text color up here. If I scroll down, it'll show photo colors that I've
used in this design. So that's the color of blue. Select the 0 is
the pink, yellow. Just repeat that pattern. And we'll do it
again with birthday. There we go. Now we have a cute bunny card and you see that it actually looks harmonious now
because we've used the same colors in the
text and the design. So it's a little bit more
visually appealing this way. And this kind of card
with this rabbit design, it's a little history. So it could be a card marketed for people with
birthdays around Easter, or people who really
like rabbits, or people who like
pastel colors. So it's a lot of options. Now at this point, you
could just be done, but I like to add some
branding to the back. Again, if you have a shop logo, you can put it in this space
right here or halfway up. That's typically if you
look at greeting cards into shops will have their branding and one of these two places, you can always just
add something cute. So let's just pretend
that I don't have a logo and I'm going
to just add a heart. And we could use kind of like this little
sketchy heart here. We'll make it smaller. Roughly to the center
of that design, or this half the
back of the card would hit T for text and write my shop name. Right there. I will duplicate that and
maybe put my website. So my shop named fc.com. I'm gonna make this a
little bit smaller. That's just a very basic sort of little branding
tag at the back. You could add your
social media handles. You could add a
copyright statement if this was your own artwork, especially I would add
a copyright statement which I would just use
the copyright symbol. I'm on a Mac, so it may
be different on a PC, but if you do the textbox, textbox, if you do Option G, it will add a copyright
symbol to your text. And then you could
do my shop name. Obviously not make this massive. And you can put that
down there as well. Some people like to
get creative and add more artwork on the back, continue the color
to the front back. But like I said,
just keep in mind, people are printing this
with home printers. So a ton of design in the back of the card
may not be necessary. But ultimately this
is our card design. And at this point you could
stop export this file, put it on Etsy and
you're good to go. And the majority of
cards that are being sold on Etsy are just like this. So they are an exterior card
only with a blank interior. Of course, you can also design and interior to go
with your card. That would maybe be a little bit more of inexpensive card. And it's going to require
providing more instructions to your customer so that they
know how to print one side, take the paper out, flip it, put it back into printer, get it on the inside,
lined up correctly. This is a little bit
of trial and error, even the best instructions, you're probably
still going to have some customers who get a little confused and maybe
waste a sheet of paper, but that's just the nature
of printing at home. So in the next lesson, I will show you about designing
the interior of the card. But again, it is optionally, you could always just make
cards just like this. If you like.
6. Designing 2-Sided Cards: In this video, we're
going to go over how to make an interior for your greeting card in
case you want to do a more deluxe style that also
includes a quote inside. We are going to be
creating the interior in the same canvas document
as the exterior. Because if you are going to be selling it as a single card, you'll want to be giving
the customer both pages. So to get started,
we're just going to duplicate the first page. And then I'm just going to
select everything inside. And remember we have locked all the key components
and the outside Delete. And now we have
another clean template for the current interior. We're going to be doing a
similar alignment where the left we have the front
inside of the card, which typically doesn't
have any writing on it. And on the right
we have the quote or the texts that you
are going to include. So I'm just going to hit T for text and just make up a
little saying that you might want to find inside their help your birthday
is a jump in good time. Not exactly poetry, but maybe because
with the bunny theme. And also you can put our artwork inside this card as well. You can do picture
on the interior, anything you like really. But just keeping in
mind card conventions, the interior is usually just
playing with some text. Now a couple of
things stylistically, I'm going to do
differently with this card then with this page
rather than the exterior. First, I'm going
to select all this as we locked and
I'm going to unlock them so now I can fit them
and I will also ungroup them. Now the first thing I
want to do is change the instructions because this is not the side that I want them to be cutting off
of as their guide. I'm going to change this to print this page on the
reverse of the card front. And I will make sure that says
the same on both sections. Now, in theory, when you are printing this, you
print the front, then you flip the paper and then you print the back and
it should all line up. But in my experience, not all printers, great job
but aligning everything. And the concern that I have here is about this dashed line being very slightly visible on the interior of the card if
you just printed it as is. It's my personal preference to delete it for the
interior of the card. Now, I would recommend for your first one printed
on your home printer if you can give this a try and see how the
alignment works for you. But I find that you don't
actually need the dotted line on both sides of the paper because you only need
to look at one way cut. And I just think erasing
it on this side, it just keeps things
a little bit tinier. If you want it to minimize
this sign even more, you could erase your shop names since it's already
on the other side. This instruction on the
very edge, top and bottom. And that could be your
interior of the card as well. So it's not terribly difficult
to create the interior, but it does require
extra steps and maybe half of the
person buying the car. And like I said in
the other lesson, this is not how the majority of the ones on Etsy are designed. So you could choose
to do interiors as a way to
differentiate yourself. And then also your
customer has the option of not even printing the
interior if they want. They could just print the
outside and not do the inside. So it does create a more versatile card
in that regard as well. But let's say that we're
all done designing here. We are going to go
to share download. And if we were doing just this, a single card front, we will just download page one. If we're doing both,
we can select both. And I'm going to
flatten the PDF. And what's that that is going to do is make all of these elements combined into the
document rather than clickable in a PDF. That might sound a
little bit confusing, but I find it is
simpler for customers. It also, like it says here, it helps it print properly. So I choose to flatten my
PDFs for greeting cards. I will just hit download. It's just going
to take a second. And there we go. We have the PDF downloaded
right here to my computer. And this is the file
that I would put on the Etsy listing when I'm
creating it on my shelf. Now there are a few things
about greeting cards that you may want to note when
you making an Etsy listing. So let's go to the next lesson and talk about
those listing tips.
7. Listing Tips: Let's go over a few things
to keep in mind when listing your printable
card on your Etsy store. If you're looking for more
detailed instructions on setting up a digital product
shop on Etsy in general, I have another course for that. And this lesson is
just going to focus on the details relevant
to printable cards. As far as the
deliverable items go, you can simply add
your PDF file to the listing and that's all
your customer will need. You can upload a maximum of five items to a digital
product on Etsy. So you could consider
adding in a separate PDF with instructions if you feel
like your design needs it, or you could include a thank you note to
your customer with a coupon code or just links
to your social media. If you were doing a card bundle and want to sell multiple files, you might want to consider
putting the files into a zip folder so that you can include weigh more than
five products total. Now, if you've never sold
digital products before, then the listing images
might be something that you're not really
sure how to approach. Let's hop back into Canva for a minute and I will show you some quick and
easy way to create images for this kind of product. I've opened up a new
canvas document here to create our image
listings for FC. And the size that
I like to use for image listings is right up here, but I will take it
in the screen as well and make it a lot bigger. And this is in pixels
because we're working on a digital image right
now rather than inches. So the size that
I'm using is 2,700 pixels wide and
2025 pixels high. So these are the
dimensions that I use for Etsy listings in Canada. In order to make some mockups
with our greeting card, I have taken a cropped image of just the front of the card. So basically I took a screenshot of the
PDF on my computer, cropped it to just be
the front of the card. So I'm going to import
that here into Canva. So let's delete that. We have our front with the current or
happy birthday card. There are a few ways
that you can make a mock-up for this product. The first one is to just create a image with
a drop shadow. So I've clicked on this picture, edit image up here
in the top left, then go to shadows. Now for digital
products like this, I like to do two shadows. You can play around. Sometimes people like
to use backdrop. I like to use glow. I just use it on the default
settings so I apply that. And you just want to wait till it's finished saying saving paused because I find it can glitch out
if you go too soon. So now it's saved. And then I will go
back to shadows again, and I will add a drop shadow
in addition to that. Apply. So now we have this card that looks a little bit more
three-dimensional. We have the little shadow on the side and the big
shadow on the bottom. In addition to this, I can go up to elements
and type in envelope. And you can go to photos. There's actually some
photos of envelopes here. Actually, I'm just
going to go up and filter out only the free ones. It turns into a trimmed one. It looks like this
is the only option. I will just go with
this brown envelope, which still looks pretty nice. You can actually edit it. I'm just going to upset
this a little bit. Saturation. Make it a little
cuter. Would abuse position up in the top-right and send it back
behind our card. Set it at a nice angle, and put it to the side. Select both and center that. That makes it a
little more clear. This is a card and you can
put it with an envelope. You just want to specify in your texture and your product
listing that it's digital, you don't actually
receive anything. But that should be clear
when your customer is purchasing it because there
is a flag on these things. This is, it's a digital product. At this point, you can
add a backdrop that could be just a solid
color if you wanted. Or you could add a texture. Sometimes the popular
ones are like a marble. You can drag and drop
that into the backdrop. There's usually some
colored ones that are a bit more interesting. Pink one to compensate the card. And then you can add
text around this. You could add a little badge. I would suggest if you're
going to do a little badge, hit C for circle. I'm going to make it white. And then drag it down
into the corner. Then you can add text on
that like digital download. It will make it bold. Rotate it a little, and put
that on little sticker there. So you don't have to do
something like this. But there was a time when Etsy, when it was harder
to distinguish between digital products
and physical ones. So sometimes it's a nice
little reminder just to add a little badge or
something like that. You could do printable
card, anything you like. This is one way, again, customize it to your branding, make it look cute for your shop. To. This is one way that you can build a mock-up for your card. Another option, we're
going to add a new page, and I'm going to re-add
that happy birthday card. And click on this and we're going to go up to
Edit Image again. Instead of using the
shadows feature, we're going to use
smart mockups. So this is a partnership that
can pass with this month. Smart mockups feature, I guess. I'm going to scroll down. They have lots of different
types of things you can put your picture on,
but they do have cards. So in this section
I'm just looking for cards that are that
horizontal alignment. I'll try this one. And it's going to automatically
put your photo in there. At this point, I
like to wait until the saving is paused, is gone, and it's done saving because sometimes these
smart mockups glitch for some reason
if you've Iceland before it's done saving. But now it's done so we can
fill up the listing image, photo size like that. Now in this particular case, this card and the neon colors don't look nice with
this background, but you want to play around with the different options they
have in Smartmockups. And if you want to create multiple photos
for your listing, Etsy lets you do up to ten, so you could try ten
different mockups. And a third option
is you can go into elements and look through
their greeting card section. I've got the free only
toggled on here again. And you'll see a
lot of these cards, just our mock-ups straight up. So you can scroll
and try and find a blank one that
looks the right size. So here's one that looks
right size for my picture. And I will insert
happy birthday again. Then it's just a matter of
rotating and lining it up. You can even make it transparent
just to help with this. Line it up as best you can. This is a DIY approach
that people did before. Smart mockup is
partnered with Canva. But even the smart mockup
doesn't have a ton of options. We'll just put
that back at 100%. So we're almost on the money. They're pretty close using the arrow keys to adjust
this a little more. They're not bad. At this point. I can actually add in a shadow, maybe just a glow. It's not bad. Not
bad for a mock-up, at the very least, if your car does not have a solid
colored background. So e.g. we could use
a different test. So this is just an image
I have in my library, but this is just a
picture as an example, this is a goose drawing. I did. Let's say that this
was your greeting card and you had the white
background on it. Just go to Edit Image and use the background remover tool. I'll just take a
second from there. Pretty good. I'll hit Apply. And then you can
reposition white card in the mockup like that. And if you want, you can even make it very
slightly transparent just to make it look a little bit
more part of the photo. Because the highly saturated makes it look more like
something sitting on top. So that's another
option if you have a white background photo. And those are three
different kinds of listing photos you can make
for your greeting cards. In terms of your
product description and title for your listing, you'll want to follow good
typical Etsy procedures. These are areas
where you can put in keywords for your
listings that people might be typing into
the search engine as he recently started including your
product description. It's searchable
Hubbard area as well. So it's a good idea
to make sure that all of your sales
copy is well-written. I recommend including
information in your descriptions such as suggested occasions
to give your card. Recommended people who might like to receive your card, e.g. this curve is perfect for blank. A short explanation
of what people will be receiving
upon their purchase. E.g. when you make
this purchase, you will receive a PDF download that you can print
and cut at home. And also include any
frequently asked questions or comment points of
confusion that you encounter. And this might be
something that you add later on if you find
that you're receiving a lot of customer requests
or questions on Etsy. Remember that the metadata
for your listing, your title, description,
and keywords, et cetera. These are aspects that you can change over time and experiment with if you're not
seeing the traffic that you'd like
on your listings. So you want to refresh
this from time to time. Don't let these parts of
your listing go stale, but also, don't worry too much about getting it
perfect the first time. Now that you've got
your listing images and your deliverables, you can fill in your
Etsy listing as usual with the information
that they asked you for. Let's head into the very last
lesson to talk about what else you could do
with these products and your skill sets.
8. Growing Beyond: After you've gotten the hang of designing printable cards, you might start thinking
about what's next. One option is that you can add a printed card line
to your store. You can take the same designs that you are already selling, print them as cards yourself, and then sell them with an
appropriately sized envelope as a physical product, this would likely sell
for a higher price plus shipping over
the digital version, preprinted cards target
a different audience than printed home card designs. And by doing this, you can greatly expand your
customer base. Obviously, this is going to be more work than just
selling digital files. But if you've created
a big collection of cards and are really passionate
about this industry, then this could be a good
option for you in the future. Another option is to look at the designs that
you've created and consider whether
they'd be applicable for any other kind
of digital product. This is especially
true if you're illustrating the card or
creating original art. Could it also be a wall print? Or maybe you could partner
with a print-on-demand company to sell it on t-shirts
or coffee mugs. There is a lot of options
out there once you have your graphic designs
created and ready to sell. Finally, you could take
a concept from one of your cards and expand
its product range. E.g. if you have a birthday
card with a dinosaur on it, and that sells really well. How could you create other party printables
with the same theme? Maybe invitations,
posters or signs, printable decorations,
party games and more. You can sell these items
individually and also create a big bundle with a sort of everything you need
for a party concept. If you are looking for
more instructions on building your design skills
and product inventory, I have a lot of other classes that I teach on these subjects. If you enjoy learning from me, let's meet again
in another course. We're at the end
of this class now. And I hope you've come away with some interesting new
skills and a ton of inspiration for
your online store. As I mentioned before, for our class assignment, I'd love to see
one of your cards. Feel free to upload either
the whole printable design or just a mock-up of
your listing to show us. If you'd like feedback,
I'd be happy to provide it and I can't wait to
see what you've created. If you have any questions about what we've
covered here today, please drop a note in
the class discussion and we can chat about it. If you've enjoyed
learning with me, do consider leaving me a review. I've read them all and
I really appreciate it. Good luck crafting your line of printable greeting cards
and happy creating.