Etsy Launch: How To Open An Etsy Shop Like A Professional Seller

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Tiffany. I'm a small business owner, creative entrepreneur, and seven figure Etsy seller. In this class, I'll help you to bypass the number one mistake I see most new shop owners make. Not just open your shop, but instead launch your Etsy shop in each of your Etsy listings to their fullest potential. Etsy as a marketplace provides an incredible opportunity to launch a business. When I started my business, I was a new mom working my day job full-time and working on my Etsy shop in the market creating digital nursery artwork. I had no idea the power of this platform, but it has completely changed my life. There are so many items you can sell on Etsy, everything from handmade ceramics, jewelry, personalized items, vintage items, praecipes, even digital downloads, and so much more. I know that right now is non-pristine time so many people who need to pivot into a new career or extended online arm for their business. Or maybe they have this amazing skill, but they just didn't know how to leverage it into a business and have no idea where to start. Whether you're a maker, an artist, designer, or illustrator, there's plenty of room for you on Etsy. Etsy can be the perfect launching ground for a new business. As a seasoned seller, I'm going to teach you exactly where I would focus today in opening a shop or publishing a new listing. I'll break down what matters most when it comes to getting sales on Etsy, and that is engagement. What is it and how do we get it? I'll share my six rules of Etsy engagement and teach you how to engage with the human shoppers who are trying to find you and me, Etsy machine that will bring them right to your virtual front door. Then come look over my shoulders as I actually opened a shop and follow along with my punch list of items to get it done in your pre-launch workbook. It's your dream to work for yourself, make your own hours and spend more time with your family. While creating what you love, Etsy offers you an enormous opportunity to launch the career of your dreams as a creative entrepreneur. If not now, then when? I believe in you and I'm here to show you how to put your best foot forward into the extraordinary empty marketplace. Come along with me, let me take you by the hand and let's launch an Etsy shop. 2. Welcome: Welcome to the class. My name is Tiffany Emery, and I'm a full-time Etsy seller, and have been selling on Etsy for the last six years through my shop, Adorn Studio. I am so thrilled that you're here. You've made a really important decision, getting educated about Etsy, and that's going to pay off for you in the long run. But before we get started, I did want to be sure to draw your attention to the projects and resources tab where you'll find your pre-launch workbook. This workbook is going to be your class project, that you'll be working through as you prepare to launch your Etsy shop. Now, we do have some work ahead of us, but don't let that sway you from digging in and getting started. I want to share with you the number one mistake that most new shop owners make, to encourage you as you prepare for your launch. What most of new shop owners do, is they basically have no idea how to launch a shop. The path that they usually take, is to gradually open their shop. They figure out their shop name and, then they open their shop. They wait a little while, and then decide to start working on a listing. Then they come up against listing items that they aren't familiar with, or maybe they just don't understand the importance of them. They half fill out a listing. Maybe they have some good photos, or maybe not, but they figured they can upload what they have, and then come back and keep working on their photos later. They usually have no idea what SEO is, which we'll cover in this course. That's completely left out, and then they publish their listing. Then after some time passes, they realize that their shop isn't doing so well. They'll do some research and figure out that they needed to work on their photography. To do that for a little bit, or they needed to optimize [inaudible] for the Etsy search engine so they work on that for a little bit, and little by little, by little, they gradually open the full door to their Etsy shop. Friends, this is a huge mistake. There are a number of reasons why you shouldn't gradually open your shop, and instead launch your shop strong and fully optimized. I'm going to explain them to you throughout this course. But just note that your pre-launch workbook will take you some time, and that's okay. In fact, it's a good thing. It's going to give you an edge over what most sellers do incorrectly. Just remember, it's not a race, it's a strategic launch. You need to prepare to fully throw the doors of your shop open, and launch for the highest probability of success on Etsy. Your pre-launch book is designed to walk you step-by-step through how to prepare for your launch. You'll be ready to launch your shop, and your first listing when you've completed all six sections of the workbook for at least one listing. You'll work through your workbook for each listing that you launch. The workbook includes the following sections: Section 1, Market Research; Section 2, Branding Basics; Section 3, Photography; Section 4, Descriptions; Section 5, Pricing and Shipping Structures; and Section 6, SEO Basics. Once you've completed all the items in your workbook, you're ready to launch your shop. In the last two lessons of this class, I'll walk you through exactly how to do that. So take your time and get it right for the highest payoff possible for all of your hard work. Now let's get started. 3. The Extraordinary Etsy Marketplace: In this lesson, I want to talk about what sets Etsy apart as a marketplace, because it's truly an extraordinary place to sell. Etsy touts itself as a global marketplace and community of sellers empowered to make a living doing what they love, while allowing buyers to find the unique items that they love. You can sell everything, from one-of-a-kind vintage items to handmade or designed-home decor, art, collectibles, digital downloads, clothing, jewelry, gifts, craft supplies, and much, much more. One of Etsy's guiding principles is to keep commerce human, and they are truly unique in this, both in the fact that the platform emphasizes handmade items with the human touch, as a cornerstone of their brand, but also because Etsy invites sellers and shoppers to connect individually through the buying process, and very much facilitates this process through the seller tools they provide. This involves a budding, creative entrepreneur to get incredibly close to their customers with lots of opportunity for direct customer feedback that can truly be priceless for a developing product line and company. Etsy customers regularly hand their sellers fantastic product ideas and improvements simply because we talk to our customers a lot. We customize items and we're able to get direct feedback for what shoppers are really looking for, that maybe missing in the market, in our shop, or both. Big-box stores would dream of this kind of connection, but it's simply not possible for them to interact with their customers at this level. So starting small and intimately can really be an invaluable asset, an edge as you launch your business, and Etsy is all about getting you close to your customers. Another thing that's extraordinary about selling on Etsy is that it provides both an incredible amount of traffic and also very affordable traffic. These are very low, at only 20 cents per listing to get started, and if you follow the link in the Resources, you can get 40 listings for free. Additionally, the Etsy platform is ranked 60th in the top 100 most visited websites in the world, in the world you all. Etsy brings over 69 million unique shoppers annually to its platform and receives nearly 500 million page visits. All this to say there's a whole lot of traffic available through Etsy. It's an incredible opportunity for creative entrepreneurs to test their products in such a booming online marketplace. You don't have to hire a developer to build your own website or worry about driving your own traffic. Etsy has an undeniable amount of traffic, which means you can get your products in front of millions of people and you can do so very, very affordably and quickly. Not only is the Etsy marketplace a huge source of traffic to your shop, but it's not just any old Google or Amazon traffic. It's extremely targeted traffic. Etsy shoppers are a target market for makers and artists alike. Etsy shoppers are known to value items that are unique, hand-made, crafty, and personalized, among other things. Etsy also has a huge digital market, where you can create passive income selling all sorts of digital downloads; everything from art prints to invitations, printable planners, digital wallpapers, calligraphy practice sheets, fabric patterns, fonts, mockups, coloring pages, and a whole lot more. A huge variety of items sell on the platform so the products that sell on Etsy are by no means homogenous. But the core values of Etsy shoppers and their interest in finding unique items that they can't find anywhere else is universal. This is great news for makers, artists, and designers coming to the platform because that means your target audience is very likely on Etsy. If you know anything about audience-targeting, it's not about talking to every person. It's about talking to the right people for your products. While almost all of us google, not everyone shops on Etsy. This means that while competition is still high, it's not nearly as high as in other parts of the web because Etsy is drawing millions of customers who are known to value unique, handmade, or vintage items. Now that we know Etsy is an incredible global marketplace because of its ability to draw us close to an incredible amount of our target customers very affordably, let's address how in the world Etsy actually does it. Because Etsy is such a great platform, there are lots of sellers and lots of listings to compete with. So how does Etsy determine from 81 million items in over 3.7 million active shops, which items are the best items to show for any given chopper search? To understand that, we need to start by understanding the Etsy search algorithm, which we'll do in the next lesson. 4. What Is The Etsy Algorithm?: In this lesson, I want to break down what exactly is the Etsy search algorithm. To do that, we need to first acknowledge that the Etsy marketplace is largely powered by a buyer search in the Etsy search bar. This is how shoppers usually approach the platform to find the items they're looking for. Now, there are some other ways that they can shop by following editors picks or filtering, but most shoppers find the items they are searching for or simply by searching for them in the search bar and that's what we mean when we talk about Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The search bar is Etsy search engine and the words that shoppers type entity Etsy search bar are called keywords. When this happens, the SE search algorithm has the rather daunting task of sifting 15 through millions of listings to deliver bag just the right set of listings that are most likely to be purchased for this search by this specific shopper. How in the world does it do that? It does that in a two step process. Step 1 is really a simple matter of matching up the keywords that a shopper searches for with listings that have those keywords in the specific places that Etsy looks for them. There are four places that Etsy looks for those keywords, they look in your listing title. This is the name of your listing, listed in large type just under the shop name, sales number, and star ranking. They look in your listing tags, these are keywords added at the back end of your listing, you get 13 of them. On the front side of listing, they show up at the very bottom of your listing and can sometimes show up as related searches. Etsy tries to match up keywords to your attributes, these are extra details that are specific to your category. They act just like tags, but they're located in a different place on the back-end of your listing. I'll show you exactly where they are when we open a shop towards the end of this course. They also aren't usually seen from the front end of the listing itself, but instead are found in the various filters that become available when a shopper is searching within a given category. Lastly, they look in your listing categories, this is exactly what it sounds like, the category of your items such as jewelry. But within each category are several subcategories and you can select whatever subcategory is most relevant to your listing. For example, if I was selling clay pendant earrings, I would choose the category dangle and drop earrings, which is inside the subcategory of earrings, inside the big category of jewelry. Each of those categories act just like tags. In fact, categories are found in the exact same place as tags, down at the bottom of the listing as the first few tags. It's a simple keyword match game between a shopper search and these four places. Etsy doesn't have to find the shoppers keywords in all of those places, it can show up in any of them. But if it doesn't find them in any of those places, then that lesson is cut from the search results. Think of it as a first cut at quickly eliminates or cuts every listing from its search database that does not have the shoppers keywords in the listing. Listings that lack those keywords are not relevant to the search, this is what we mean when we say that our listings need to be optimized for search, SEO again, means search engine optimization. All it means is that if there is a search you want to be found for like handmade clay pendant earrings, then you better be sure you have those keywords in your listing and specifically somewhere in your titles, tags, attributes, and categories. Now, that Etsy has eliminated all the listings that don't match the shoppers keywords, it has the still daunting job of ranking all the listings that are left. By ranking, I mean, which [inaudible] are shown on page one and what you're going to be shown on page 50 and what listings get to show up at the very top of Page 1 versus the bottom of Page 1. We do know that buyers are much more likely to buy items that are on Page 1 and at that near the top of Page 1. Etsy would want to rank the remaining listings in an order from most likely to sell to this shopper, to the least likely to sell to this shopper. Etsy has to have a way of ranking the listings to determine that likelihood. It does so by considering a number of factors called relevancy factors, I created an acronym to help you remember them and also remember this two-step process of the Etsy search algorithm, I call it the taller test. I call this the taller tests because I want you to think about each of these relevancy factors as little boost that can make your listing taller in the sea of remaining listings. To stand out above the crowd and get ranked higher in search the taller the listing, the closer to Page 1 for a specific shoppers search. Remember it by T, titles and tags and A, attributes and categories. These are matched to a shop or search and at this point there's a cut, the rest of the letters represent relevancy factors. For the ranking portion of the algorithm Etsy considers location, the location of shops in specific areas such as EU, Australia, and Canada can impact their relevancy. All this means is that Etsy bring shoppers from these countries may prefer to be shown shops from these countries, likely due to shipping costs, custom fees, etc. They factor that into irrelevancy, if you are a shopper for one of those countries, location is not a relevancy factor for shops in other countries such as the US. If you're a US shop, this doesn't even apply to you. L stands for listing quality score. Now, you may hear me refer to this as your LQS, this is an internal score given by Etsy to your listing based on how well your listing performs in search. Well, it seems that result in purchases are known as listings that convert, which means they convert shoppers into buyers. How well your shop does that affects how relevant you are for any given surge, also how high your ranked among your competitors. E stands for experience score; this is an internal score given by Etsy to your shop based on your Etsy shops record of customer service and policy adherence. Your reviews are very important here, as well as any cases or issues brought against your shop from shoppers that factor in. Etsy wants their shoppers to have a great experience on the platform, they're scoring you based on how good of a job you're doing it that which can determine how your listing ranks among its competition. R stands for recency, this is simply how recently an item was listed or renewed, every time you list an item, it's brand new, it's very recent. Every time an item is purchased, it's also renewed, which means it's recent. Well, it seems that have been around for awhile without sales will not be as recent as new listings or recently sold listings, which can impact how your listing ranks among its competition. T stands for translation, this one's pretty straightforward. Etsy will show shoppers results that match their search and language settings. E stands for engagement history, this is actually the engagement history of the shopper, meaning what if they clicked or liked a purchase previously? Etsy uses machine learning to analyze your listing in the context of the shoppers history, the technical word for this is called context-specific ranking, or CSR. In layman's terms, Etsy is using the information it knows about what listings the shopper is previously engaged with, and then gauging how likely your listing is to make a buyer out of the shopper compared to your competitors. It's complex and driven by machine learning and the shoppers history of engagement, which we'll talk about a lot in this course. S stands for shipping price, this one is actually for US customers only. Etsy tells us that offering free shipping to the US on your listing or a free shipping guarantee on your shop, which means you offer free shipping if anyone spends $35 or more in your entire shop will give you a priority placement in search on the Etsy app. This is a big one and it's somewhat controversial, but we'll discuss it in detail later in the course. T stands for tag keyword, order and placement. Now when I say tag, I'm referring to all the places where Etsy does that initial keyword match, your title, tags, attributes and categories. You'll remember that the first step is that you have to have the keyword somewhere in those places and in some order to match the shopper search. But then Etsy uses the actual order and placement of those keywords to determine how relevant your listening is compared to the other competing listings. For example, let's say a shopper search for watercolor, floral monogram. Now, I saw this listing and my shop, and here's the title and these are the tags, and these are the categories. This listing is highly relevant for this search because I have these keywords present in the exact order that the shopper is searching for them, watercolor, floral monogram, and my title. This keyword is too long to be a single tag since tags must be 20 characters or less. I have the broken version of this tag because I have both floral monogram and watercolor in my tags. Take note that the tag, monogrammed floral and floral monogram are not entirely equal. The word order matters and the closer match you are to be exact word order, the more relevant you are to the search. Also, the fact that I have these three keywords in both my title, in my tags indicates that this is what's called a focus long-tail keyword for this listing. I'm telling Etsy that I'm extremely relevant for this search by the fact that I have used these keywords in both my title and my tags. Keyword order along with the path that the keywords used in the shop research are placed in multiple places in my listing makes this listing highly relevant in terms of keyword SEO. Again, these are all factors that Etsy uses to determine if Holocene is relevant and determining a relevancy rank. In the next lesson, you'll learn why this two-step process of the Etsy algorithm drives us to not just open our Etsy shop and not just publish a listing, but to instead launch our shop in our listings for the highest engagement possible. 5. Why Launch?: In this lesson, I'm going to show you why we launch. Launching means that you wait to open your shop and release each of your listings until each listing is fully optimized. This is opposed to the idea of gradually opening and working on your listing once it's already published and out in the world. There are multiple reasons why you should launch your shop and your listings and not just open your shop or just publish your listings and gradually work on making them the best that they can be. As I explained in the 2nd video of this course, most shops will not launch. They will instead gradually open, which is a huge mistake. Let's dive back into the reasons Etsy may find your listing relevant to a shopper search and I'll explain why this is such a huge mistake. New shops and new listings have advantages in the algorithm. I'm going to say that again. New shops and new listings have advantages in the algorithm. Etsy tells us that they will not factor in your listing quality score or your experience score when you're a new shop or a new listing. This is so huge but people don't understand it. What this means is that for a small period of time, when your shop is new and/or your listing is new, you have the ability to compete with big shops, with big sales, and big five-star reputations because Etsy doesn't count your LQS or your experience score against you. But in time, they will. If you haven't leveraged your newness when you first open during that time to build up your LQS, which you do by turning shoppers into buyers, and build up your experience score, which you do mostly by getting good reviews, then you're giving up a huge advantage and are creating a much tougher hill to climb for yourself as a new shop or a new listing. Then later when you come back to work on your shop to bring it up to speed to the place where it needed to be when you first opened, now you're not new. You've lost your advantages. Even though you may improve your SEO through titles and tags or you may add some better photos, you're now on your own to have a listing quality score and an experience for that can compete with the market. The market is fierce. One of my shops has over 6,000 five-star reviews at the time of this recording. I have all star listings that have gross millions of $. There are lots of other sellers who are very successful on Etsy with lots of proven listings. All is to say, the listing quality score on those proven listings is going to be through the roof because those listings convert and the Etsy machine knows that. But when you're new, Etsy throws you a bone and says, "We don't really care. They're new and we're going to give them a shot." If you do well when they give you that shot in the former shop reviews, then you'll get more views. You do well when you have a listing that engages the Etsy shoppers. Engagement is being measured on your listing when it's just a new little baby listing, even from a new baby shop with no reputation to stand on. We don't know how long they give you that shot. Furthermore, your LQS and your experience score are never given to you. These are just backend metrics that Etsy has and they keep them to themselves as to where your shop falls. You see, once you've lost your newness, you've lost a great deal of control. It's highly important to leverage your newness, take those boosts while you have them. Also take this opportunity to realize that where you need to focus as a new shop or a new listing is really clear. Location is out of our control. LQS and experience score are free or neutral for new shops. Recency is built into new listings because you're new and translation is out of your control. What's left is a focus on that first cut matching of your title tags, attributes, and categories to the searches for which you want to be found. Coupled with offering free shipping if possible. We'll talk about this. Focusing the rest of your time on making your listing highly engaging. You create a strong history of engagement. How clarifying is this for a new shop or for any shop releasing a new listing? Based on the TALLER TEST, the first cut, it's really easy to see why you should launch. It's almost a no-brainer. Simply don't give up your advantages. Now remember, Etsy is using machine learning to analyze your listing. Machine learning is the part of the algorithm that is personalizing search to each specific user or shopper. Now I've heard it said that we as sellers don't have any control over machine learning. That it's so specialized to each buyer's preferences. That how can we possibly influence what happens in the machine learning component of the algorithm? Well friends, not only can you influence what happens in the machine learning component of the algorithm, but you must influence it in order to drive your listing to make sales. Machine learning is driven by shopper engagement. The Etsy machine is constantly learning what listings to show shoppers based on their history of engagement with shops and listings. This means that we do have control over how our listings perform in this part of the algorithm based on how engaging our listing is. In the next lesson, we're going to talk all about engagement. What is it and how do we get it? I'll be sharing my six rules of Etsy engagement for any shop or listing launch. 6. The 6 Rules of Etsy Engagement: In the following six lessons, I'll be sharing my Etsy rules of engagement. These rules will help to guide you as you create your listing. Our job as sellers is to create the most engaging listings for the human shoppers on Etsy that we can possibly create so that the Etsy machine learns that we're a great listing and will in turn, put as in front of more shoppers, which it does by giving us views. This is how you educate the Etsy machine. Its love language is human engagement. More importantly, the Etsy machine starts taking note of your listing within just a day or two after you listed, which means your listing should be fully optimized when you publish it, not worked on for weeks after you publish it to bring it up to speed. So to start, what is engagement? Engagement on Etsy occurs anytime a shopper interacts or engages with your listing. A shopper types a search inquiry into Search, and is shown a grid of ordered listings based on what Etsy deems to be the most relevant listings. An Etsy shopper can engage a listing by clicking it, favoriting it, adding it to their cart, and/or purchasing it. This is engagement and the hierarchy of engagement, the purchase or checkout is the highest form of engagement and the one that we are all of course striving for. But clicks, favorites, and add to cart actions are all promising actions that occur prior to a purchase and are also valuable data for the Etsy machine that you're educating. Engagement and purchases will drive more engagement and purchases. This is how the sales ball gets rolling. So if we fail to have an engaging listing from the moment we launched our shop and publish our first listing, then we're slowing that process down significantly. Launching your shop is like rocket fuel for your shop. Etsy may only give your listing 50 views that day. But if you're listing is optimized to be relevant for the buyers who are searching for it, and it's so engaging that you make a sale from 50 views, you'll get the machine's attention with that. That's a two percent purchase rate or conversion rate, which is what the machine cares most about. Again, to calculate your Etsy purchaser conversion rate, you take your number of views for a listing and divide by your number of purchases for that listing. Etsy will show you this metric in your stats for each listing that you have, and it's the most important metric regarding how successful your listing will be. The machine is learning and calculating how many times does it have to show your listing for any given keyword search before you will give it a sale. A one percent purchase rate or conversion rate is standard for marketplaces such as Etsy when using the formula above, dividing views into purchases. Anything above that is good, show the machine a two, three, or four percent conversion rate or higher, and over time, you'll start seeing your listing move up on that relevancy rank quite quickly. Being highly relevant and highly engaging from the moment you click "Publish" on your listing is a great strategy for moving sales your way, which is another reason why we launched our listings fully optimized to be taller and also highly engaging. In the next six lessons I'm going to share with you my six rules of Etsy engagement. As a seasoned seller, these are the components that I would never think of launching a listing without, making sure that they were all on point. They are: one, create a standout, marketable product; two, create a trustworthy brand image; three, take scroll stopping photography; four, write descriptions that eliminate questions; five, set competitive pricing and shipping structures; and lastly six, understand Etsy search and research your titles and tags. Think of these as six spokes on the wheel of engagement. When all six are working together, the wheel rolls smoothly. But if we leave any spoke broken or unattended to, then we're in for a wobbly ride and are failing to fully optimize our listing and therefore reducing our chances of educating the Etsy machine from the very beginning that we have an excellent and highly relevant listing that will produce high engagement. Remember, our goal is to move a customer from search all the way through to a purchase. These six rules of engagement, all are working together fully optimized or your best chance at doing that. Follow along your pre-launch workbook as I lay the groundwork for what you'll need to do to set up your listing with all six of these engaging areas working together. This is how you'll launch a listing, and remember don't launch your shop until you're ready to launch at least one listing, otherwise, you're giving up that new shop advantage. 7. Rule 1: Create A Standout Marketable Product: The first rule of Etsy engagement is to create a standout marketable product. In this video, you will learn what it means to be marketable, how to think like a shopper, how do I market gaps, and tips for product development. The big question you need to answer to determine if your product is right for Etsy is this, is my product marketable? What I mean by marketable is that your product is something that shoppers are actually searching for. This may seem obvious, but I've seen many shops bring products to market, and yet there was no market for them on Etsy. Spending a little time on Etsy searching for similar products, yours can quickly tell you whether or not your item is actually in demand on Etsy. It's really easy to check if your product is marketable. We simply need to research the market. Be sure to think like a shopper and type some search terms into the Etsy search bar that you would use if you were trying to find your item. Now, pay attention to that first page of those search results. A marketable item will have some competition, meaning there will be others selling similar items. This certainly doesn't mean that they're selling identical items, but there should be other items that would fall into the same general category of your item. Here are some questions to answer in order to determine your marketability. On that first page of results, are there a lot of items? Are there successful sellers with lots of reviews selling those items? Keep in mind that a shop can have a lot of reviews, but that doesn't mean that they are selling a lot of that particular product. To see what product a shop is actually selling, you can check in two places. The first is their shops' sales, if it's clickable than the shop is chosen and make this information public. However, there's an option for sellers to keep this information private. If you encounter a seller with private sales information then you'll need to visit their reviews to see what products are being frequently reviewed. This will show you what they are actually selling. If you see a lot of reviews for a single product in the same category as yours, then that's a good piece of information to indicate that this item is in fact selling on Etsy. Take note of any top sellers in your product category as you may want to revisit those shops when it comes time to do your SEO research and less than 12. You can also use a tool called Marmalead into research. So search terms or keywords you're using in your research that best describe your product and see their actual monthly search volume on Etsy. This is a great practice, but for product development and for refining your SEO, which we'll cover in more detail in lesson 12. I do offer a free two-week trial of Marmalead to my subscribers, which I'll link in the projects and resources section. Marmalead has several tools that help you see items that are trending on Etsy, and further researcher specific market to determine how strong it may be on Etsy. When it comes to marketability, there are a couple of areas where I see sellers really missed the mark. Many sellers are too specific about what their item is, and they miss the broader category that they're item is actually marketable for with higher search volumes. For example, perhaps you want to sell ceramic houses, and you do a search for ceramic houses, and you see some items being sold, but you really can't find any seller that's receiving a large number of orders for the search term, ceramic house. The seller then incorrectly decides that ceramic houses must not be marketable on Etsy, but that's not necessarily true. The seller has missed their opportunity by not thinking like the shopper, and why someone may want to own a ceramic house. They're missing out on some huge search terms that could be applied to the listing that immediately make it highly marketable or searchable, such as house warming gift or farmhouse decor for example. A shopper may not know that they want your very specific item, but they are searching in a broader category of items that your product fits into. Don't assume that your specific niche or very specific item can't do well on Etsy because it doesn't have high searches for that niche keyword search. We'll talk about this in more detail in lesson 12. But the more specific your keyword is, the less searches you can expect there to be for it, and that's okay. What's important is that you also think of how your product can fit into larger searches so you have relevant keywords available for your item, with a healthy volume of monthly searches. As you research, I suggest thinking in both narrow, and wide terms and considering how your product can fit in the Etsy marketplace as a whole. This is also a great practice for product development. If you don't have your product yet, you can develop a product based on what buyers are searching for and based on what is doing well. To be clear, this does not mean plagiarism. That's highly unethical and a very bad long-term business strategy, but paying attention to the marketplace at large to know what selling is a best practice for Etsy sellers, it can lead you to some great insights as to what's missing. Finding, what's missing or a market gap is actually how I came to the Etsy platform. I initially launched my business selling printable, downloadable nursery Walmart. I created that artwork because I was decorating my daughter's nursery and couldn't find anything that I liked or that I was really looking for at that time, six years ago. I was my own target customer, a mom to be searching for nursery artwork on Etsy. I knew my market was on Etsy because I was on Etsy, and there was lots of nursery on Etsy, and many successful shops selling it. But it just wasn't what I wanted. I launched a shot that had what's called a unique selling proposition or USP. My shop is based in watercolor nursery artwork available digitally in the specific styles, and color palette that I was looking for. As it turned out, so were a lot of other people. These are the opportunities you'd look for in the Etsy market. You're not reinventing the wheel, bringing something to market that no one is looking for. Remember, for my shop, I have a unique nurse shoe artwork to Etsy at that time. But nurse shoe artwork was already doing well. Being your own target customer and bringing to market what you find missing is the way many Etsy shops are born, and it works really well for a lot of sellers. Identifying market gaps is a great way to launch a successful product because you're launching something that has very little competition. You're also not copying what's out there. Remember our first rule of engagement is to create a standout, marketable product. You certainly don't do that by looking like everyone else. Bring you and your own unique point of view to your product, and create something that is different than what's out there in some way. This allows you to stand out from the competition and search and connect with the Etsy audience in a way that is different than other shops. Remember, different and unique is a good thing on Etsy. I just want you to be sure you have evidence of searches with a good amount of traffic behind them so that your unique item can actually be found by Etsy shoppers. Take some time and use your pre-launch workbook to complete your market research worksheet to ensure that before you bring a product to market, you are certain that it is actually a stand out marketable product, and you have the data to back it up. If it isn't, do your research and brainstorm it to determine what type of product you could develop that could be new and captivating to the Etsy audience. 8. Rule 2: Create A Trustworthy Brand Image: The second rule of engagement is to create a trustworthy brand image. In this video, you will learn why trust is a key component of success on Etsy, what a great brand does, how to tell your brand story, the brand basics you must have to launch an Etsy shop, and the importance of filling out your About section and adapting the Etsy's universal policies. Your brand is an opportunity for connection with your customer and a first impression. Brands have personalities and they evoke feelings. The use of imagery, fonts, color, and photo styling are powerful in their ability to make customers feel a certain way about your brand. Mainly, your customers can have an instant connection to your brand because it speaks to them, their aesthetic, or something they admire, but can also have the opposite effect and turn them off in those same respects. A strong brand can create customer loyalty, allow you to set higher prices over time, and create an association to your product as higher-quality, among other things. Good brands promote trustworthiness to their customers, and that will keep customers coming back time and time again. This rule of engagement is not just a logo, it's a brand image because your brand is much more than your logo. Your brand can tell a story and be very cohesive, acting as your lead salesperson in the human lists online marketplace at Etsy. You are a part of your brand, which means your About section should be filled out and you should have a profile image of your smiling face. Etsy wants its marketplace to be unique and to promote the humans behind its shops. But more than that, your brand needs to have something to say, a point of view, a look, feel, and personality. This is conveyed in your logo, shop banner, and any infographics that you place throughout your listing. It not only helps to sell your product because of the potential for customer connection, but it also provides a baseline for professionalism and buyer trust that is expected in the Etsy marketplace. Branding is a rather big topic that would exceed our time together if we were to really discuss all that your brand is and does for you. But for today, I want us to simplify this idea down to just two simple questions. One, what is your brand message? Two, what is your brand identity? What you want your brand to say revolves around your brand messaging. Your brand messaging is foundational and helps to dictate decisions when it comes to your brand design, as well as your unique brand personality and voice. Think in terms of what kind of impression you want your customers to have and focus on that big picture. Your message helps to let your customers know what is unique about your brand, your core values, and what sets you apart from your competitors. You can summarize this with a tagline or a deeper connection to your brand that you can write about on your About page. Think of words that describe how you want your brand to feel and write them down. Imagine your brand was a person. If it was, what would its personality be? Funny and sarcastic, serious, botty, boho or earthy, feminine, classic? Give your brand a personality and treat it just as a person who will be guiding your customer through your product listings because it does. As an added exercise, I recommend creating a mood board on Pinterest or a physical mood board of cohesive images that visually represent the mood or vibe of your brand. This can be so helpful to figure out what you really want your brand to say and convey. Get very clear about your brand message. As you build your board, you may find some conflicting ideas and that's a good thing and forces you to get clear as to which direction you want your brand to ultimately go. That brings us to question number 2, what is your brand identity? The visuals that come together to make up your brand image are your brand identity. These are your logo, your shop banner, background imagery, colors, fonts, icons, patterns, and any other visual items you choose to use when marketing your items. Take what makes your business unique and translate that visually into a compelling brand identity. Referring to your mood board can help you to figure out how you want to approach all of the visuals you'll be showing customers, from your photography to your font selections. Your logo should give your customers a quick visual connection to your brand. But remember, it isn't the whole brand. Think of it as a quick visual cue to everything in your brand messaging. Customers should be able to look at your logo and get a general feeling for what your company is about. But don't feel like your entire brand message must be visually shown in your logo. Some of the very best logos are often very simple, and when in doubt, simple is a good way to go. Your pre-launch workbook will help you to make the most basic style guide or style sheet that you'll need for your Etsy shop. A quick search on Pinterest for brand style sheet will show you examples of all that you can do with a style guide to create a cohesive, visual picture of your brand. Now, you don't need to create a full professional style guide. But over time, I strongly recommend getting as crystal clear as you possibly can about all of your brand visuals, and a finished style guide or style sheet ensures that your brand remains consistent and visually on point. Filling out your pre-launch workbook will give you the most basic style sheet to run with. At the end of the day, your customers need to trust that you are legit and showing up without a proper brand image is truly a sure-fire way to lose that trust and quickly call shoppers to click away from your listings. Additionally, the products in your shop need to make sense for your brand and should be relevant to each other in some way. If you're speaking to two completely different markets, then it's best if you put those products in completely different Etsy shops to avoid making your shop appear hodgepodge with many random items. For example, let's create a hypothetical shop called Wanderlust Weddings and say that it sells wedding decor. Choosing to selling items such as printable planners alongside wedding decor wouldn't really make much sense for Wanderlust Weddings. They would run the risk of looking very hodgepodge and random. Printable planners would be better suited in their own Etsy shop branded in a way that makes sense for that product. Unless the product was a printable wedding planner, then we can totally see how someone in the wedding market would find both of these products and this brand appealing. They make sense in a single shop because they're relevant to each other or to the brand in some way. We've all seen scary shops, whether it's a.com or an Etsy shop that looks like a bad yard sale. We know what it looks like when we find a shop or a brand that we really don't connect with or trust. Think about why that is. For the most part, it's usually a combination of lacking professionalism and also lacking a cohesion and presentation of your product in your shop. In addition, avoid some really simple mistakes that new sellers make, and be sure to fill out all of your About section and check the box that says you'll adopt Etsy's universal shop policies. Etsy tells us these matter in your experience core, which remember affects your search ranking because they affect a buyer's trust of your brand. Please just heed that advice and just do it, easy-peasy. To create the actual graphics of your brand identity, here are just a few places where you can find quality branding. For those lacking design experience, you can hire a freelancer to do this for you through sites such as Upwork and Fiver. There are also many Etsy shop selling services to create your shop icon and banner for you. Canva is a very intuitive drag-and-drop online graphic design platform that works with simple graphics and is great for beginners. Canva offers a free Etsy shop icon and banner maker which I have linked under the Resources tab. Those are the bit more design experience. You can find pre-made logo templates on websites like Creative Market. These logos typically require some Adobe Illustrator or photoshop experience to modify. Alternatively, you can make your own logo from scratch in your graphic design program of choice, or even hand-letter a logo and vectorize it or letter directly using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Regardless of who makes your brand identity, you are in charge of giving the visual direction to be sure your brand messaging carries through. That's why it's so important to be sure to use your pre-launch workbook to brainstorm your brand messaging and be sure it's crystal clear. I've also included the needed assets required to open your shop, including the dimensions of your shop icon as well as your shop banner. By the way, feel free to have fun with this. Branding can be a real milestone for a creative entrepreneur as you see your business idea literally start to come to life. 9. Rule 3: Take Scroll-Stopping Photography: The third rule of engagement is to ensure your listing has scroll stopping photography. In this video, you will learn the absolute importance of your lead photo for engagement, tips for brainstorming and engaging and on-brand photo shoot, how to ethically conduct photography research and why you should, the role of your secondary photos in one video, when to outsource photography, and sources for learning product photography. This one simply cannot be understated. We must get found in search through SEO, but the number one factor for getting engagement, those clicks, favorites, and purchases for your marketable Etsy product is your photography, especially photography of your first photo or primary photo. It is so key you guys that you make sure your first photo stands out in search. After typing in a search, shoppers search fast and quickly scroll through the list of items, only stopping if they see something that gets their attention. A lot of times sellers will take a photo and put it up on their listing only to find that the way the item was shot doesn't best capture the item itself when it's being viewed in that marketplace grid of listing by a quickly scrolling shopper. Save yourself some grief and do some product photography research. To start, I recommend that you print out your product photography brainstorm and research handout from your workbook. Write down the words that relate to how you want your product image to feel. Some props that come to mind are photography styling that you have in mind for your item. Feel free to reference back to your branding basics worksheet if that helps you. How can your items stand out from a page of similar items? Consider contrast, texture, color, and other design elements that may help your image to pop. Natural light will generally be your best friend for the best images, but also consider that photography is just another part of your brand storytelling. What setting, props, texture or background can best tell your brand and your product story that in an instant, can quickly connect to your customer. Be sure to do this brainstorming step before you carry on in your photography research to get all of your own ideas on paper. It's always best to create your own ideas before you consume the content of others, starting with your own ideas before you research your product photography, can help tremendously in making sure that your point of view remains unique. Next, head on over to Etsy search to generate a search that's relevant to your product. This will allow you to see how your competition is photographing this kind of product, paying very close attention to what actually draws your eye as you scroll. You may want to take note of this on both desktop as well as mobile. How an image is cropped can be very critical to how it displays in search. Remember that you are in a marketplace, so you can't simply throw your item up on Etsy and pretend that customers will be looking at your product in isolation. You must research ethically through the lens of market research, never with the intent to replicate anothers exact photograph, but understanding compositionally how your product or similar products photograph best to stand out from the crowd can be extremely helpful and save you a lot of time and energy as you prep for your photoshoot. In researching, here are some key photographic takeaways that you may observe; how closely you should crop your lead photos so that it will stand out, whether or not you need to use a model for your product, certain colors that draw your eye to a product, certain colors that blend in and cause a product photo to be easily missed, whether details are important or distracting, whether props enhance the appeal of the product or take away from it, whether any text or call out should be placed on your photo, whether a leaf photo with variations such as color or sizing is eye-catching or a total eyesore. These decisions are dependent on your specific market. There's no one size fits all formula to a winning lead photo. At the end of the day, it's simply must be engaging, and the best way to get engagement is to be visually enticing and stand out from what's currently out there. Consider what's working for others and how some of your own original thoughts from your brainstorm can translate to a stellar scroll stopping and unique product photo. For example, when searching in Etsy for an item like handmade soap, you'll see that there are several different ways that products are displaying. Some are style close ups with props, others maybe a colorful array of soaps filling nearly the entire image. Research will help you to identify the photographic style that's drawing your own eye, and you can take note of that in your workbook. Once you've established the style of photography that will work best for your lead photo, you can move on to planning your secondary photos. You will have the opportunity to have up to nine more photos for a total of 10 photos and also one video. Your video is without audio and can be up to 15 seconds long. The point of the remaining nine photos and video is to fully showcase your product and remove any questions from the customer's mind that may keep them from purchasing. I've included some of Etsy's suggest product photos in your workbook for your brainstorming purposes. But just know that these are just ideas, you can add whatever photos help you to sell your product to your customer. Does your product have variations or options such as sizing, colors offered, styles, etc. Etsy allows you to list items with up to two variation and also link a photo to each individual variation. Consider taking advantage of that if it helps you to make your product listing more clear. Again, think like your customer. Imagine what they would do if they encountered your product in a retail store and deliver that experience to them photographically. For example, imagine that I'm in a retail store and I come across this mug. What am I going to do with it? I'm going to hold it in my hand, I'm going to be able to feel the weight of it, I'm going to be able to pull the mug up close to my face and see the finish of the glaze where it's both smooth and rough, I'm going to be able to flip it upside down and see that there is a nice brand moment on the bottom, I'm going to look up at the display and see if there's other colors, or other sizes available, I might even ask a salesperson, is it dishwasher safe or can it be gift-wrapped? There's so many things that in a retail environment, customers have the opportunity to observe that you don't have an e-commerce environment. In your Etsy shop, your products need to be very visually descriptive in your photography. A video is a tremendous opportunity to show more angles, details, or even the process of making your item that can help to further sell your product. Etsy only requires you to have one photo to publish your listing technically, and the other nine, as well as the video are optional, but as a best practice, I suggest using all the opportunities you have to seal the deal with your customer on why your product is great and the ways that they can use it. It's also a great practice to include an infographic in your listing. An infographic is just a graphic where the focus isn't necessarily photography, but instead on information that you can use to clarify any critical information for the customer or eliminate any common questions or misunderstandings. Another great tip for new shops who do not have any reviews is to consider adding a grand opening graphic to your product photos with a compelling discount offer. Remember, you want to get those sales and interviews coming while you're still new, that's the whole goal as a beginner. It also immediately explains to your shoppers that you are a new shop and there will be more understanding of the fact that you don't have any reviews yet. The point is that a well-planned photoshoot will save you time and energy. I shall be ready to hit the ground running when it's time to photograph. You already know all the photos you really need to get engagement and also eliminate questions so that you stand the highest chance of getting the sale. Actually photographing your item requires some skill and there's no shame in hiring things out if you don't feel that you have the skill set or the time to acquire the skill set. It's a great time to be alive and we have so many resources available to us to learn new skills. I know I want to discourage you from doing so, but on the other hand, and just because we can learn these skills doesn't mean that we have to learn these skills. For some sellers, it's loads easier to hire out photography. Just know that it's a personal decision. If you are photographing your items, know that you need to really spend some time making sure that your photos look stellar. There are a lot of great classes right here on Skillshare that can help you to learn how to style, create a great flat lay and more. The right style of photography will depend on your specific product and the research that you conducted. I'm going to link to some great Skillshare courses in the projects in resources tab that will, in an hour or so, bring you up to speed on the subject that separates about 90 percent of the unsuccessful shops on Etsy from the 10 percent of successful ones. This is not difficult material, it's truly a basic understanding of lighting, times of day to shoot, easily accessible materials and equipment such as your phone. Also some upgrades available to you when you really want to level up for the best photography possible, along with some product styling tips. I want you to put your own flair into your photos and make them truly unique and appealing to your quickly scrolling shoppers. But I also want you to be aware of your shoppers choices, your competition, to ensure that you are more visually enticing them what's out there. Launching a listing with a scroll stopping first photo is like rocket fuel for engagement, especially clicks. Be sure to get this one right. Your secondary photo and video are the ones that move your customer from interested to purchasing and it's your job to get them there. Do the work in your pre-launch workbook and leave no stone unturned when it comes to selling your product photographically. 10. Rule 4: Write Descriptions That Eliminate Questions: The fourth rule of engagement is to write a description that will eliminate questions about your product. In this video, you will learn the role of your description, my product description formula, why Google matters when it comes to your description, how to write a description that actually sells, and other promotional uses for your description on Etsy. Now, we've already talked about eliminating chopper questions through our photography. The role of your description is to further eliminate any questions not yet removed through your photography and to further clarify any details and fine print. There is an important disclaimer in this lesson as a seasoned seller I feel obligated to share with you, and that is that most of your customers likely are not going to read your descriptions. Etsy doesn't make your description very easy to find, especially on mobile. It usually has to be clicked to even be opened, and most shoppers shop by photograph only. This is why I suggest infographics and any truly critical information about your item make its way to a photographic spot for the least amount of issues. That said, the customers that do make it to your description are normally very interested in buying from you if they've bothered to read it. It's not to be ignored, it just primarily should be redundant for what you've already shown in your listing photos and any fine print items. Your description ensures that every detail a shopper may need to know about your item is available to them if they choose to read it. Walls of text tend to scare customers, so you want to break up your description into an easy-to-read format. My description formula can be found in your pre-launch workbook. I like to start with a short descriptive keyword-rich sentence or two that describes my product and why my customer will love it. I include keywords in the first couple of sentences, not for Etsy search, but rather for Google search. Your Etsy listings are on the Internet, which means they can be found through Google Search, and Google reads your description when it ranks your listening in its own search algorithm. Etsy [inaudible] specifically that your description does not factor into their search algorithm, but it does for Google. That said, for Etsy, you should still write your short description to help sell your product to your customer. Keep descriptions short and sweet and to the point, but with professional language that helps you to paint the picture of why your customer will simply love your product. Next, I like to add some bulleted highlights about the product. Again, we're trying to move the shopper along further into the buying process. We don't want them clicking away because there was something about your product that simply wasn't clear. Dimensions of your item and any pertinent highlights regarding your item can be easily bulleted and found for customers scanning your descriptions. Consider your photos and what questions could remain for a buyer after viewing your photos, include these items in your description, remember that your customer cannot touch and feel your product. Play a game of 20 questions that someone may have about your product and check that you can answer every one of them in your product description. Your product description needs to be written for your customers who do take the time to read everything and want a very thorough understanding of your product. As previously mentioned, if you have any really critical information, I don't like to hide that in my item description. I'll make an infographic for it and add it to my photos. But your bullet point highlight section may reiterate some of your infographic information as well. Next is where I add in any fine print regarding my item. Your item may not have any fine print, and that's totally fine too. Fine print typically includes disclaimers. For my shop, this has to do with the variation found in screen colors versus print colors or the natural variation of wood grain and things of that nature that I want my customer to expect. You can essentially cover anything that pertains to your product but didn't make the cut for your photos or your other areas in your description. Lastly, you can use your description to add promotional information to your listing that can create further engagement for your shop. Some examples of this are; cross-promote your other listings or shop sections by linking them in a related listing section, promote a link to join your e-mail list if you have one, mention any coupon or discounts available and how to get them, also note that if you are short on product photos and have spots to fill, this promotional information can make for a great infographic to insert into your listing photos. Make sure you work through your descriptions to eliminate questions worksheet for every listing that you launch. Descriptions are not your most important element relating to engagement, but they are a factor and should not be overlooked. Between your photos and your description, a potential buyer should have no questions left regarding your item. 11. Rule 5: Set Competitive Pricing & Shipping Structures: The 5th rule of engagement is to set competitive pricing and shipping structures for your item. In this video, you will learn the importance of being market aware of pricing and shipping costs, how to incorporate shipping into your price, the difference between a shopwide free shipping guarantee versus free shipping per item, the importance of conducting pricing and shipping cost research, and the correct pricing formula that ensures profitability. When it comes to pricing your items and determining your shipping structure for the Etsy marketplace, the keyword here is competitive. Now, this word gets a bad reputation particularly in the artists community, and I'm all for community over competition, but when it comes to doing business in a marketplace like Etsy, one of the worst things you can do is to pretend that you don't have competition. Your shoppers know you have competition. They're simply called choices. You must be market aware of your shoppers' choices. You can have everything going for your listing. You've worked really hard and it's just a shame for it not to be successful because of pricing or shipping strategy that wasn't used. Let's start with how you can be competitive in terms of your shipping policy. Etsy has told us that their algorithm detects higher engagement. Actually, the highest form of engagement, which is purchases for items that offer free shipping. We know that shoppers are more likely to purchase if shipping is free. In turn, the algorithm is giving you an additional boost in search if you're able to offer free shipping and if I haven't hear where this home yet, please allow me to do so. You need every boost you can possibly get to compete on Etsy these days, but shipping is expensive. There's no such thing as free shipping, we have to pay for it. It's an expense. In order to offer it, you must add your shipping costs into your price and account for it as an expense. If you simply can't do that, then that's your decision and so long as most of your competition is following suit, then you'll likely be able to get away with that. But I will tell you that I think the tide is definitely turning where it will be harder and harder for shops to charge for shipping. Buyers have come to expect free shipping based on Amazon Prime's free two-day shipping guarantee and it is permeating the world of e-commerce like crazy. Before you say you can't possibly include shipping in your price, just be sure that your competition hasn't found a way to do it and that you truly must charge. Conversely, if your competition is charging for shipping and making sales, then you probably can too. A workaround for free shipping per item is to offer what's called a free shipping guarantee on your entire shop. This means that you'll ship any order $35 and over for free. Keep in mind, shoppers can bundle multiple items in your shop together to reach that $35 threshold, but it can be helpful for shops particularly who sell less expensive items that must remain price competitive and lower price points and can't as easily absorbed shipping costs. This feature can be turned on in the shop settings section of your shop once your shop's open. Now, let's chat about making sure your items pricing is competitive. Referring back to your market research worksheet where you identified some of your top competitors, do an analysis of what your competition is charging. You can do this manually through Etsy search and/or Marmalead can once again be your friend in determining the general price ranges of similar items in your category based on keywords. When researching, be sure to answer the following questions. For a similar item, what is the average cost from the most successful sellers? Are any popular sellers running sales or using coupons? Take note of the pre-discount prices as well as percentage discount being offered. Is your competition in your category offering free shipping or free shipping guarantee on their shop? How many days does it take the most successful sellers to ship their items? This is the processing time. Remember, customers will be viewing your product next to your competitions' products. Some shoppers only purchase an item if it's on sale. If that kind of shopper is your target audience, then you should consider frequent sales in your pricing strategy. If you're listing as full price and most of your competition is discounted, that's going to affect your engagement, same as shipping. If you're charging for shipping and most of your competition isn't, that's also going to lower your engagement. A lot of sellers fall into the trap of thinking that they have hit a ceiling with how much they can charge for their item, and they just simply refuse to charge correctly. The only one who suffers in that is the seller themselves, because creative entrepreneurs often make the mistake of undervaluing their work and cutting their profits short. I want you to set your pricing by first determining how much you want to make or how much profit you want per item. Mike Michalowicz is the author of Profit First. I'll link to his website in the resources, but I think he's really hit the nail on the head for what most entrepreneurs get wrong when it comes to pricing formulas. The traditional formula is sales minus expenses equals profits. Your profit comes last based on whatever's leftover and unfortunately, many businesses find themselves focused on profit last and finding there isn't much leftover or unfortunately, nothing at all. Instead, he suggests that the formula should place profit first. The correct formula is sales minus profits equals expenses. This ensures profitability, on a practical level what that means for me is that every time Etsy transfers money to my bank account, I already know that a set percentage of that is my profit, and that slides right on over into my profit banking account. Everything else stays in my operating account and it must cover my expenses. If I don't have enough, then I need to cut my expenses, not my profit and if I can't do that, then I need to raise my prices. This is how you determine your item's price. Your price is the sum of your profit, which should include your own personal labor, but not any additional help you have to pay, your material cost, any additional labor cost, shipping material cost, shipping cost, and a need discount cost. For example, let's say you want to make $10 per item. To figure out your price, you add in your material, additional labor, shipping materials, shipping costs, and if you're offering a discount, add in how much you will be discounting the item. In this example, our retail price is $30. We can offer a 20 percent discount on that price and our customer will pay $24. I've ensured that I will be paid at least $10 no matter what and if I choose not to discount, then I can either lower my price to $24 or increase my profit to $16 per item. You control your profit because you control your price. You don't let your expenses control your profit by allowing it to be whatever is left over or being unwilling to raise your price so that you're profitable. Use your pre-launch workbook to work through your pricing and shipping worksheet to ensure you have a competitive pricing and shipping structure in place for your listing. Be sure to price out any variations or options that you may be offering as well, including possible size variations or others that require different pricing. In the next lesson, you'll learn about our final rule of engagement and likely the least understood aspect of an Etsy listing, understanding search and researching your SEO. 12. Rule 6: Understand Search & Research Your SEO: The 6th and final rule of engagement is to understand search and have well-researched SEO, or search engine optimization. In this video, you will learn tips for brainstorming keywords, how to determine which keywords are the best keywords, how to compare keywords inside Marmalead, how to create your listing, title, and tags, and how to tag long-tail keywords that exceed 20 characters. Now, we already did quite a bit of background on the Etsy search algorithm in our previous lessons so you're well on your way to understanding the algorithm far more than most sellers who approach the Etsy platform. Because you understand the taller test, you already know that the only places you need to focus in terms of SEO are titles, tags, attributes, and categories when you're first launching. Categories and attributes act like tags and are best shown inside the back-end of an actual Etsy listing. I'll show you those in our final two lessons when we launch a shop. It's important to know that while categories and attributes act just like tags, they require no research, you simply select the most relevant categories and attributes for your listing from the backend of your listing when you're listing it. However, your title and tags will require you to do some research and lucky for us, this is not a guessing game. We have several places where we can find the best titles and tags. In the last lesson of your pre-launch workbook, you'll see that I've created a brainstorming page for you. This is where you'll want to, once again, think like you are a customer and start writing down the search terms that you think you would type if you were a customer searching for something like your item. Also, feel free to ask a friend or a partner for what they would call your item has sometimes you'll discover unique language that you may not have used as the creator of the item. Be sure to think outside the box in terms of occasions for which your item may be a great gift, materials you use, any trends where your item may have relevancy, etc. Then head on over to the Etsy search bar and type in various keywords to see what other keywords the Etsy search bar will auto-populate for you. Now, these are not necessarily the best keywords, I'll show you how to find those in a moment, but they are popular keywords and can be a helpful place to brainstorm from. Write any keywords down that are relevant to your item onto your brainstorming page that you think could be good so that you can further research them. Now, take a look at your biggest competitors on Etsy in your category and see what titles and tags that they're using. But just because they're doing well with a specific set of keywords, doesn't mean that you should use those exact keywords. I typically jot down just a few keywords from my biggest competitors' titles and also examine their tags which can be found at the bottom of their listing. Keep in mind, this doesn't mean I'm going to use them, they're just part of my brainstorm and I'll only use the keywords if I find compelling data to support that they're actually the best keywords for my listing. How do we determine which keywords are the best? Which one should we actually use? To do that, I use a best-practices tool called Marmalead to evaluate the keywords from my previous brainstorm and to find more keywords that I might not have found or thought of. Also, research each keyword to see which have the highest search volume and are the most engaging. Marmalead is a paid subscription and in my opinion, it's well worth the money. As I mentioned before, there's a link to a free two-week trial of Marmalead in the About section of this course and I highly recommend you check them out. I never launch a listing without running my SEO through Marmalead to ensure it's as good as it can possibly be. What's great about Marmalead is that it'll show you real monthly search volume, engagement, and competition for each keyword you research, which allows you to make quick work of determining the keywords that are most worthy of your item. There are many tools you can use a Marmalead to help you find and compare keywords. But in comparing them, you're going to compare keywords across three pieces of data: Number 1, how many real monthly searches does the keyword receive? Number 2, how much engagement does the keyword receive? Number 3, how much competition is there for that keyword? Meaning how many shops are using it and trying to get found for it? Marmalead has a color-coded system of green, yellow, and red to help you to quickly process through those three pieces of data to see where keywords are strong, green, average, yellow, or less than ideal, red, on their signature Marma-Meters. Here are some key elements to understand about how search volume engagement and competition level usually pan out among keywords: Number 1, the more search volume a keyword has typically the more competition it also has. It's harder to make conversions or purchases, sales from high search volume keywords. Number 2, long-tail keywords are defined as a very specific keyword phrase, such as watercolor floral art print. When you search for a long-tail keyword in Marmalead, you can expect that you will not see a large volume of searches for that phrase. However, long-tail keywords are strongly recommended because they have less competition and when someone does search for that and you are relevant for that, then it's much more likely that you will get a sale. Number 3, the key question about which keywords to ask yourself is this, for my product, do I use high search volume, broad keywords or low search volume, long-tail keywords, which is better? The answer is there's pros and cons to both, but I recommend launching your listing with a mix of both long-tail and broad keywords. Here's why. The entire goal that you're working towards is making a sale. We need to see your listing convert, we need to have listing quality score to be a good one, we need good customer experiences, which you can't give if you don't have any customers. If you use nothing but broad, high search volume keywords on your listing, then it could be very difficult to compete and you may get lost in that sea of competition. That's why using less competitive keywords can help you to get your first conversion faster. However, what I'm teaching you is to launch the best listing you can possibly launch and also that you are going to be briefly getting a boost in search where Etsy is going to be actively testing your listing out and I want you to get the most out of that testing period that you can. If Etsy starts giving you views for some of those high search volume keywords and you get engagement, then that's going to accelerate your growth. Big competitive keywords have high search volume and if you can regularly get shown on page 1 for a high-volume keyword and convert, then that's a really good thing. I want you to go for that. I don't think that it's good to shy away from big competitive keywords, especially when you've create an item and a listing that truly can compete for that keyword. The mix of high and low search volume keywords is where I like to be. Once you've conducted your research, you should have a list of a good mix of keywords that you can bring to your listing. Now, what do we do with these keywords? We're going to turn them into our title and our tags. From this list, we want to select one to two keywords that we really want to target and those keywords should be very descriptive of what our product is and should be at the front of our title. I like to use every character of my title, but I also know that my title will largely be cut off, especially on mobile. I want my title to be easily read and understood for the shopper. Craft a title that's keyword-rich but not keyword-stuffed and put your keywords into a sentence that is easily read by human shoppers. Use a seven-comma rule to ensure your title has less than seven commas to avoid being perceived as keywords stuffed. Any focus keywords that are in your title should also be in your tags and you'll be most relevant for those keywords because those are your target or focus keywords if they're present in both your title and your tags. Be sure to keep them in the exact same order and if you run out of tag characters, then you need to break up your keywords. Here's how you do that. If my title is watercolor floral nursery printable for baby girl nursery, then I would break that up to be watercolor floral, floral nursery, nursery printable, baby girl nursery. I would not want to flip girl nursery to be nursery girl because changing the order changes the relevancy rank. Once your title is fully incorporated into your tags, you simply need to add your tags in from your list of keywords until you have added all 13 tags. The same principles of overlapping keywords applies to any long-tail keywords that do not fit into a single tag. Once you've completed your brainstorm worksheet, research, and rank your keywords using Marmalead, you'll have completed our final rule of engagement. Again, there's no rush to complete your workbook, take your time and do the work to prepare for your launch. It's the preparation step that so often missed by new sellers and that's the big opportunity to launch big on Etsy. In the final lesson, come look over my shoulder as I launch a new shop and a new listing. This will help you to see the back-end of an Etsy listing and how your pre-launch workbook will aid you as you go. 13. LAUNCH! Part 1: All right guys, the moment we've been waiting for is here. We are ready to launch an Etsy shop. You're going to navigate to etsy.com/sell, and click this little button here, "Open Your Etsy Shop". Now, you will need an email address to do so. I am opening a new business here. I've created just a Gmail account to go with it. To start, my name is Tiffany. They start by asking your short preferences, and then it's like English. I'm in the United States and my currency is the US $. Selling is my full-time job, but you could select whatever applies to you. Then down here, just click the "Save and Continue". Enter your shop name. You can check the availability. It is available. If your shop name is not available, you'll be able to pick something else. I have some good ideas if your shop name isn't available. Let's just say if I wanted to do HeritageSigns and that was taken, then I see HeritageSignsStudio, HeritageSignsDesign, HeritageSignsGoods, or just adding the word shop or designer studio at the end of your brand, can be a way to have an Etsy shop with still your part of your brand name, but it's not necessarily the exact things. Let's just click on that "Save and Continue" button. Now it's time to stock your shop. You can see that Etsy is telling you to list as many listings as you can. This is true. However, it is definitely a quality over quantity thing as we've discussed. Take this with a grain of salt, you'll do much better releasing fully optimized listings. So add a listing. From here I'm going to add in my photos. You can change the photo order around and these should look familiar from your pre-launch workbook, but they by no means have to follow their exact recommendations. You can hold on shift and upload several photos at a time. These are my main photos, and then also have a section of infographics that I'm going to be loading. While those load, I'll also add in my video. These will just take a minute to load. If you may get any warnings about resolution, you'll definitely want to correct that. If all the specs that were in your pre-launch workbook, you should be fine. Our first primary photo is uploaded. This is a really important feature to pay attention to, this adjust thumbnail. What it is, is that it allows you to fine tune for what the shoppers actually going to see in search. If you click this, you can really see, you can see down here too what they're going to see. When we're talking about where your listing looks like in the sea of listings, you may want to bump up the size here. Meaning, just zoom in to get a better shot of your product or you may like this zoomed outlook. It really depends on what you're doing, and you could also test this. You could duplicate this listing and test different croppings and just to see what is going to stand out the most in search. Sometimes things look right here, and then when you actually look at them in search you're like, "Know what? I think that should be bigger." I'm going to go for this middle ground. I still want to see my props, but I think I want to see a little closer shot of my sign. I'm happy with that. I think that that stands out. I can still see the photo which has people on it, which I think people like to see people. Then I'm just going to determine what order I want to put my photos in, and this is just up to you. I like to think about what a shopper most needs to see. So I'm going to show a couple, really visually enticing photos. Then I'm going to go ahead and let them know they have a few size options. They have some stain options and some letter options. Then I'm going to get into my details. I actually want to crop this, because I can see a little bit of editing that I didn't take care of here. You can see that took care of that. This is my detail shot, and I think I want my font options to come after my letter options. Then get into some more details in with my size small and my grand opening coupon. It's not really a coupon, it's just essentially an alert, letting them know that they have a coupon. This looks good to me. You can preview your listing, but a lot of times they won't let you do this until all your fields are filled out, which is unfortunate, but you can mess with this, this order down the line. The next was video, you can crop your video. I don't really think I need to do that here. There's some helpful links to learn more about making videos that sell. I encourage you just to take a look at those. Now, we get these are now red because I had actually hit that "Preview" button, maybe I shouldn't have done that. They won't be red for you unless you hit the Preview button. But it is going to highlight out everything that we need to fill out our listing. To start the title that you crafted, I've got a Word doc, actually this is a Google Doc. I recommend typing out all of this information into Google Doc, just for spelling purposes and just making sure you catch any grammar errors and Google Docs will do that for you. Then you don't have to worry about that. I'm just going to copy my title over from here to here. Now, I have already played with this a little bit, and I've hit it on the head with my character account. You likely will have to refine your title or you might not have enough characters, or you might have too many and need to do some refinement here of your title and that is totally fine and to be expected. Who made it? This is just in about this listing. There is almost like a making sure that we are selling mainly handmade products, so I've made it, it's a finished product. But if you're selling supplies, then you would select "Supplies". If it's vintage or you recently made it, you have the pre-made inventory. You could select any of these items, so made to order. Now category, we talked a lot about category. This is one of your really important SEO areas. The reason why is, because it acts as tags for buyer searches. I'm going to just type in signs. When I do that, you can see it populated out in the home and living category, the home decor category, wall decor, wall hangings, and then signs. I would want to select "Signs", because that gives me all of these keywords. Whereas if I just put in home decor, then I'm not getting wall decor, wall hangings or signs. Be as specific as you can in your category, and remember that once you select your category, it's going to give you more details to fill out based on that category. In this case, I'm in signs. So you can see I have material, room, style, graphic, framing. If I were to type in jewelry here, it's going to give me some options. I don't know why it just want the pendants. Jewelry, it's going to give me options: charm necklaces, pendants, dangle and drop earrings, so be the nipple jewelry. Be the most relevant category that you can be and then select, then you see your attributes. Now, Etsy doesn't call on attributes, but they talk about them a lot, which confuses people. But these are the attributes. They're the additional details that come down, they're drop-down menu, so you don't have to brainstorm for them or anything like that. You just select them, and you want to select anything that's relevant. In this case you pick gemstone, necklace length, pendant height, pendant width, shape, style, theme. These are all going to just be whatever your category is. Again, my category is signs. So I'm sticking the signs, and I'm going to go through and fill out now my attribute section. My primary color for the sign, I would say is brown. Now, if you have a very specific color, like your product is lilac, you would select purple. If your product is blush, then you could still select pink. As long as it's relevant, don't select irrelevant things, but definitely select anything that could be relevant. I'm going to say my secondary color is white. My material of my sign is wood. This is actually a brand-new thing that they just released yesterday for the signs category to add that material. Which would essentially mean that I don't have to add wood up here on my title or my tags, but I'm going to keep it because I know that I want to be the most relevant I can be, and I want to see custom wood sign in my titles, in my tags, and in that specific order. This is a case of choosing to still include an attribute in my title or my tags, even though it is here because it's just super important. Now I can select it to five rooms where this sign might work. I mean, if you look at this sign, where could it work? It could work in a lot of places, actually in a home. Probably the most popular is going to be the entryway, I'm also going to select the living room. It could go into man cave, but I'm not sure that I'm going to show up for other items like that. It could go on an office, possibly in bedrooms since it's a marriage thing. I'm going to leave it at that. I'm selecting four of the five that I could select. Style, I am targeting farmhouse. I'm going to call it country and farmhouse. There's not really a specific graphic style this falls into it. It's a wood sign. It is unframed and it is a rectangle. I'm not going to include my dimensions here. I'm not going to because I offer multiple items. But there is an option here that if you do offer multiple items, you could add multiple dimensions. The problem is it takes up your variations. I only have two and you'll see when I get there, I have to cram a couple of things into there including my stain color. So this won't work for me, but it may work for you and it is great if you can use it here, I cannot. This is a horizontal orientation, I would say this is an all-season product. The occasion is going to be they do a good job of explaining this over here, but if it's designed for the occasion. So for example, graduation party decor is designed for a graduation party, not just any gifts that could be given for a graduation party, because then you'd fall into too many categories. If this is a wedding gift, as he's telling us, that's not really what we mean. We mean if this is a wedding decor or wedding, like something you would still look out. I could fall into that category, I don't really know. But I've got wedding already basically targeted the way that I want to target it and my titles and tags, but I'm going to skip that for now. Choose holiday, this is again the same idea. If you're selling a Mother's Day card, then your relevant for Mother's Day, not just any holiday that you could be gifted for. So this is not a holiday item. This is not any of these holiday items. The sign is not illuminated, therefore, the bold type. I'm not going to fill that out. Renewal, I'm going to select Automatic. You can definitely select Manual and a lot of people do that so that if they have any listings that aren't selling, that they will essentially expire. That's not a bad practice, I just tend to just leave mine at automatic. But you can read about that a little bit more here if you're confused at all. The type of item is going to be for me physical because this is a physically shipped item. If you're selling digitally, then you'll select this box and when you do that, you're going to scroll all the way down at the bottom and see that you now have this digital file upload area. You can add up to five files. Those files could be Zip files or they could direct to drop boxes. You aren't truly limited in only five files, if you need to get more of those bios to your customers, but there's five actual upload areas. I am not selling digitally here, so this is a physical item and as you can see, that box will not be there anymore. Next is going to be my description, we went over this in detail. I've just got it over here in my document and I'm going to cut it. One thing I like about writing my description out in a Google Doc is that these little like half's turn into fractions for me. Whereas if I were to type them over in Etsy they wouldn't. I'll just show you the difference, but I really like the ability to add in my little copyright thing here. Just looks a little more professional. I could adjust anything here. If I were just trying to type 1/2 in Etsy, it's just going to do that. Whereas if I do it in and Google Docs, it's going to give me that nice little fraction. There is very limited formatting available, I'm not sure why. It would be wonderful if they would give us bolds, or some itallics, or some underlines. But for whatever reason, Etsy doesn't do that. We are limited and this is what I've worked out to make it so that this item's description doesn't read like a block of text. It doesn't look as good as it probably would look if we had some of those formatting tools available to us. But this is what we're working with. This follows the formula that I gave you in the class, just with the bulleted highlights, fine print, and then some promotional items below. You can also click this and it'll show you a preview in Google if you want to see that. If you have any production partners, if anyone is making any thing for you or helping you in this, maybe you have a printer that you're sending your items to, whatever it is, you need to declare it here, and you would just do so by adding their name and how you're using them specifically and save the partner. Some of this is only getting sent to Etsy and some of it is on the front side of your listing if you want to show it to them. That is something to consider that if you are using a manufacturer or anything like that, you need to declare. I am not. I have my own facility and do everything in-house. Section, this is basically how you're organizing your shop. I still like it to be a key word because I just never know if anything could eventually become a keyword area of SEO. So I'm going to call this last name signs. I believe we can have 15, maybe 20 sections now, I can't even remember. It might show me here. No, it doesn't show me here. You can put it in whatever section you prefer. Now tags, this really should have like red flags, like it should be blinking that this is not optional. I think it's hilarious that they put that as optional because it's really so important for how you get found in search. A lot of times what I'll do with my tags is I will just copy this title straight down here and work it into my tags. Now, that's a little bit of an old way of doing this because the title and tags used to have to match. They don't have to match anymore, I just like a lot of them to match, that's how I get my focus keywords, but you can just start breaking apart your title into tags down here, and then you can make sure that you have some of those keywords that you wanted to make sure we're in both your title and tag. You can break them apart like this. You can see I have some of this language that I wrote for the customer that I don't want to be found for like pallet sign style. I just want to be found for pallet sign, farmhouse decor, established sign, custom wood sign, engagement gift, Add. Now, you'll see if it'll kick back and either have more than 20 characters and you can see how far out you can do that. So now I have four left and that's where I would go back to my brain storming sheet and pull in any of those extras. But now I know that I've got a lot of focus keywords that are in my title and my tags. This is probably too many, but I don't know if I believe that there's too many focus keywords. I think that being as relevant as you can for what you want to be found for is a great strategy. I'm going to delete those tags out because I already have my finalized list of tags in here somewhere. But that's, a lot of times, how you can do it. This becomes personalized wedding gift and personalized gift. Materials, these are my materials. You could do this all straight inside of the listing, I just have them here so I don't battle thinking about it. Now, my pricing. Pricing for me is going to be a little different than it may be for you. If you have one set price for your item regardless of if you have different colors or whatever, then you're going to enter your price here. I can enter whatever I wanted here. It's going to change when I get down to variations because I'm going to actually charge based on one of my variance, which is going to be my size and my letter finish. Just know you can put your price here, but if you have variations, this is going to go away and you're gonna set pricing and variations, if you're variations, change your price. A good example of this is the color might not change the price, but the size might. I'll show you that in just a minute. But feel free if this confuses you, go ahead and enter your price here. Quantity; I like to set this at 999 because that's the max and I make items to order. So I don't want to run out, I don't want sold out listings very often, so I keep this as high as possible. You would enter here your fixed inventory, or if you're selling vintage items, then this might only be a quantity of one if you have one of a kind things. Next is going to be variations, we'll explain when I meant there. The variation type here, you can use any of these pre-loaded ones or you create a new variation. You only get two. So in my listing, I have to work around that a bit. I have to combine two variations into one, which is why I'm going to do custom ones and show you what I mean. This may help you too if you have a few things that you need to get from the customer. I'm adding in a variation because I need to know the size, the letter finish, meaning if they want painted letters or natural letters, and the background stain colors. That's three variations that I need to know, pick three options. Variation is just another word for options. Because I only have two drop-down menus with Etsy, I'm going to combine size and letter finish into one variation. I'm only going to be able to add these one at a time. There are character counts here. Now, there are character counts in play here that's why I have this written like this. If I try to write small natural letters which I would like to, it's going to tell me that I can't go over that 20 character count. So sometimes you have to get a little creative with what you put here. But this gives me essentially two selections. Now, these are different prices. I'm not going to charge them differently if they want a large and also charge them differently if they want their letters painted. My prices vary for each size and letter finish. My quantities can stay the same and I'm not using skews, but that is important to select if you need to enter different pricing, we'll do that in the next step after we save this. But before I do that, I'm going to also add in, I could just put color but I want to be really specific with what my customer is selecting. I have chosen background stain as my customer variation. Because I have paint here and I have another color. Now, the background stain doesn't vary the price, the background stain, they just select what they want. I don't know if I have those listed in there. I do not, I'll just manually put them in. Those are all in there now and I don't need to select anything over here. Once I click "save and continue," you can see now I have prices available to change for my size and letter finish, but no prices available to change for my background state. Whatever my pricing is, I've got this listed. I'm selling my small for a $45 fee and then I know that my medium is going to be 88 and my large is 130. That's pre discount pricing. Then I know that I'm adding for paint, I'm going to add $7, which is going to be 52, 95 and 137. Now you can also link photos to your variations if that interests you. I don't think it's a bad practice at all, but you don't link additional photos. You have to link from your actual photos that are already in your listing. All of the ones that I have shown right now are painted letters, so I'm going to show a small with painted letters, which is this photo. I'm going to show a medium with painted letters, which is this photo. I'm going to show a large painted letters, which is this photo. When they select things on the front side from the drop-down, the picture is going to change, the photo is going to change to show them, "you selected small, it's going to look like this, you selected medium" and these won't have any right now. I probably need to do another photo shoot and show some natural letters on my listing, but for now, I'm okay with it. Personalization section for me needs to be turned on, and it needs to be mandatory. This box, if you didn't want it to be mandatory, you could select it to be optional. Now, there definitely is character counts here. As you type you can see it populates over here and your character count is going down over here. I've already written this out and I can tweak it as needed. I've got a pretty good grasp on this, so please enter your family name and establish date. The format will be the family names, and the established 20 XX. Please note size small has no dates, so I've put just something that I really want to draw their attention to, to make sure they know here. Then I've also said that if they've selected painted letters from the drop-down above, and then I need to know if they want black or white letters. Really in this listing, I could have used four variations if Etsy would have allowed me to, but again, they only gave me two. I've pumped two into here, another one into my second variation, and then I'm asking for the fourth piece of information here in the personalization, along with obviously they're personalization details. They're all workarounds. I do wish Etsy would give us some more variants, but they've got a big platform and a lot of things to deal with. Now it says shops that offer free shipping on orders 35 and up in the U.S will now get priority placement and search. You don't need to click that. learn more. You already know what that means. But what they're trying to show you is that, they're encouraging you to set up free shipping. Of course you don't have to, but you should definitely try if you can. Now shipping prices, you can either have them be calculated which they do recommend, or you can enter them manually. It depends on how you're running your business. I actually don't have them calculate for me. I set a fixed price. I'll show you calculated just to start. It's going to put your ZIP code in here. Ours is going to be four, [inaudible]. Select your processing time. This is just how long it's going take you to prepare the order. This is going to be 3-5 business days for this product. Ship is faster, you can make that the better. We're going to ship United States and worldwide. I'm going to edit that. I don't want to ship to all countries. I just want to ship to North America, and within there you can select if you want to ship to Canada, Puerto Rico, etc. This again, because you're using the calculate for me, they have mail classes where they will calculate each of these USPS mail classes for you, that you can reach toward the defaults. Or this is where you would select free domestic shipping or free international shipping, if you want to do it as a free shipping offer on this exact item. You can also add an a handling fee, which just basically you're adding above and beyond what the shipping cost is as a handling fee the buyer is not going to see that they're just going to see a whole shipping fee. You're adding an additional fee in addition to what's calculated here. I am not going to do it this way. If you have calculated shipping on, you do have to add an item weight and an item size because in order for them to calculate for you, they have to know that weight and size of what you're packing. I shipped UPS, so I'm going to enter my fixed prices manually. My shipping origin is United States processing time still the same. My shipping carrier is UPS, and my mail class is ground. What you'll charge; I'm going to charge a fixed price here, because I am going to turn on a free shipping guarantee, which means I still have a shipping cost on this item if it's under $35. But it's over $35, then they will essentially draw a line through this and say, we're giving this shopper free shipping because they've spent over 35, so I prefer to do that. If they ordered the small, which I think is going to come out to around 30, just over $30 with the discount I'm going to offer them, then they would pay actually the 750. You can still add shipping upgrades and additional locations I shipped to the U. S, and this is how my receipt's going to look. Because my items all vary in item weight and size, I have different sizes. I'm not setting this up and I'm not using calculated shipping, so I don't need to. This is showing you a preview down here of where it should be, what it's going to look like to your customers, the shipping price and the total price. I'm going to save this as a shipping profile. They're going to warn me that I'm raising domestic shipping costs and that buyers don't really like this, which I understand. It is preferable that you apply the same shipping options to as many listings as you'd like. I'm just going to call this, "Last name signs." This is the shipping profile I used for my last name signs, and always edit those later. Then I'm going to click "Save and continue." Now you've completed stocking your shop with one listing and then you can stay here and keep adding listings. If you have done any batch work and you're ready to do that by all means go ahead and list out those high-quality listings. But otherwise, you really just need one and you can click, "Save and continue." Now this is where you're going to set up all of those things that have to do with how you're going to get paid and they're all legal. Tell about yourself, your name, your birthday, your home address, where is your bank located and all those other private details. Once you complete those details, you'll have this little giving the walls one last coat of paint notification. Then finally that your shop is open for business. Congratulations and we will be completing our shop set up in the next lesson. 14. LAUNCH! Part 2: I've just finished setting up my listing and I've actually gone ahead and set up my shop, but I'm going to show you what I've done here. If you go over here to the Sales Channels section, this little pencil will give you an Edit button, and this is how you edit any of the front side settings of your shop. As you can see here, you can upload that banner, you can upload your shop icon, you'll have the opportunity to crop. You'll also see that on the banner, you could change up the layout if you wanted to do a different style of banner or if you don't have one at all. There are also some upgrades available here for you through Etsy Plus and that'll give you more carousel or collage options. If those interest you, it's a small monthly payment that I believe $10 or $15. This is your title, what you're going to want to edit in here. This is going to show you your Google search preview, so think about what you want people in Google to see here, and also people on Etsy because they're going to see it as well. Like it to have some keyword richness but not looked keyword stuff and click "Save". Your shop location, you want to go ahead and add that in there as well. Here's our beautiful listing. Don't worry that you only have one, you can add more as you're ready. As soon as you hit "Publish" on this listing, it's going to take a couple of days for Etsy to actually index your listing, which just means that it's not quite cataloged into their system yet. The way that you can tell that is if you copy your title over and you search for your title inside of Etsy, when you're indexed, you're going to actually show up here. As you can see for right now, I'm just showing up to similar items, I'm not showing up for my actual item yet. That does take a day or two, so you do have just a little bit of leeway if you need a little bit more time to get things really polished up before people will really start seeing this but it's not much, it's obscene. Listings get active within just a day so that's why the Launch method is still very much valid. While it might not be the very moment that you had published it, soon after the customers will start seeing your listing and start engaging with it. After that, you'll see I have a shop announcement here where you can edit and you can put whatever you want here. For me, I'm putting "Grand opening special. Enjoy 30 percent off your order." I also have a second shops, so I'm announcing that this gives me additional credibility because I don't have any reviews. If you're a brand new shop, you're not going to be able to point to another shop to show your credibility, but just showing that you're new should help to make people understand why you only have one listing and why you don't have reviews and you're giving them a nice incentive here to give you a shot. Shop Updates is a great way to promote your shop. It's not all that effective until you have people who are engaging with your listing, following you as a shop, favoriting your shop, favoriting your listings, but once you have that momentum going, these make a lot of sense. It's Etsy's own internal social platform where you say, ''Hey, I have some new items come check this out," and then on each individual shoppers Home Etsy page, they'll have a little section that says updates from your favorite shop. So that's a great way to get the word out about new products or just to keep fresh eyes on your shop from people who've purchased from you or engaged with you before. Now, this is your About section down here. As you can see it says About HeritageSignCo. It's going to tell you the year that you've opened your shop. I don't think you have to have a video and photos to start, so I've left those empty, although I will be publicly filling those out shortly, especially photos. But you do need to go ahead and just have your title, your headline for your About section. This is my tagline for this business, "By family and for family," and then just a little blurb. That just gives you some credibility. The other thing that you need to make sure you have is your friendly face down here for at least one shop member. I will end up filling out more shop members and include my husband because it's a family owned business, but you don't need to have more than one, especially if it's only you, but you do just need to make sure that you have these three things filled out because that checks that About box that we had previously talked about. Shop policies. How do we fill these out? This little section here that would say, I believe it says something along the lines of adopt Etsy's policies. You'll want to select that, that may be way off, but it's right here at the top. It'll be pretty obvious to you. Go ahead and click that if you can. The only reason not to click it is if you, for some reason, just can't follow this delineation of policies, but most shops can. The whole reason is just to create uniformity for the customers so that they quickly see shop policies. This is the shipping and processing time, these are the payment options, it's this format. You don't have to agree to accept these cancellations or exchanges, that's all still up to you, it's just that you're agreeing to take this format for your policy. I don't accept returns or exchanges because these are personalized products. Whether you have these on or off, isn't that you're opting on to Etsy's policies. It's whether or not you selected this formatting of the policies so just to be clear on that. I don't accept returns or exchanges, so I'm going to turn that off. I'll accept a cancellation within an hour of purchase, but by that time, we are normally processing an order and you could change this to whatever you want. Of course, you can accept returns and exchanges and if you do, you'll need to make your terms clear to your customers. It's just making things very crystal clear to your customer as to what they can expect and they can quickly find this information on your listing. Now Privacy policy, it can be intimidating to new sellers. It's really no big deal. Just go over here to this seller handbook article and you'll see they have a template worked in. Just delete out all of the stuff that is templated and just work in your own information. If you sell to the EU, it makes you GDPR compliant, which sounds scary, but it's really simple. I actually don't even sell to the EU, but I just wanted to show you guys that if you do sell to the EU, that you'll need to have this here. Then you just click "Save policies" and your policies are all setup. There is one more area down here called the FAQ. I highly recommend filling this out once you have a good idea of what your FAQ should be. It's a helpful place to direct customers to whenever you keep getting the same questions, but I would also encourage you that if you have a lot of these questions, that you somehow work them into your listing. I'm going to leave this empty for now. Again, not essential. If you are selling to Europe, you'll need to add your contact info, but I am not selling to Europe, I'm selling domestically so I'm going to leave that blank. That pretty much checks your set-up box all except for one, actually two. The other set-up box that is really important is that if you want to offer that free shipping guarantee, if you weren't able to offer individual free shipping and you do still want to offer the free shipping guarantee, then you're going to want to come over here to your shipping settings and then turn on this free shipping guarantee. I've already got this on, but there's just a button here for where you can turn it on. I'll go ahead and turn it off for a minute so you can see right now. So it'll say here, "Enjoy priority placement in search when you offer free shipping." That's a strong statement from Etsy. So they really want you to offer it if you can. Then you just scroll down here and explore your options. Is that going to be the button to hit, I guess so. Get started, whatever. Turn on a shop-wide free shipping and then cover your shipping cost. Now, I've already taught you how to cover your shipping cost so this more of is a tool I'm just going ahead and set free shipping now if you needed to go in and add those shipping costs, remember my baseline shipping cost was $7 and 50 cents, so I would just be adding that to my price. This tool was created to help existing sellers who weren't just starting fresh to bulk edit a bunch of their listing, so you'll have this option if you want to review and edit your prices. I'm just going to close this because I've already got my shipping cost built into my price. That shipping and the last thing I want to make sure that you do is if you are offering a grand coupon code or any kind of coupon code, come in here to marketing, sales and coupons, and make sure you run a special offer so use special offer. You can run it as a coupon and if you do, then the customer will have to actually enter in a coupon code. I prefer to run a sale because I like the way it looks in search, I think it's more engaging. I run a shop wide sale. In this case, I'm running a 30 percent off, I've already got this and I'll just show you how you do it. So 30 percent off coupon and you can run it for whatever duration you want to. I'm going to run it for the entire first 30 days. That's as far out as you can run. It also is like a 30-day window. Again, you can name your sale whatever you want. I've already got a grand opening code in here. So I'll just call it GRANDOPENING2. If you have any terms and conditions that they need to follow, feel free to add that there. Worth noting also that you could make this a free standard shipping coupon if you're interested in offering free shipping, once they reach a certain quantity or an order total. But just keep in mind any of those free shipping options they don't count towards that boost in search that you could set $100 threshold if they spent $100 or more with you, but that's not going to give you that free boost in search so you can do it, but it will not help your SEO on anyway. So this is the coupon code and now you just add your listing. If you have a lot of listings, it's helpful to just add it by section, I've got this whole section of Family Name Signs. I'm going to go ahead and do that, and that way, any other signs that I would add into this Family Name Sign section would also get that coupon code automatically applied. You could also search for a single listing, review and confirm. It should let me know what I've set up and I'm going to confirm that discount. So my sale is live. The last thing we want to show you is what your shop will look like on the front side. So you can just click "Listing." You want to see this listing on the front side or you can go to your shop homepage which is always Etsy.com/shop/yourshopname. I'm just going to click this "View on Etsy" and I can see this listing. You do have listing tools up here with an ID. You can see your brand name, you can see your title, all see how this slashes my price for my coupon code, I really like that, that shows up in search and it just is more engaging. But it's a good idea just to flip through your listing and just make sure you're happy with the way everything is looking, make sure your video is going the right direction, make sure that none of your pictures look fuzzy and also make sure that everything is visible at this level. This is desktop. I also suggest that you use your phone and look at your listing on mobile just to make sure there's nothing kind of funny that, or it could be a better experience. So just making sure everything's very legible. Shoppers can always click in and zoom in to see more detail, but I like to make sure that they can see everything they need to see from this level too so I'll show you where they can click and then there'll be zoom in here and really get up close with my stains if they want to look at them super close. But as you can see from a distance, I was still able to read these stained colors, and that's going to be important because some people won't know to click. Just make sure that everything in your description looks good as formatted the way that you want it to look. Also, just be aware that your description is only going to be here for a minute, and once you get a review, your review is going to pop over here and your descriptions is going to move over to this side. So interval would just be that little same kind of first paragraph, maybe. Peek into your description and it does look different on mobile. You can also just see some of the things that you plug into the back of your listing where they show up here on desktop. So when you said who made it? What is it? This handmade icon is showing what it is. Your materials actually get some pretty prime placement here. But they do still need to be relevant, so don't start trying to show people stuff here that isn't relevant to materials, but it does stand out pretty well. The shipping and return policies, this is when you sign on to your policies, just give this nice universal look so that customers are seeing the same kinds of things and they get used to seeing it. This is a cost to ship of 799, returns and exchanges are not accepted but please contact me if you have a problem with your order. Where I'm delivering to, that's my zip code. I'm shipping from the United States. "This will be made just for you. Prep time varies. Contact the shop to find out when it will ship." So if you had put in that you accept returns and exchanges, your terms would be here, if you had put in a standard shipping time then it would all be here. You can also see here that they link to your About section, so if you click to your shop policies here and they can send you a message personally. It seems like this should actually have the shop owner's name, which I think I need to go and update. I must have done that incorrectly. So I'm just going to go back one step. Go here. Looks like I missed one spot here. I need to probably just plug my photo in here. This differently base. Yeah. So make sure that's there too. I missed that. I thought that they actually pop that up from the Member section, but they don't, and that's really it. Just continue to work on your shop like I said, it's going to take just a couple of days before you'll start seeing some engagement on your listings because you do have to get indexed. But beyond that, it's a great time to just release more listings, keep going one by one. You know when someone sees this listing that they're going to be interested in, because you've done everything you can to make this as good of listing as it can possibly be, and that really is the secret sauce for success on Etsy. You just have to have really high-quality listings that engage customers and move them through the buying process from interested to purchasing. 15. Conclusion + Bonus Lesson Offer: Congratulations on reaching the end of this course. You're now armed with the information you need to have success in the Etsy marketplace. Once you have your shop open, continue to roll out each listing fully optimized according to what you learned in this class and in your prelaunch workbook. Don't get in a rush to see your shop full of 15 half-optimized listings. You'll do yourself no favors there. Just take your time and get each listing right. I promise, it is worth the effort to launch an engaging listing, and I hope you'll post to the project section as you go. I'd love to see what aspects of your shop you're working on in terms of branding or photography, and of course, screenshots of those freshly launched shops and listings. I hope you found this class helpful and I truly wish you all the best on your Etsy journey. If you're interested in learning more about how to set yourself up for success on Etsy, be sure to check out more resources for growing your Etsy shop at artisanempire.com or hop on my email list to stay in touch and receive my bonus lesson to this course, how I use Marmalead, showing you an in-depth look at how I use Marmalead to compile and organize keywords for any given listing. Thanks so much for watching. I'm cheering you on and wishing you lots of Etsy success.