Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi there. My name is Jane a cell, and I'm a creator living just outside Detroit, Michigan. I earned my art degree in 2013 but have been drawing and creating my whole life. My work is inspired by vintage advertising, mid century illustration and relief printing. About two years ago, I wanted to find a way to make extra income in addition to my full time job without taking on the work of a second. That's when I started my Etsy shop. When I first started my Etsy shop, I hit to piece together a lot of information to figure out how to sell my artwork as digital prints online. I hope this place will simplify the process for you so you don't have to go through all the work that I didn't throughout the class. I'll walk you through selecting and designing artwork to sell, scanning and editing your work, creating user friendly templates for digital products, enlisting digital products on at scene. You'll use thes steps to create a digital greeting card to sell on Etsy. This class is great for artists, designers or freelancers who want to make money selling their work on etc. This class is in for students who are familiar with etc. But may not have sold anything out there before or want to learn more about selling digital products. Students should also have a basic knowledge of photo shop. Knowledge of illustrator and in design are helpful but not necessary. After this class, you'll walk away of the skills to make your own reusable templates, create well rounded at sea listings and sell high quality work to your buyers. Beyond selling greeting cards, you'll be ready to start selling your work as art prints, calendars, invitations, postcards or anything else you can think of to sell as a principle on etc. So with some initial time energy of front, you'll be able to sell one piece of artwork over and over again as a digital product.
2. Why Etsy?: all right. So before we get too deep into the details, let's just talk about why at sea so etc is just one of many different selling platforms that you can use to sell your artwork online. There are some things that I think make at sea unique and really helpful for artists in particular. So we have at sea, of course. Reid Bubble Society six threaten lis Like anything else. Each of these other websites have their pros and cons, but I think at C stands out from the rest with red bubble society, six Threat bliss and countless others. You upload your artwork and they kind of take care of the rest. So after you upload your art, they can print it on T shirts as art prints. They can sell it on mugs, and then you get a small portion of the sales. A lot of people will actually sell their things on etc. And some of these sites as well, so I would definitely do your own research and make your own decisions. But today I'm only going to focus on etc. Because I think that really is the best platform for artists to really share your voice and build relationships with your customers directly. So let's start with what I like about etc. Number one. You can build relationships with your customers directly, and that's actually really important. So that means that your customers can contact you directly. If there's an issue, that means you can thank them personally if they leave a review with some other sites. You don't get any direct interaction with your customers, and that's because the website is doing all the work for you, which can be a great scene, and we'll get to that later. But that means that you don't get to hear about how much they love your product directly unless they make the effort to find you on social media or contact you some other way. So basically, you don't really get those positive feelings aside from when you know you've made a sale. I think this is one of the most important things you know. It means that people can contact you directly whether they love your product or if there's an issue, and even if there is an issue, you can actually take that opportunity to build a relationship with that customer and maybe improve their experience. Even if someone doesn't reach out to you about their purchase or with questions when they buy your product, you can even have a personalized message that's sent to the buyer or to find different ways to connect with them that you really don't have on some little's other websites, another benefit of using Nazi is creative control. So that means that you get to design the way your page looks. You get to upload your own photos of your products in a way that reflects your style is an artist or designer. Another great thing about at sea is that has a built in audience Now. Some of the other websites that I mentioned have built in audience is of their own, but I want to point this out because technically, all the things that we're doing today you could do to sell your products on your own website. But it might be harder to find you. So that's where etc is really nice because it has a built in audience of people looking for very specific things, etc. Also has a lot of very Nishi customers, so that means that if you have very niche artwork. Chances are your customers will find you. And of course, there are some downsides to using Nazi as well. So I mentioned before how great it is to have direct contact with customers. But they also means that you're gonna get direct complaints, etc. Isn't gonna be totally hands off means you'll have to practice good customer service and resolve any issues on your own directly with your customers. But I also see this as a pro because that means if there's a complaint, you can handle it directly and maybe build a stronger relationship with that customer, which could benefit you and them in the long run. There's also going to be more work up front when you use at sea, as opposed to those other sites that I mentioned. And that's because you're gonna have to either create your own mock ups or take photos on your own. You are gonna have to design your page. You know you have to create your own copy, have your own descriptions, But even with that work up front, it will get a lot easier as you go along and you get usedto, etc. In the platform and building your brand. And like any other website, there will be fees associated with selling on Etsy. And lastly, I just wanted to touch on customer confusion. So no matter how many times you may say it on your product description, customers will still be confused that they're not getting, ah, physical piece of artwork, that they're just getting a digital file. So it's just something else to keep in mind.
3. Selecting and Designing Artwork: for this class will be creating a temple in photo shop in design, an illustrator for a five by seven greeting card. You use your own artwork to place in one template. You can either pick some artwork you've already made, or create something specific for this class that's up to you. So for the example that we're gonna use today, make sure that your artwork will work with a five by seven inch ratio. I made a little design that was just slightly larger than five by seven. So that would be easy to work with for the class as an example, Really, The most important thing is just making sure that your art were makes sense with the item that you're trying to make. A greeting card can be almost anything since we're going to leave it blank on the inside. So I don't want you to overthink this. You don't have to come up with a witty saying or something funny, unless that's what you want to dio. But just feel free to take a piece of artwork that will work in this format. You could also make it horizontal, you know, seven by five, really, we just want to make sure that your artwork is gonna fit with the design. Here's the five by seven example Again, if you have a square piece of artwork, probably not gonna look great. But you could always add text underneath it or above it or something else to make it fit properly. And the reason that I'm stressing fit so much is that you want your final piece to reflect the kind of artist or designer that you are. You don't want to look like you're just repurpose ing some old art where because that comes across as lazy. So you actually want it to look like it was intended to become a greeting card in this example, or maybe a sticker. But whatever you're making, just make sure that the fit in the shape and the size all makes sense.
4. Scanning: in the next two videos will go through scanning and editing analog artwork. So if you're working with a digital design, feel free to skip ahead to the temple. It's overview video, so let's talk about our scanner. I just have a very basic all in one cannon scanner or printer, and it does the job. Just find for me. So I don't feel like you need to go out and purchase anything special. There's a lot of different scanners out there, so do some research if you're interested in something else. If you just have all in one like I do, that should do the job just fine. So once you placed your artwork inside the scanner, we'll need to scan the work at a high resolution. Basically, the higher resolution means that you'll have a better quality product at the end, so you want to make sure that you're scanning at the highest DP I possible DP. I stands for dots per square inch, so basically, if you have a document that's 300 dp I. That means in one square inch of that image there are 300 dots, so each of those dots is a different color, and that makes up your image. Something at 72 DP. I would only have 72 dots per square inch. That's important because let's say something at 72 will become extremely pixelated if you try to enlarge it. It doesn't have as much information as something that's made at 300 d. P. I. Basically, the higher the DP I the better quality because there's more information in your image. So my all in one printer scanner goes up to 600 d. P I for scanning. But some of those high quality scanners that I mentioned before can go up to 1600. Different scanners and computers may vary, but here are a few other settings that will be helpful for scanning. So the 1st 1 is full color. That's pretty obvious. Ill just scan in as a full color image, and I still use that Even if I'm scanning something that I'm going to make black and white , you want to make sure that you save it as ah tiff or J. Peg and I just mentioned that because I know some scanners will default to PdF for used to scanning documents so you want to make sure that it is saving as an image file, and Tiff and J. Paige are recommended. Next, you want to select the size of the area to scam. Some scanners will have an auto features, so we'll just automatically detect where your artwork is, and that's the area it will scan. I, for some reason just don't really trust that. So I just select the entire area of the scanner, so we're almost ready to go ahead and scan. But I just wanted to add a note about making sure that you have pressure or kind of weight on top of the scanner. Basically the culture of a contact with the glass, the better scan you'll get. If you don't put any weight on it, you can actually see the difference. You'll get some weird shadows or bumps. Maybe if there's Ah, crease in your paper, that might show up. But if you're applying pressure, it's basically just gonna flatten. Now your paper, your artwork a little bit more. And make sure that we don't get any of those weird gray areas that might show up. I actually put a jewelry box on top of my scanner because it hurts my arms. If I try to hold down on it while I'm scanning, you'll find out where it works for you. A heavy book encyclopedia. I also have a really big cookbook that I've put on it before, but it just makes a lot easier than having to stand around, especially if the scan is taking kind of a while.
5. Editing in Photoshop: So now that we have are scanned image, I'm just going to bring it into photo shop so we can start editing. So here it is. Looks pretty good. I'm just gonna start with making a copy of my background layer because I want to work as non destructively as possible. Okay. And then I'm just gonna start by adding an adjustment layer. The brightness contrast now usually don't mess with the brightness too much with scanned documents, they already should be pretty bright. They have, ah, light in the scanner. That's actually helping to scan in the image. So it shouldn't be too dole or anything like that. I am just gonna adjust the contrast a little bit. I just want to make the image pop a little bit more so it's a subtle difference. But I'm just trying to make sure that my black lines look a little bit darker and just wanted to have a little bit more contrast between the light and dark. All right. Next, I'm going to adjust my levels, and you can either use the eyedropper tools on the sides over here, or you can use thes little markers to adjust your levels So if a movie, this one, I'm adjusting the white. This is the black and then the middle is kind of the gray, the mid tones. I don't think there's a ton of major adjustments I need here. Most of these look pretty tour to color. Let's just take a look at using the eyedropper starting to skin to sample the white area here. It did shifted just a little bit. And that's because my paper wasn't appear bright white. But I'm pretty happy with it. It looks how I want. I'm really just trying to get this look is close to my original painting is possible If you want. You can take this time to really make your artwork more dramatic or softer or change the look of it. But I'm just trying to capture what my original painting look like. So if you're gonna do something a little bit more dramatic, I can sample one of those lines here, and it really brought out all the black meat it much darker, very high contrast. But this isn't really the look I'm going for, so I'm just gonna undo that with Command Z. So next I'm just going to add ah hue, saturation layer. And this is nice if some of your colors are looking a little bit Dole, if you want them to be more rich and saturated. So let's just see what that looks like, so that makes it very vibrant and bright. That's not the look I'm going for, but it is fun to play around, and sometimes it's worth it just to see what other options you have if you're not trying to get it to look exactly like the original, so I'm just gonna move it back down 20 So I am gonna bump up the saturation just a smidge. I don't want it to look very obvious that I made adjustments, so I'm just making very slight adjustments here, there to get what I want. If you did want to change the colors at all, you can play with the hue, so you know I can change the colors up completely. You can also focus on specific colors so we can do our reds. You get some different effects there, or let's see, could play with our greens, see what happens. Not a whole lot happening, and there really aren't a lot of green tones and here, so the changes air pretty subtle. You can really only see it kind of just along here because there's some green tones in the background, but I'm not changing. My colors solves change. That fact is the URL, and then it looks like since I hit undo a couple times I lost what I had added for the saturation. Um, and I believe it was right around plus seven. No, I really haven't done a lot so far, but just making those colors a little bit richer and adding more of a contrast, just trying to get it as close to the original as possible. So next we are going to take a look at some of the little imperfections with the scan. You can see them a lot clear. With that, I've zoomed in, so it looks like there's some kind of paint that over left here when there may be some straight pencil marks. So now I'm gonna just those areas. So, as I mentioned before, we want to be non destructive. So I'm just going to group these together and all cold. This my adjustments and in that way, for some reason, I do want to change any of the adjustments here. I can always go back and change them. Okay? And I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate that fired, dragging the group down here to the bottom to this little plus sign, and they all just duplicate the group. Okay? And now I'm just gonna emerge these layers to flatten them out. So basically, it's on to condense all the adjustments and the background copy into one layer. But I'm just gonna select the group right click and then March group. The room's gonna hide these so you'll see that this entire group is now one layer. So if I hide it real quick, there's nothing there because it's all in one layer together now. And we just want to do that before I go ahead and do some clean up work. All right, So we're gonna go back to this area from before. I'm just gonna zoom in a little bit more, and then I'm just gonna go ahead and clean up the area by using the clone stamp tool. So it just looks like a little stamp over here. I'm just gonna click on it. So with the clone stamp tool. I'm gonna press, option and click to select this area. So basically what I'm doing, it's kind of similar to an actual stamp. So the stamp, you press it onto the ink and then you go and apply it to the paper. So basically what I'm doing right now is dipping the stamp in my ink, which is just this part right here off the painting. And then what that's going to do is fill it in with that same color and texture. So when I click and hold down, you'll see this little plus sign appear. And that's basically showing me where it's taking that sample from where it's getting my so called ink from. As you can see, I actually kind of if I go out here, it changes. Its kind of making it blurry. I'm not holding down right now. I'm just trying to show you what it's sampling. So here, if I bring it out into the kind of gray black background it's sampling from this background , all right, I am gonna command Z just because I made a mistake. There we go. If you want to change the size of your brush or the area for the clone stamp tool. You can go ahead and use the left and right brackets on your keyboard, so I'm just use the left bracket to make it a little bit smaller, so I can be precise, but I don't want to be to be too small. Otherwise, it's gonna have very just thin lines. I really want this to just blend them. All right, so I'm going to option click again. Just cleanup belong here. You're gonna have to option click a few times, depending on what you're Our work is like. So if I just want ahead and started rushing here, you'll see that it's adding a line because it's sampling from the line that the plus sign is over. It's gonna undo that. It's gonna option click here, so I go up here there looks better. You can see it's a little bit blurry looking, but I'm okay with that. I'm zoomed in pretty close, and let's just look for some other areas to fix. So here's a spot. So this spot here is actually from my scanner and let this be a lesson to you to not leave anything on your scanner for too long. I had made some X plats to use his textures and artwork and accidentally left it on the scanner for maybe a week. And some of the ink actually stuck to my scanner. So I toe scrape the glass off. It was not pretty. So so. Word of wisdom. Don't leave anything on your scanner ever, because now that means you have to clean up your work. More click. They had a touch, and I'm just gonna go through and look for any other areas and see, it looks like there was some lint. Or like a hair on the scanner that happens to song in a sample. The background here. Simple. Here. This, um, probably gonna have toe make it a little smaller using the left bracket. Now, I'm gonna have to be careful, cause I don't want to get o. C. I got too close, you know, it made that little lines. So I'm just gonna undo that command z enough to change where I'm sampling from. So sample here and you can always leave in some imperfections to So I have some little white dots kind of around here where my paint must not have fully covered the paper. I'm okay with that. I kind of like that. It looks a little bit rough. It's not absolutely perfect. I like you know, there's some brush strokes you can see here. I like all that. Not loving this green. That was part of the paint that I used. And it's so much are obvious up close here, but I'm not sure if it's really that No, it's villainizing. Mile e can still kind of see it. So I am gonna just that too. I see. So I'm just gonna go ahead, make this little bigger. See, this is where it gets tricky, though, because you don't want to look like you're creating some strange patterns. So I'm not actually going to go over this entire area. I'm just doing some of the more concentrated green parts that I don't want to be is obvious . If you're not careful, it'll be very apparent that you just use the clone stamp tool a lot. I think that might be enough. And when I'm zooming in and zooming out, I'm just holding command and pressing either the minus or the plus, so minus zoom out command plus zoom in. No, except it might fix this little. But there looks better to me. Blends in a little bit more off the rest of the painting. Okay. And then I'm just gonna go through and fix anymore. Imperfections. - Okay , so at this point, I'm happy with what I have here. I think it looks good to go for my greeting card. I kind of like a little bit of the in perfect look, but cleaned up the areas I had some concerns about. If you'd like a deeper dive into digitizing your artwork, I would highly recommend can't cook Alexe class about digitizing your artwork. It's really great. Especially if you have a lot of white space in your painting or drawing. She has some really good tips in there for cleanup, that kind of artwork. But for now, I'm just gonna stop here and go ahead and save, okay? And that's all I have for digitizing your artwork, bringing into photo shop and getting it ready to plug into our templates.
6. Template Overview: So why are we using templates? There's a few really good reasons to use templates, and it's gonna make your life a lot easier in the long run. For one, it's going to save you time formatting your work In the future, you won't have to think about the dimensions. Every time you're gonna make a five by seven greeting card, you'll just have a template ready to use. We'll also make for user friendly files for your customers. So since we are making our digital product, you want to make it as easy as possible for your customer to download and print it, you know, even if they are gonna send it to a printer, you want to make sure that it's easier for the printer to USA's. Well, that's why tablets could be really handy. So let's talk about choosing a program to make these templates in. So when making your templates there isn't really a one size fits all option. They're different programs that have different benefits. So let's start with Photoshopped. Photo shop is really great. If your original artwork was a drawing, Ah, photo a painting. You know something that's analog. That's not something you made on your computer or if you didn't make something on your computer. If you created Photoshopped, it makes sense to just stay within photo shop and make your temple. It there next we have in design in design, I think, is a great option if you're not as familiar with creating your own marks and bleeds and trying to figure out dimensions on your own. Because basically, that's what we're going to do with our Photoshopped template. We're gonna have to do a little bit of math and make some of our own marks and leads on there in design. It does a lot of that work for you, so that's a great option if you're not as familiar with photo shop. And lastly, we have Illustrator Illustrator is a good option if your original design was created within illustrator. Otherwise, I don't think it really makes as much sense as using photo shopper in design. So figure out what works best for you. What makes the most sense for your design and then we'll move on to creating templates in each of these programs
7. Greeting Card Template: Photoshop: Okay, So since we're already in photo shop, let's just start there. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a new document. Let's call this at sea five by seven Greeting card templates. Okay, so I've mentioned before that our final card is going to be five by seven. That measurement is actually off the front of the card. So the card after its folded So before folding, the actual card will measure 10 inches by seven inches. So we're gonna create our template with a bleed in mind. I'll return to their later and talk more about the bleed. So to account for the bleed. And actually I was gonna choose this two inches and we're going to say 5.5 inches. Oh, actually, excuse me 10.5 inches because that will be the size before it's folded and 7.5 inches. I'm using these measurements because there's going to be 1/4 inch bleed on all sides off the card, but we'll talk more about that later. So we talked a little bit about resolution before with D p I. This is P p. I, which is basically the same thing. Pixels per inch and 300 is pretty standard for any kind of print document. Typically, for print products, you would use C M. Y que. But since we're making a principle that most people are printing at home, ah, lot of home printers are programs so that they're adaptable to RGB colors. Also, my scanner scans in images as RGB as well, so I'm just going to stick with that. There's a lot more that you can go into, see and like, a verse RGB. But I did just want to point out, typically see em like a is what you would use her print for this. We're actually going to stick with RGB, so I'm just gonna leave that as it is, and then we don't really need to do anything with these options down here. Now let's talk a little bit more about the bleed that I mentioned before. A bleed is necessary whenever you have a design that you want to go all the way to the very edge of the page. So if you think about a printer whenever it prints anything, even if you've created all the way to the edge of the page, it's gonna leave a small white line around the paper, And that's because the printer can't print ink all the way up to the edge. So if you have a bleed area, that means that you design your product or your poster. Whatever. You're making a little bit larger. So basically, you're gonna have to print it on maybe a little bit bigger paper and then cut it to the size that you want. And this will make more sense as I go along. So that's why I made our documents size 10.5 by 7.5 inches because I'm gonna have 1/4 inch bleed around the entire document. And to note that I'm gonna go ahead and create guides on our document so we can go to view new guide. And I can just create guides this way. So horizontal obviously will be a guide going this way horizontally vertical. We'll go this way. Okay, so I'm gonna make my 1st 1 to be the vertical guy that goes along this side. So I'm just going to make that at wait to five inches. So 1/4 of an inch. Okay, Got our first guide okay, create our next guide. So I'm going to do the opposite. And over here, this next vertical guide. So that's going to be at 10 and 1/4 inches. Do you just hit? Enter? Okay. Another way. You can create a guy. It is by clicking up in the ruler and then dragging down for horizontal. Or I can click in the side ruler here for a vertical guide. This I don't like as much because it's a little bit harder to be precise sometimes. Yeah, same at quite getting 0.25 So I was gonna go ahead and created the way did the others so speak horizontal? Okay. And then this will be at seven point perfect. Okay, So basically, this means that this will be our bleed area. So whatever design is here, I'm just going to make a quick rectangle. So if I make erecting gold, it's basically the size of our document. All of this area will print, and then we can cut at thes lines to get our actual document size. So basically, there's 1/4 inch bleed around the entire document here. So this is 1/4 inch, quarter inch quarter in and quarter inch here. Just get rid of that rectangle and you don't always need a full quarter inch plead. But the math is just a little simpler that way. Since we're creating our own guides, I just want to make it as simple as possible. So just made our son or guide at 5.25 and then I'm actually going to make a son or guide in between these areas. So this left side is the back of our card, and the right side is the front, and this guide is going to be the full line. So that's where we're gonna fold our card. I just want to add Ah, couple center guides. We know where the center area of each side of the card is. So I'm gonna add a guide at 2.75 so this will be for the center of the back on. We're gonna add one at the center of the front, so that will just help us keep everything in order. So we're going to create a smart object that we can insert our our work into. But before we do that, we're gonna have to create a rectangle to act as our smart objects saw selector rectangle tool I'm just gonna click and this window will pop up and I can type in the exact dimensions that I want. The dimensions I'm typing in our for this area here, the front side of the card. But we're gonna have to take into account the bleed on thes three edges. So the wits is going to be five point to five inches and the height will be 7.5 inches. And the reason that the shorter side is 5.25 is because there's only a bleed on one side here. Okay, it's lots that enter. Go ahead and move this snap into police. Okay, so we have our rectangle here, and now we're ready to turn it into a smart object. So when you go over here and I'm going to right click on this area so you don't want to right click in here, you have to make sure you right click over where the text is and we're gonna choose. Convert to smart objects. Okay, so that means will be able to swap artwork in and out here for our template. So I'm gonna go ahead and double click. Okay, so this is our smart object. And now we can go ahead and add our artwork, so I'm going to go ahead and place embedded. I'm gonna find are Photoshopped Document. So I didn't crop this image earlier. I just kind of left it as it waas. And that's because it kind of his clear boundaries. If your work doesn't, I would go ahead and crop it before you bring it in here. So when we originally were working in photo shop, I would crop this too about five by seven inches or 5.5 by 7.5 inches. But here it doesn't really matter because those air the dimensions of the artwork basically , So I'm just gonna have to go ahead and enlarge its If you have a older version of photo shop, make sure you're holding down shift as you drag the corners to enlarge it to keep their dimensions the same. I have the newer version, so actually, by default, it's keeping the same ratio, so I don't have to hold down shift. I'm basically just going to make it big enough to fill the space completely so I'm pretty happy with the placement over that. I'm just gonna zoom out a little. I'm meeting all the edges. There's no random link, white space. So let's go ahead. And you can either click this to commit the transformation or hit Enter. Perfect. I'm and I am just gonna hide this little back round rectangle. We don't need any more. I just don't want this to peek through somehow. It won't for this example, but it's something to keep in mind if you're adding, let's say a black and white drying was transparency. Then you want to make sure that this rectangles and showing through behind it all right? So I would just have to go ahead and save this. This will save our smart objects. Okay, then I should be able to exit out and well, uh, it's in our original. It's in our template. This is almost ready to go, but we still have to add marks to signify where it should be trimmed, and we'll also have to add some marks for the full line. It's not as necessary for this type of design because we can tell where the full line is. The card ends right at the center, off the page. But if you have a design where you have an all white background all the way across the full line will be helpful real quick. I'm just going to rename this so and I should say, please artwork here, which you should remember since you're creating this temple it. But let's just helpful for you to remember where you're smart object is and where you will be replacing the artwork. Okay, so now we just need to make our term marks. So I'm gonna go ahead and select our rectangle tool, make sure it has no Phil and a black stroke. I'm just going Teoh, increase the stroke. Wait to to just so it's a little bit more visible. Click. And I'm just gonna make 1/4 of an inch 1/4 of an inch square Zoom in a little Ian, we're gonna go ahead and move this to the corner, and then I'm just going to copy that and added to all four corners. See, it's kind of hard for me to select it when because it's so tiny. So keep in a zoom in. Okay? Yeah. Here. This one, actually I am gonna change the stroke color because I do have such a dark background here. That's gonna be kind of hard to see the trip, mark. So I'm just gonna change this stroke color toe white. So I'm gonna go ahead in change that. All right? And then Cappy Command, see and then paste command V perfect. And then I make sure gonna group all of these together just to be a little bit more organized in label remarks. So we clearly know where they are. We can hide them if we don't want to see them Now, we're gonna go ahead and just add are dotted lines to indicate the fold. So I make sure just gonna hide our artwork for now, just so you can see this a little bit better. I like to use a pen tool for this stroke colors black again. So just click there and then I'm just shifting holding down shift and click again. I'm just extending it a little bit over our work area. It's just because it's such a tiny space. It's kind of hard to click in there, and then I'm just gonna change it toe a dotted line All right. So let's zoom in so we can actually see this. So are dotted. Line is so close together that almost just looks like a line from far away. But we can go ahead and change that. Let's go to more options. And I just want to increase the gap, achieve it five, see what their looks like. Okay, so that just adds more space there. I'm I'm OK with that. It really doesn't need to look good. Necessarily these air really more for function. So we just want to indicate where yourselves to fold this card. Sam's gonna hit. Okay, so just zoom back out, and I'm just gonna cappy paste his men. It's actually easier to just click outside of it because it's so tiny and drag. I just want to make sure to put it at the edge right there. Perfect art. So these gonna go ahead and group. So I just clicked on one. Hold down the shift key, click the next one in group full lines. So we're almost done. I'm just gonna bring up our artwork again. So at this point, you could technically be done, But I'm also gonna go ahead and add a logo because this is for my Etsy shop, and I want to hear my branding on here. So let's go ahead and place my little go. And I'm just centering it to that centre guide we made earlier. And I'd recommend using a black and white logo or some kind of gray scale just because chances are someone is putting this at home and we don't really want TEM toe waste all their colored ink on your logo. It's just a nice details that have, though, to signify that this is your work. All right, so at this point, we have our template ready. So I'm just gonna go ahead, um, and save it. I know we still hit. We have some specific artwork in here, but if you want to get rid of that because we are just using this to create a template, you can go ahead and get rid of it in your smart objects. So we could just go ahead and delete this layer. So now we have our template made, and we do already have our artwork in here, so I can just go ahead and export it. I'm gonna export is a J. Peg. All right. And then I'm also actually going to save it as a pdf. And you want to make sure that this is set so high quality prints and I just want to show you another quick tip. If you do want to change the color of all your trim marks at once for some reason, like let's say you have a design that you're gonna have across the whole entire page. So you want the truth marks to be bright red so that they really stand out and we can create a solid color layer. I'm just gonna make it a bright red, okay? And you want to make sure that it's above your Trimark group and then hold on ALTs and then hover here until this aero appears and click, and then you'll see whole Zuman that are true. Marks are all red, and there's just helpful in case you need to change the color of those really quickly. Basically, that's it. So we have our template, and you can just create as many greeting cards you want by replacing your smart object with your artwork here. And let's just go ahead and take a quick peek and what we just made. Here's R J Peg that looks good to me. We can see her trim marks clearly barely see those fold lines. There are little go looks good. Here's pdf so we can see all our lines. If, for some reason these thin Trimark lines are appearing, some has, it might just be the way that Adobe is displaying it. But you can always make those a little bit thicker if you want to make them more obvious.
8. Greeting Card Template: InDesign: let's take a look at in design. So, in design, an illustrator should be a little bit easier than photo shop because they both have the ability to add. The bleed right is when we're creating our document. So we're just gonna go ahead and create new I'm just gonna change this two inches. We'll name this real quick, okay? And I'm just going to make our documents size without the bleed. So we don't have to take into the account the lead when I'm making this document size right now. So we're just going to do 10 inches by seven. Just gonna be one page. We don't need to pay attention to those areas. I'm just gonna make zero inch margins. We don't really need margins for this, okay? And then we're gonna do our bleed. So, like, before I'm going to stick with the quarter of an inch plead all the way around, okay? And if this link is appearing, it means that these air all gonna change together in the same ratio. So they're all equal. So I just changed one, and it changed the bleed for the bottom, the inside and outside. Okay. So I can go ahead and hit. Create. Okay. And it looks very similar to what we need in photo shop. Except this area where the bleed is just doesn't appear as whites. It's just clear here. So the white areas, the true document, but this red edges the bleed. I'm am gonna add a guide for the center, which doesnt be right here at five inches and that will once again kind of provide a marker for the back in the front of the card. I am like, last time. I'm gonna add center guides, both of these areas. I can add it 2.5 inches, and then the next one will be at 7.5. Okay. And then I'm gonna go ahead and out of frame like before. I'm gonna make it 5.25 inches wide by 7.5 inches tall. Okay. Okay. So this frame is where our artwork is going to go like last time. I'll just go ahead and add my logo, and I can go ahead and save our template. Okay, so now to add our artwork, I'm gonna click on our frame here place, and then I'm gonna go ahead and find our PST document. Just click in there that will place it. And then if I click on this circle here, this will allow me to adjust the size of the artwork itself and the placement of it. So if I drag it, you'll see changes. Okay, so I'm still going to make it a little bigger and you'll see here. So I just did it with whole out holding shift down. So in here, it's not maintaining my proportions. So I'm just gonna go back a few steps for a resized it, And I'm just going to make sure that I hold shift down as I make it larger. All right, so keep in mind that all this edge will get cut off. This is the bleed area here. So on the final card only of this tiny little bit of the leaf that's a concern for you. You'll want to adjust some pretty happy with that placements as it is, it's even though this isn't a great part of the painting that's going to get cut off, okay. And then we can go ahead and export it as adobe pdf print. Okay. And then we're want to make sure to go to marks and bleeds and check crop marks. And then we can go ahead and click export. So here we hear of our document and it has our two marks all ready to go, and that's it for in design.
9. Greeting Card Template: Illustrator: And now time for illustrator. So gonna go ahead and create a new documents, rename it. And just like we did in in design, we're going to do 10 inches by seven inches. I didn't change it from pixels. Two inches. We'll do that now. Okay? All right. And then we're gonna add or bleed once again. So we'll do 1/4 of an inch all the way around. It's already set to RGB. Start off to change that and set toe 300 peopie I So we should be all set now. The rulers don't show up automatically. So I'm gonna go ahead and go to view rulers show rulers, or you can hit command are okay. I'm going to go ahead and our center ruler center again here a 2.5 inches for the center of the back and center of the front at 7.5. Okay. Perfect. As I mentioned before, really only recommend illustrator if your original artwork was made an illustrator. So that's what I'm doing here. So I'm actually just gonna go into my original artwork. We're gonna do this guy. I'm going to select all that copy commune. See me and V and Paste. Okay. And I still have this all selected. You can see it's all selected. Still, I'm gonna hold on shift, we get a little smaller, and then we're going to play around with size. Because this project, I'm not sure if it will work. Exactly. So I might have to do some extra adjusting. I'm gonna hold down, shift again. Okay. So if I bring it down, you'll see that it's too small. There's a lot of extra space. What I can do for this design is maybe spread some things out and I can make the background fill this whole space. So I'm just going to click on the background of the artwork, okay? No, that takes up all that space, okay? And I'm just gonna go ahead and lock that object for now. And now I can select the rest of the artwork without selecting the background. So I'm still gonna look a little awkward. If all I did would just drag it down and center it. So this is a design that I'd probably have to play around with a little bit more. I'm really just making some adjustments to make it look a little less awkward. So really, what you would want to dio I would probably want to start out with this design in the five by 74 map. Looks okay with some of my adjustments, but it always looks better if you're doing it intentionally and making sure your design looks intentional. The sun was kind of plane by. I looks OK, but like I say, it will be a lot easier if you were to design it with the five by seven proportion in mine . Okay, so now, at this point, we could just go ahead and export it. We could also add the logo like last time. You've seen me do that a couple times. I don't think that's the focus of this section. Okay. And then we're just gonna go ahead and save this as a pdf. So say there's pdf. I'm not changing the name because I'm really just using this for a test of the template, okay? And then go to marks and bleeds and we're gonna select Trimark. Remarks are the same as crop marks that we saw as an option and in design. Okay, so here it is, with our little trim marks. Looks like it's working perfectly. You'll notice that I didn't show you how to add the fold marks like we did in photo shop, and that's because the fold marks wouldn't really be visible. You can see there's so little of the artwork on this edge that we wouldn't really be able to see the full marks at all. Okay, and there you have it. That's the final way to create a template that you can use over and over again for your greeting cards.
10. Testing: At this point, you should have your greeting card ready to go to sell on Etsy. But there's one more thing that you have to dio. That's to make sure you tested out. So do a test print. Make sure that your term marks make sense and actually trim your paper to Villager marks. Make sure the full lines make sense. Basically, you just want to make sure you're testing it out because you are actually selling this. So you want to make sure that you're giving your customer a good product, and a lot of them may not be familiar with lead marks or term marks. Full lines. It's a lot easier to test it out now. Then find out after you've already gone through all this work posted your product, someone buys it, and then there's something that's a little off, so just make sure that it's user friendly
11. Etsy Shop Overview: Okay, so now that we have our artwork ready to sell, we need to have a Nazi shop to sell it on. If you don't already have one established, it's pretty simple to get started. You're gonna go Teoh etc dot com and we can just scroll down to the very bottom and click on sell on Etsy And really, from here, you can just click on open your Etsy shop and go on from there. I'm not gonna walk you through all the steps to creating an Etsy shop. I also can't because I already have mine created. So I would recommend doing some research on the Etsy website first. Just so you know what you need. Basically, what's required is going to be a shop name and you have to set up your billing information . Those are really the two biggest things when you're first getting started on etc. And then from there you can customize your shop with branding and copy. A little information about yourself is the seller. But really all you need to get started will be the name and to set up your billing, there really is a lot to learn about at sea in my class today is focused more on the technical aspects of selling digital products. So I would highly recommend diving a little deeper and exploring their resource is they have the beginner's guide to sign I'm etc. And they also the Etsy seller handbook. Those are just two things I'm mentioning. There are a lot more resource is on their website. I've included links to both of these in the project. Resource is
12. Etsy Listing Overview: So once you have your Etsy shop all set up, we can get ready to post our first listing. So from your shop manager page, we're gonna go to the left side bar and click on listings, and that will bring you to this page. And before we actually create a listing, I'm just gonna open up the adult list saying window so you can see what that looks like and see what you'll need to create your listing. So I'm just gonna click, Add a listing. Okay, so here's the listing page. The first thing that shows up is option to add photos for your listing, and you're going to need at least one photo at sea. Recommends that you have more than one photo for these products. They're pretty simple, so there's not really too much to add. Some people will add the photo of their digital product, and then we also have a sample of what it looks like after its printed with all the trim marks and everything. But that's up to you. I don't add that I just stick with my main photo and I usually have a couple zoomed in shots. So then we'll scroll down and we have our title. We have an about this listening so you have the option to say that you made it. Or if you're part of a team, a member of your shop or another company, your person that really doesn't apply in this case, what is it? The finished product or a supply? So here we would use a finished product, and then you can say when it's made, Okay? And then we have our category section here so you'll see. These are some common categories that I've used. So that's what shows up here will be sticking with probably digital prints or greeting cards. See, so we could put it in greening blank greeting cards. Birthday cards. Here they have paper. There's a few different options of what we could list are categorias okay, and then you also have these renewal options. So for these digital listings, I always keep it at automatic, and that's because we're not. We don't have a physical item with a limited quantity, so it makes sense to just have the listing automatically renew when it sells out or when four months is up so you'll see here each renewal list for four months, Okay? And then you're also gonna want to make sure that we check digital because this is going to be a digital file. And then we have our description backs here. I'll talk more about that later. And then there is also this option for custom orders. You can choose to have custom orders or not. For me, it just kind of depends on what the product is and how simple or not that it will be to customize section. This is a few of different sections in your shop, so these are the sections that I have, so that's optional. And then we also have tags here, which I'll get into later materials you can add, maybe paint or painting watercolors, pen in ink, things like that. Basically, what did you make your original artwork out of? Okay. And then this is where you would set the price for your product. And then we also have the quantity here. Like I said before, you have an unlimited quantity because this is a digital item. So I usually will set this somewhere around 100 or a larger number, because then it won't run out, But even if it did, we do have that bought over new selected and then there's also this. Allow restock requests. If, for some reason it ever sold out, then it would give your buyers an opportunity to ask for it to be restocked, so I would check. Yes, so you can also get personalization for listing. So if there's something that you want your buyer to be able to customize, this is where you would add that so you could add personalization instructions here, and then they can tell you how they want it personalized. But that is something that I haven't tried out yet. But that would probably work pretty well for a greeting card if you wanted to make it personalized. And then here is where you would upload the actual file. So this is where you would upload your pdf for J pegs off our greeting card, and then this is a little different here. Now they have this marketing section, and it's automatically checked to advertise the listing. I'm gonna go ahead and click. No, and that's because you will be charged for advertising the listing. And unless your shop is very successful, you know that's probably to take some time. The advertising can lead to sales, but starting out as a beginner, I don't know if that's really necessary. So I just wanted to give you an overview of what the listing page looks like. Over the next few slides, I'm going to go into more detail on photos and mock ups and all these other details here. Basically, what I like to do is gather all of my information before I actually go to post the listing . So rather than coming up with each item as I go, I find it much easier to get most of these prepared ahead of time in the glass. Resource is, I've also included this checklist, but before creating a listing, and I like to have my product files, my mock ups and photos, my title, my description and my pricing all figured out.
13. Mockups and Photos: Since we're selling digital items, markups are a great way to bring them to life and help potential buyers. See what your artwork would look like. An action. I like to use simple mock ups with a clean background for my digital prints, and you are a few options. With these, you can purchase a mock up on sites like Creative Market. You can get Free Mac apps online or you can make your own. Buying a Mac up is nice, because it means you don't have to do a ton of work and you're gonna get a high quality markup file. They're usually pretty easy to use and have clear instructions on where to put your artwork . If you're less experienced, I would recommend buying one. However, if you are buying a Mac up online, that means that other people have access to that Mac up and are probably buying it, too. So it's just not gonna be as unique to your shop. Is that something that matters to you? Then you might consider just making your own mock up. There are also a lot of sites that offer Ah, Free Mac up. We'll just make sure that you use those carefully. A lot of times they'll have special requirements where you have to include a credit saying where you got the Mac up from, or sometimes you're not allowed to use those for commercial use, which if you're selling on Etsy, that would be a commercial use. So those are things to keep in mind. You can't decide between purchasing a Mac up or getting a free one. I would probably just recommend buying one that way. It will just be a little bit more clear to you how you can use it. But even if you are buying a Mac up, just make sure to read all the fine print and make sure that you're using it properly for my head. See shop. I actually use a combination of free mock ups and markups that I've made myself. So here's an example of a mock up that I made myself. I want to show this sample to you to point out one thing in particular, so you'll see that there's a blue circle and it says Principal on it. I usually like to include something in my Mac up that indicates that this is a principal product So as I mentioned before, Sometimes customers don't realize that their purchasing a digital download. This is just one other area that you can make it very obvious that this is something that they can print at home. I also like it because that can draw people's attention as their scrolling on Nazi. You know, it's right there that it's a printable products, so if that's what someone's looking for, they can see it right there on that thumbnail image.
14. Listing Titles and Tags: all right, so your title is gonna be very important. Nine etc. And that's because at sea will use your title when people are searching on the site for a strong title, you're going to need a clear description, keywords and to include something like principal or instant download. So when I mentioned clarity, you just want to make it really obvious what your product is. Part of that is going to be including something about it being principal or an instant download, and we'll come back to keywords in a little bit. So let's look at a couple examples. Here we have a good strong title Rose pattern principal greeting card, Lincoln Side General Greeting card floor illustration. So uses some key word, you know, Rose pattern. That's very specific floral illustration, but also has some more general terms, like blank inside general greeting card. I wouldn't say this is the strongest title possible, but you can kind of see where we're going. Each of the phrases makes sense. I also just want to point out the slashes between the different phrases you could use a comma in a space, um, hyphen in a space. Basically, you just want something to kind of separate. Those terms will make it easier when people are reading the description. And then here's a not so great title greeting card, general blank rows pattern. It just sounds kind of discombobulated. Doesn't really sound like something that you would say or type into a search field. So you wanted to read Kind of. Naturally, you know, we have a certain word order that we use when we're speaking. So think of it that way. You wouldn't say that. Friends out loud, you might say Rose Pattern General Greeting card, But you wouldn't say it in the order greeting card. General Blank rows Pattern tags are also very important. Non, etc. And helping your products get found. So you're going to be allowed 13 tax for each product, and you want to make sure to use relevant keywords for those tags. So think about what would you search for to find your product? So for my greeting card example, I would probably search for floral birthday card or floral greeting cards. Something like that, Or maybe I'm just searching for a blank card. That's just pretty. You can search for a pretty greeting card. Don't be afraid to get very specific with some of your tax, especially because at sea serves a lot of niche customers, and then you can use some of your other Terex to be a little bit more general. So, for instance, I could have floral birthday card or rose pattern card as one tag, and then another tear could say gifts for her or thinking of you. So even though those aren't specific to the design of the artwork, they instill lineup with how the card will be used. Terror is gonna be a little bit confusing and takes some getting used to, especially if you don't really know a lot about search engine optimization or a CEO, but etc. Rank is a really good option. Seems the e rink you sweet old at sea rink. I mean, it's basically a website that you can link to your Etsy shop, and I'll give you an overview of your entire shop and all your product listings and kind of show you what's working. How are you getting seen? If so, what tags air helping you get found which tags aren't anything that you're listing might be missing. E. Rank also has a feature recon search for keywords to use, so I really would recommend looking further into that. If you're still a little bit confused about tags or really want Teoh, it will want some strategy for your Etsy page.
15. Description: next we have your description. This is almost as important as your title description is less about you trying to sell your product with flowery descriptions and more about informing the buyer what they're going to get. It's important they understand that they won't be getting mailed anything and that this is purely a digital file, as I mentioned before. No matter how clear you make this, you'll still get someone once in a while. Who asks you when will receive their item in the mail? Our goal here is to be as clear as possible for the best experience for them and for you. You don't want people to feel like they were misled by your product on purpose. Here's what I like to include the product details download in printing instructions in terms of use. Final sale. So let's talk about the product details so product details can include things like the final print size. What kind of envelope would work while with your greeting card? Things like that. Maybe also the file type that will be included in there. Download. Is it gonna be J. Peg? It's gonna be a pdf. Are there multiple sizes? All those details you want to include in your description. You just want to make sure that people know how to access the product once they've purchased it. And then we have terms of use. Final sale information. Basically, this is us just trying to cover our. But we want to let people know that they can't resell or reuse your file. They can't use it for commercial use. We just want to be extremely clear about how the file should and shouldn't be used. No, unfortunately, people buy things, might try to resell them or sell it as maybe another at sea Item. Who knows? People do crazy things. This just making sure we cover ourselves in case there any issues in the future. And it also kind of service is a little bit of a warning to anyone with nefarious intentions.
16. Pricing: now for the fun and not so fun topic of pricing. There are a few factors that you're gonna need to consider, so let's start with the value here I'm defining. It is how much someone is willing to pay for your product. I think that's important because you may value your work one way when you're selling a physical product. But here, we need to keep in mind that we're really selling someone a digital file, and some people are going to see the value in that the same way that they would an actual art prints or original piece of artwork. That's something to keep in mind. You have to think about what someone is willing to pay without undervaluing yourself, so it's a little bit of a balancing act. You also have to factor in at sea fees and figure out your desired net revenue. How much do you actually want to make per sale? You'll have to think about taxes. I'm not an accountant or a tax expert by any means. Let's something else that you're gonna have to figure out on your own and then materials. So what are a cost of your materials now? there really aren't any materials like shipping Hacker Jean things like that. But you didn't have to use some kind of materials to create your original artwork. That might also be something else you want to take into account here. So now let's talk about the value a little bit more. I want to make sure that our work is priced to sell. So like I mentioned before, you have to have it at a price that people are willing to pay for a digital product. Which brings me to the type of product. So think about a greeting card that you would get from a store that could be anywhere from $2 to, let's say, 6 54 a glittery fancy card here. They're just getting the digital file. So maybe the price makes more sense closer to $2 than that 6 50 range. But if you're selling ah, printable calendar, that might cost $10 for a digital products. So maybe you price that a little bit higher than you would the greeting card, but really, at the end of the day, you're just gonna have to find what works for you. You know, I've done a lot of research on my own, just looking at different etc. Listings, trying to find out a rhyme or reason to. The price is that people are using, and at the end of the day, you just have to figure out what's gonna work for you. I don't think there is one perfect answer for every Etsy seller, so that's something you might have to take some time to figure out and now onto. Fees at sea is a business, so selling on their platform is going to accomplish some fees. First, we have the listing fee, so every time you post a listing, you'll be charged 20 cents for their listing. So, for instance, if you only have one listing on your site, that means that you were charged 20 cents, and that's it, because that's only product on your site. So every time you make a new listing on Etsy, you'll be charged a 20 cent feet. Next, we have auto over new sold, and I think this might be one of the most confusing of the fees. It took me a little bit to wrap my head around this one, basically for listings with the quantity over one. There's a 20 cent renewal charge every time the item is purchased. So if you have a greeting card on etc. And you said that the quantity was 10 that you have 10 greeting cards, someone goes and buys one greeting card. There's going to be a 20 cent charge right away, and that's to auto renew that item. Next, we have our transaction fee and that's gonna be 5% of the purchase price. And finally, the XY payments fee, etc. Payments is optional. So basically, when you first go to set up your shop, you're gonna have the option to sign up for etc. Payments. Basically, if you don't sign up for etc. Payments, it means they're gonna be very limited in what kind of payments you can accept so without using etc. Payments, you can only use pay pale. You can't use credit cards. You can't take other forms of payment. So most people myself included use, etc. Payments. If you use etc. Payments, you're going to have this fee. That fee is going to be 3% of the purchase price plus 25 cents, and that's the etc. Payments fee for the U s the fees, actually, very per country. So that's something that you'll have to look for a Nazis website if you're living outside the US So that's a lot of information. So we're actually gonna look at an example. So let's say I'm selling a digital item for $5 and someone buys it. Whoa. Okay, so right away I'm gonna be charged enought over new sold FY 20 cents the etc. Payments fee. So 3% of $5 plus 25 cents and then the transaction fee, which is 5% of the purchase price. $5 that is 25 cents. So my final not revenue, is gonna be $4.15 for that one sale. Okay, so here I've pulled up my ETC Net revenue calculator, and this will just help you be able to figure out pricing for your products. So what I'm gonna do here is just go ahead. Changes number. Let's see what it looks like. A $20. I've included a link to this calculator in the class. Resource is so you should just be able to plug in a number, figure out your net revenue, so $5 like our example on the slide is gonna come out to $4.15. So just go ahead. You'll hear only have viewing access for the calculator. You'll just go to file, make a copy and then you'll be able to use the calculator on your own and plug in your own number in the yellow highlighted cell.
17. Create a Listing: All right, So now that we've gone over everything that will need for listing, I'm gonna go ahead and create one with my sample. And I'm happy with the thumbnail as it is, so I'm not gonna make any changes to it. But you do have the option to go ahead and zoom in more. Maybe I'll do a little that there, Okay. And then I'm gonna add another mock up just without that little principle kind of sticker there. And I'm just going to zoom in on that to show a little bit more detail so that there's something else for the buyer to see him. And then I don't have just one picture. So go ahead and you'll click on crop. So crapping So it says here, you know, cropping will control how it appears on the listing page. So if you want to keep the ratio, you have to go ahead and click which ratio you want to use. Arms seem to stick with us four by three. And I don't really want anyone to be able to copy my design. So I'm just gonna zoom in on half of the card just to show a little bit of detail, all right? And then I'm just gonna add the exact same photo again, and then I'm just gonna zoom in on the bottom part of the card. All right? So we're all set with our images, and then I'm just gonna copy and paste the title that I already made. Okay? And you'll see here that there are character limits. Just pay attention to that. I believe when we get rid of this real quick, I believe it's 1 40 Yep. Okay. I'm just gonna copy and paste that back in. I went over these before, so I'm just gonna go through these kind of quickly. I am going to choose a color, and these are great for people who might be looking for something a little bit more specific. So it's kind of a blackish gray for the background, you know, let's to pink occasion thes occasions get pretty specific. Really, this isn't for one occasion, so I'm actually not going to use this category. Basically, if I did that, it may not show up in other categories, So this is good if you have something with a clear intention, like a first birthday. That's very specific and the same goes for a holiday. So just because it could kind of look like a holiday doesn't mean you want to use this category because they will be misleading. I would only use this if it really is something that was designed for a specific holiday. Okay, we have automatic digital already have those selected and then I'm just gonna copy and paste a description that I already made. So basically, what I like to do is have this description ready to go in a Google doc. So I can just copy and paste it whenever I'm adding a new list seen without having to come up with everything all over again. Okay. And then I do have one part that I have to change on this description here, and that's just a brief description of the design. So I mentioned before that etc. Uses the title to search on their website. But search engines like Google will actually also use your description. So it's a good idea to have some keywords in here. A swell old so kind of the key words that I'm using here would be thank you know Mother's Day birthday wishes Rose print, floral greeting card, all of those. I just want to add a little bit more description there. But really, most of this description is just focused on exactly what the product is and what people will be getting if they buy it. And we're just gonna ignore this part about the production partner that doesn't apply to what we're doing with this digital products. And I'm not gonna add a section right now and we can go ahead and enter tags. So I came up with some before, so there are character limits to the tags, so let's see, So that fits. Hopefully, one of these is a little too long, so I can show you. Okay, so they can't be more than 20 characters. So this is just too long. I'm just gonna change it. Botanical prints. So, basically just trying to cover multiple bases with all my tags without overlapping too much , so I wouldn't want to put, you know, blank inside card or blink card. Several times I'm trying to be pretty specific. So blink birthday card so that I'm covering a wide range of areas. I don't really need to keep copying the blank inside part. So this cards for her? I don't know if I really like that. I'm gonna do a Mother's Day card, but I don't think people are really searching cards for her. Sometimes gifts for her. That might make sense. I think Mother's Day card will cover more. So this is too long again. So let's to printable card, because I've already included the birthday here, so I think that will be OK. And I like to use all 13 of my tags. So I am going to think of one more. Let's see if there's anything I haven't really covered. YYeTs I'm just gonna do, let's say plain greeting card that my pizza long Okay, that works materials gave my price. I already figured that out before. I'm gonna price this at $3. Quantity 100. Yes. I'm not allowing personalization. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and upload my file, so I'm going to do the pdf version e and also a J. Peg and I can have both at once. So I just held down the shift key to select both of those. All right? And I'm still double check my description. Make sure that I mentions. Yep. Okay, so I mentioned here that they're going to get a pdf on A J peg. If for some reason you're only providing a pdf for J peg version, just make that clear here. I like to provide people a pdf and JPEG one possible, but that might not make sense for whatever digital item you're selling. I would say pdf is probably the safest bet, though, because people can download the Adobe Reader for free. So that's really a nice option for people. It makes a lot easier for them to print it at home marketing. So I'm not gonna market this right now like I mentioned before, so I'm gonna go ahead and publish. Hopefully, it doesn't give me any issues. Sometimes I do have trouble where it will say I'm missing a field. So let's see. Okay, so that happened here. And usually the issue is somewhere in here. I don't assign a skew for my products, but sometimes you have to type in something here. So let's just put in one. I'm gonna delete it and see what happens. Okay, so that worked this time, and then this is just letting you know that it's gonna charge me the fee for posting my first listing, and this will come up for every listing that you publish. All right, so here's our listing could go ahead and view it. And there it is. You have your first listing on, etc.
18. Etsy Tips: Okay, so I just want to go over a few more tips on selling digital items on at sea. So if you go to settings in the left side bar here E and go to in phone appearance, it will bring you to this page. So this is where you can have your shop title, your shop icon. But what I really wanted to point out was the section message to buyers so you can have an automatic messages sent to your buyers when they purchase from you. So that's just a nice way to reach out to them directly with a little message of Thank you for choosing to buy a product from you. And I just also included in a PS line some information about if they want to share their product on instagram and tearing me. I'll give them a 20% off coupon. So it's just something to kind of promote my work, get more followers on Instagram, so feel free to add something like they ought to your message as well. I don't want to be too pushy, but it's just a nice way to connect with them and hopefully just get them to follow you and see your artwork kind of build your brand. And then there's also this option to have a message to buyers for digital items. So this is also where you could include some specific information about downloading and printing their digital item. Only thing here is that this would be the same for every digital item that you sell. So if your instructions change depending on the type of item, that just might be a little confusing here, so I'd keep it pretty. General, if you are gonna add a specific message to people who buy digital items from you and then I have just one more tip for you, we're gonna go back toe listings. All right, So something else that you can do is add a link in your description to one of your other products. So maybe you have, you know, several different kinds of floral greeting cards and you want people to be able to find them quickly. So they're looking at one of your items and see in the description that you have a link to another item in your shop, then they can go right there.
19. Customer Relationships: so now that we have our first listing up and live on, etc. I just want to talk, touch a little bit on customer service and really building that relationship with your customers. If they have a question or concerned, they can reach out to you directly. Even if it starts out as a negative or complaint, you have the opportunity to build a relationship with, Um, I worked quite a few customer service jobs in the past. Those were the hardest jobs I ever had, but they really taught me a lot about people and providing good customer service even when it's not very easy. So I just wanted to give you a few tips on handling BB, some challenging situations and just tips. Overall, first, assume everyone is coming from a good place. Even if you interpret a message or conversation from a buyer as a negative, just try to think that they're coming from a good place and that it's something that you could help them out with. There's no need to overreact or overthink the situation. Next. I just like to keep it friendly, so if it's obvious that someone is very unhappy about something, you know im very quick to offer an apology, even if maybe I don't feel like I did anything wrong. You just want to make them comfortable and keep the air interaction light and friendly. After all, we're just dealing with a digital item on at sea, so it's pretty low. Stakes don't get emotional, so maybe you get a message for a buyer that is really aggressive and upsetting. Don't get emotional, don't respond right away. It's probably not about you. It might be about something else that's going on their life. It probably is because once again, this is a digital item on etc. It's not a life or death situation. If you do have a strong reaction, wait to respond. I like to keep a consistent tone in all of my interactions. My tone is pretty friendly, lighthearted, conversational, all of those things. So just because the situation might be a little bit more serious doesn't mean I switch it up to be extremely formal and cold. I try to keep it consistent throughout all my interactions, and then we want to make sure that we're responding in a timely manner. So even though I mentioned you know stepping away, not responding immediately. You still want to respond? I would say within 24 hours. I believe that See does have some kind of vacation mode. I haven't used that yet, but that is an option if you won't be able to respond to any of your customers for a while . But otherwise I would say it's best to respond within 24 hours at most and finally be generous. You know, I have included in my terms that I don't accept returns for digital items because the nature of the product. But if someone is truly, really unhappy about something, I would rather refund them the $5 or $3 that they spends, then drag it out longer than necessary. I'm not interested in getting into an intense back and forth with someone over something like that. I just don't really think it's worth my time. It's not worth their time, and I'm okay with giving up a little bit of money. If that means leaving them satisfied and happy with our interaction. You also don't want someone going and leaving a one star review. So when push from stash of, I am willing to give a refund, even though that's not even part of my shop policy. Sometimes you just have to pick your battles, and I think this is a battle that's usually not worth fighting over.
20. Digital Product Ideas: So we've covered all the basics of creating our templates, creating a listing, starting her at sea shop, having our first listening on at sea customer service. And with all those tools, I want you to be able to create more than discreet ING cards. So a few other ideas would be art prints, calendars, coloring pages, bookmarks, gift tags, stickers. Really, anything else say you can think of to sell is a printable. The sky's the limit, and there's probably things that people I haven't even thought of yet, So I really invite you to get creative and think of new things that you could do with your artwork.
21. Class Project: so I have two steps for our class project. Step one, post a picture of the artwork you're going to turn into a greeting card if you are going to do something other than a greeting card. Just make sure to share that when you post the picture, because I would love to see what your ideas are if you are gonna venture outside of the greeting card that we used for class and step to share, a screenshot of your first etc. Listing.
22. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking this class with me today. I really hope that you got a lot out of it. And then you learn more about at sea and how to sell your digital products on that platform at sea can be pretty overwhelming. So I highly recommend checking out the resource is that I mentioned throughout the class. And if you want to follow along on my journey and see some of my art, follow me at Shane A cell art on instagram and follow me on skill share as I post more classes. Thank you.
Shayna Sell, Illustrator and Creator
