Maybe you have already taken a deeper dive into Etsy research and found some videos from sellers telling you how they make thousands of dollars each month selling print-on-demand apparel and other products.
I watched at least 10 hours of videos like these in the first week of my looking to open an Etsy shop. I clicked Like and Follow for a few of them. Some videos are only 10 minutes in length. Some are between 20 and 40 minutes in length.
Some of the highlights of these videos include how to use Canva to just grab a template, change a few colors, and upload that to your store. Others show you how to search for the most popular current item, such as a Mom t-shirt, then create a copy of that design and add a few nuances and colors to create something similar. The implied message here is that you can just copy everyone else, or use pre-constructed designs, and make sales in a few clicks.
These videos also show you how to do a surface-level keyword search, write titles, add images (and change the images that are stock from POD vendors like Printify and Printful. And those parts of the videos are accurate in what is needed. You’ll learn about eRank, Everbee, Marmalead, etc. There are many more than that; you can find a list here.
eRank is the one I started with. Why? Well, for one, it has a free option that’s pretty good for getting started. I researched that as well and found that the top-mentioned tools are all fairly equal. It just depends on your needs. I won’t go into how to use eRank in this post. I’ll leave that to a different section on tools.
Are YouTube Influencers Altruistic
Getting back to the “get rich my way” videos, I want to address some of the criticism you will see aimed at them. The obvious one is that even with a 30-minute video, they aren’t telling you about the timeframe between how they started and how they reached thousands of dollars a month in sales and gave up their day job to live peacefully off the immense passive income they are making while traveling the world and only working a few hours a week.
A lot of them then tell you about all the links in the video description. They offer links to discounted Etsy codes, and hopefully, you see that that is an affiliate code. They are getting a kickback for that link. Just an FYI, you can find those codes online without clicking on an affiliate link. Google is your friend here.
Then you see they are offering a class that they “guarantee” will get you to their numbers. I saw one that was nearly $1000. I thought to myself “What is this person going to show me that is worth $1000?” If you read the comments from satisfied customers, you may see people exclaiming how excited they were to finally get their first sale three months after completing the YouTubers course.
Wait? Three months? You paid $1000 for a course and it still took an additional three months to make a sale and you were that excited about it? I decided I was not going to pay someone to show me what I could learn on my own by reading the Etsy help pages, and watching videos from Printify, other YouTubers, and other sources. I don’t want to make a recommendation based on my own experiences. What I will say is, that most How To video sources are going to have a product to sell. I don’t think you should go that way.
Can You Mimic Their Success?
You may be saying “But these shops are successful, so why can’t I be?” That’s a great question. I am still trying to do more investigation into the success of some shops over others. I did pay for a plan on eRank. Once I took the base paid plan, I was able to get more information on the best sellers out there. I will tell you this.
If they list their shop name, plug it into the search on eRank and you will get their shop history, their recent sales, what their best-selling items are, and what those listings generated in potential gross sales. (eRank doesn’t tell you how much of those sales are given to the vendor, Etsy, taxes, shipping, etc.) So, yeah, they may have made $200,000 in sales over three years, but the expenses and taxes might take over 65% of that income.
One of my favorites is one seller who offers her income/expense Excel sheet for download for $20. Please don’t fall for that. If you have a subscription to Microsoft and Excel, just look up templates for income and expense. You do need a little bit of Excel skills, but you can make your own Excel sheet to track income and expenses. And, if you are serious about earning income, then I insist you have a way of tracking your sales.
Are these sellers lying in their videos? I don’t think so. I have certainly followed their advice and began my shop by following their methods. Did I spend money based on their recommendations? Yes, I have. I purchased a subreption to Canva, Place.It, and Leonaro.ai. I also purchased a few pre-made mock-ups.
What Aren’t They Telling Me?
They aren’t telling you that they were not overnight successes. They say they are helping you save time that they wasted by doing all the research and trial and error that they did to get to their success level. I think that, if you are not someone who can find the information on your own, then maybe shelling out your cash to get their template for selling is right for you.
Ask yourself this question? If these sellers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year running their shop(s), then why do they need to sell their get-rich-my-way plans? Why not give it away for free in their videos? After all, they get ad income every time you watch the videos.
Here’s another question to ask? Suppose you opened a store on your main street, and you are finally making a great income after hard labor, long hours, and personal investment. Why would you then call up everyone and say “Hey, if you want to make money like I make money, then open a store down the road from me and be a direct competitor. Pay me $1000 and I will tell you how I made my store the most popular of its kind in town.”?
There has to be a hook, right? Here’s the hook. They aren’t telling you something that isn’t available for free with enough research. Here’s what else they aren’t telling you in their videos. Business requires effort. Even selling on Etsy isn’t effortless. Maybe they did launch a store and started to earn massive income in a month. But that sounds a bit incredulous.
Continue on the journey with me. I will be discussing what I did in the first 30 days of opening my shop, and where I am now and moving forward. Can you make it on Etsy? It depends on a lot of factors: what product am I selling? Am I dedicated to hours of effort with no reward? Can I market myself? Can I master SEO and keyword usage? Can I afford to lose money and for how long?
See my next post on my first few days of building a shop.