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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Neil and his wife figure out how to get more traffic to their online Etsy store.
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Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: Hey y’all, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J; today’s question comes from Neil Miller and Neil writes, “I’m hoping you will not discriminate me since I’m not from the South. I am from the frozen Tundra of Minnesota.” We do not discriminate, the war was over many years ago, my friend.
JOCELYN: It’s cool Neil, we like you.
SHANE: It’s cool, we’re cool at Minnesota; see what I did there, ‘frozen Tundra’, ‘cool’ with Minnesota?
JOCELYN: That was great.
SHANE: All right, maybe not. All right, “My question is regarding physical products and services. My wife has recently opened an Etsy shop and I am wondering of you could give some ideas –” I cannot read today “– on getting traffic to her shop. Also, I run a small janitorial business on the side and would like to get traffic to my website. I get maybe 20 visits or so a month to my website. Thank you very much on answering our question.” All right, Neil, there’s basically two ways; it doesn’t matter if you are selling physical or digital products first of all. It doesn’t matter if your website sells, you know, widgets, or things, or lawn mowers, or racquetball racquets, or you’re selling digital products like e-books or e-courses. Your website exists on the internet, there’s only two ways to really get traffic to that site; you can either create a ton of content and let it grow organically or you can pay for it. So what I’m gonna do is talk about how to grow your content organically and then Jocelyn is gonna talk a little bit about paid advertising. Okay, so your wife has an Etsy shop so what she should probably do is maybe start a blog where she can talk about the things that she sells on her website. So, she can create blog posts and have a website where people can come and see and learn about all the things that she creates. Etsy is like an arts and crafts marketplace kind of deal; if you’ve never heard of Etsy before, where people make things and they sell the things that they make. So I would probably create a blog or something or a website where she can talk about all the things that she makes. We had a client named Sarah over at Printablecharm.com and she sells like printables and things you print out for birthday parties and stuff like that. And she has a website a blog and all those things where she gives people ideas for parties but she sells her stuff over on Etsy. So that would be a great model for you to create content, lots of content where you talk about all the things that you do on Etsy and you are going to grow organically that way and Google is going to find it and you’re gonna get search results when people search for those things and you’re gonna find blog posts that your wife has written where she talks about those things and she can link over to her Etsy store maybe and sell all that content. There’s also a lot of room here where you can share stuff on social media. I know Etsy stuff is very creative; that usually translates very well over to Pinterest; I think Etsy has a greater female audience probably than male audience as well. So that’s really going to kind of combine there. You can get on Pinterest, people will share things, maybe Facebook – or Instagram probably will be better than Facebook where you can take pictures of the things that your wife is making and you just create all this content and you speak to people through these social media channels and over time, the search engines are gonna find out what your wife’s doing, they are gonna start showing up in search results and people are gonna come to her blog and website, learn about her, get to know her, get to know her products and then go over to Etsy and buy things. So, that’s kind of the long-term strategy. You should probably be doing that no matter how you choose to get traffic anyway because you don’t want to base your entire brand on the Etsy store, because what if Etsy closes your store or what if Etsy shuts down and disappears and you’ve built your whole business to make money on Etsy and it’s gone? So that will be a great way to protect yourself and future-proof your business and get more traffic to your Etsy products.
JOCELYN: And all of the things that we are discussing here, you have to remember, we are not Etsy experts, we do not know very much about it, we do not sell things about Etsy and –
SHANE: And we don’t know – we’ve never read their terms and conditions. So you’re gonna have to learn that.
JOCELYN: So you have to make sure that anything that we talk about here would be considered okay in their terms and conditions and that goes for any platform that you sell on that belongs to someone else. You have to make sure that you are following the rules.
SHANE: Another reason why you need your own platform, your own blog, your own website so you get to make the rules.
JOCELYN: But we are not necessarily against platforms like Etsy if it helps you to get started and you’ve maybe even doing it for a while; I know a lot of people sell things on websites and on Etsy and that’s totally cool too. So, I totally agree with the organic traffic and that’s fine to do. Another way that you can get traffic is through paid traffic and depending on which social media networks that you like to use, they are all a little bit different. I think Pinterest now has paid traffic and that would be a really cool thing for you to do probably depending on what you’re making on Etsy. We’ve had a lot of success with Facebook ads and you can put just a little bit of money in and really target down an audience and show them your ads. In order to do that, you probably would not be able to send the traffic directly to Etsy, you probably have to send them to a Facebook page or a website that you own –
SHANE: And you can check their terms and conditions to see if that’s okay. We’re not sure about that. So, basically if your ad is not allowed to send people to Etsy, your ad could send them either to your website that you create or like Jocelyn said, you go make a business Facebook page called, you know, ‘Miller’s Etsy Store’ or something whatever and you have a Facebook page and you can actually get the link for that page, use the ad to go there where you have posts and links to all your Etsy products.
JOCELYN: And there’s actually paid ads inside of Etsy; I just bought something from there a few minutes ago for a baby shower and I –
SHANE: Didn’t know that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I bought –
SHANE: Are you busting the budget over there Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: I bought the first listing that I saw which was a sponsored ad. So just something else to think about, you may even consider advertising right there in Etsy.
SHANE: Etsy is very similar to, a thing called ‘Teachers Pay Teachers’ where people – teachers can go out and sell their lesson plans and Teachers Pay Teachers is not the best use of your time and money because they take a huge portion of your profits but I know that a lot of people do have success in that kind of marketplace by posting their lesson plans and then they buy ads directly from Teachers Pay Teachers that show in the sidebar. So as teachers come on and they look for other lessons, they see different subjects and they can go over on the sidebar and they pick the lesson that they may want. Etsy probably does the same thing. All the people you are selling to, are already on Etsy so that might be a great place for you to spend your money right there instead of a big, convoluted system to drive it from Facebook to Etsy. You should try both, see which one works the best and don’t discount selling stuff on your own website. If your website is going work good, you might as well put your products on there too so you can keep all of the profit and Etsy doesn’t have to take any of the cut. All right guys, that’s all the time we have for this Q&A, thank you so much, that was a great question Neil and if you have a question, make sure you head over to the website, listen at the end of the show, during the outro song and we will tell you how you can ask a question and be featured on another Q&A with S&J mini-podcast. Till next time, we’ll catch you all on the flip side.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Neil Miller says
Wow, I checked out Flipped Life today to listen to some podcasts while at work and there is my question featured on the Q and A podcast!
I believe I submitted my question a couple of months ago. My wife is starting to get some sales on her Etsy shop and a lot of hits. Here are some things we have been doing:
Contacting bloggers and offering products for them to give away (this has been great so far). This has given the Etsy shop a decent amount of traffic.
Facebook has been big. My wife is also a photographer so she is able to take great pictures of her jewelry and post them on FB.
Word of mouth to family and friends.
You have reaffirmed our decision to start a website and I was hesitant. I built one but we have not content on it yet so I have a “coming soon” page there for now (we have four small kids so finding time is a challenge).
Since making jewelry takes time, I am hoping to also create some type of downloadable items that my wife can sell for a more passive approach.
Thank you guys for answering my questions on the podcast!
Kat says
Hi Neil, you guys sound like you are off to a really great start with Etsy! I love your idea of bloggers using your products as giveaways!
I have a suggestion or two if I may?
I think expanding by having digital products in your store is a great idea! Perhaps your wife could create a couple of simple jewelry making tutorials (either PDF or video) to sell in the store and maybe even branch out into selling the supplies that go along with the tutorials.
You mentioned that your wife is good with photography so I wanted to reiterate what Shane said and suggest you guys get on Pinterest, if you’re not there already! It can be a HUGE source of traffic and sales for Etsy sellers and if you have the visuals right you are already half way there 🙂 Frequency is also super important on Pinterest so if you can pin and repin for at least 15 minutes a day it would be a great start.
Cheers
Kat
Shane Sams says
Listen to Kat…she knows what she is talking about.