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Tuesday, December 10, 2013

10 TIPS for Successfully Selling On ETSY

how to sell on etsy

I have been selling my metal furniture, jewelry and trees on Etsy since 2007.  I have been there and done that and I am still selling!  (my shop) Through the years I have learned first-hand how to market my shop.  I have also been writing about selling on Etsy since 2008 and coaching Etsy sellers in every niche imaginable.  I am the owner and chief editor of Handmadeology and the author of How to Make Money Using Etsy.  The following 10 tips for selling on Etsy will help you understand what it takes to become successful on Etsy.

My number one tip that I tell new Etsy sellers, is to remember that Etsy is not magic.  Just throwing up a bunch of 20 cent listings with no business plan will not bring you the success you are looking for.   If you treat your Etsy business like a hobby you will reap hobby money, but if you treat it like a real business you will bring in the money you are striving for .  Remember, you reap what you sow.
Here are few articles to make you think and inspire you during your creative business  journey:

Product Photography should be number one or at least high up on your list when it comes to running your Etsy business. Without shoppers being able to touch and handle your items, your pictures need to be the best they can be.  Detailed, clean, clear, not too dark, and from different angles.  After a shopper looks at all 5 pictures they should feel like they have picked up the item and looked it over and are ready to take it to the cash register and buy!
Here is a huge list of product photography tips for Etsy sellers.
Product Photography Class

I remember when I listed my very first item on Etsy…I was clueless about pricing.  There are many factors that come into play when pricing your items, so knowing your product is crucial.  You need to know how much it costs to make your item, how much time you spend making it, and how much it costs to ship.  These are just a few things to keep in mind when filling out the price section of your listing.
In pricing articles below, you will find in-depth tips that will help you  get the most for your handmade items.

Standing out in the crowd of Etsy sellers can be a difficult task.  You should have a clear vision of what you want your brand to be and stick with it.  Doing your research on how to build a strong and long-lasting brand should be high up on your to-do list!
Here are a number of articles that talk about brand for creative business owners.

Knowing who your target market is is key when it comes to selling online.
Here are some questions to get you started:
Are your target customers male or female?• How old are they?• Where do they live?• Is geography a limiting factor for any reason?• What do they do for a living?• How much money do they make? This is most significant if you’re selling relatively expensive or luxury items.
Example of a Target Market
This is my target market: Women, over 30, median income of $60,000, single or married, college-educated, urban, professional, but quirky…

SEO is sometimes difficult to understand, but it is vital to the growth of your creative business.
Getting your Etsy Shop and Etsy items found on Google can be a difficult task, but with the proper research and placement of specific keywords, you can begin to dominate small niches and move up in the Google search. There are a few things you need to keep in mind when you are looking for keywords to use.
When looking for keywords and phrases, shopper intent, search volume, and keyword competition are the 3 most important factors that determine a good key word.
Shopper Intent First — The most important factor to look at when figuring out the value of a keyword or phrase is intent. When picking a good keyword to analyze, pick words or phrases that people interested in your items would search for. You know your product best. Once you determine what these words and phrases are, use the Google Keyword tool to find more suggested words and analyze them to see if they are worthy of using. I will explain more about this later in this article.
Volume Second — When determining the value of a keyword or phrase, you need to look at the search volume. Are there enough people searching per month for a term on Google to even consider optimizing for it? (The Google Keyword tool provides this info for you). If you answered yes, then you have to ask yourself if it is possible to rank for that keyword? It will be extremely difficult to rank on Google for a high volume term such as ‘garland,’ but easier to rank on Google for lower competition, small niche, 2-3 word phrases such as “paper garland”.
Keyword Competition Third – A key word can have a high search volume on Google, but that does not mean it is a good key word or phrase. You have to know how many competing pages there are according to Google and the competition on Etsy. These two factors can help you determine if you want to use a key phrase or not. I will also cover more about this later in the article.
Small Niches Always- Why would you want to focus on a small niche? Smaller niches are searched less on Google every month, but they also have less competition. The smaller amount of competing pages, the better the chance your shop will rank on Google for a particular keyword.
Check Handmadeology’s manual on Etsy SEO right here on the blog. It is packed full of links covering every area of SEO for your Etsy shop.

By now most Etsy sellers have heard about the Etsy relevancy search change.  When I cruise the Etsy forums, team discussions, Facebook fan pages, comments on Handmadeology, and my inbox,  a common theme seems to pop up over and over.   Sellers are trying to understand what the changes to the Etsy default search mean, and how they can make the correct changes to get the most traffic that leads to sales. Etsy Relevancy optimization and SEO go hand in hand.   Google is also set up as a relevancy search,  setting up proper SEO from the start will optimize your shop for Etsy relevancy.
The Handmadeology team has put together a FREE package that will help every Etsy seller understand what the new Etsy search is all about.  The Etsy Relevancy Breakdown walks you through every thing that has changed when the search default was changed to relevancy. In this report you will also find helpful tips which will set you on the right path to increasing your views and getting more sales.   Also in this package you will get a 12 point checklist that will help keep you on track when you are listing new items and optimizing your shop for the Etsy search and Google.
etsy relevancy checklist

As you know, I am a huge advocate of social media marketing. Marketing my Etsy shop on Facebook and Twitter have greatly increased my visibility and grown my customer base. Getting new potential buyers to view your work is only part of the equation…building relationships with your customers is the other part! Social media makes connection with customers easier.
Being an Etsy seller, I know how hard it is to get any views from just listing your items on Etsy. Marketing your Etsy items outside Etsy is a must these days. I am excited to share this free e-course with Etsy sellers, because I have been using these 10 steps for years and I have seen great results. I have increased my traffic to my blog and Etsy shop, moved up in the Google ranking, and have even seen my customer base grow.
Connecting your Etsy shop with Facebook and Twitter is only one piece to the social media puzzle.  Check out this huge list of social media marketing tips for Etsy sellers: Make the Connection
If you are ready to learn how to decrease the amount of time you spend promoting your Etsy items and at the same time maximize your results, the Holiday Rush Etsy Marketing Formula5-day FREE e-course is just for you! This course has been taken by over 3,000 Etsy sellers and is simple to understand and implement.
If you have not already noticed, all four steps in this marketing plan are free. Yes they are going to take time to build and get right, but in the end, you are going to build a business doing what you love. There is no “easy button”, but if you let your passion shine through, you will succeed!
Social Media Articles:
Quick Blogging Tips:
1. Be consistent. Blogging takes time, and without consistency you will not gain momentum.
2. Build community. Get the community involved in your blog. There is power in numbers and you have to harness that. Feature other sellers and artists, and let them help you spread the word about your blog.
3. Give away free stuff. Give your readers more reasons to visit your blog. Develop a few products that you can give away. Whether it’s a free tutorial on making a necklace , a recipe , a digital download, or an ebook that you wrote. Check out this article on creating an killer ebook! Here are all the free products that we offer through Handmadeology.
4. Build your brand. Your blog should be a reflection and extension of your brand. Banners and color schemes should match across the board. When a customer comes to your blog, they need to know it belongs to you.
5. Have fun. The second that your blog becomes a chore and no fun, you need to stop and reevaluate what you are doing.
Blogging Tips:

The handmade movement is accelerating at a fast pace. Hundreds of thousands of people are signing up for Etsy every month, and it is getting more difficult to get recognized. One way to increase your network, get more recognition, expand more exposure, contribute to the handmade community, and build back links is to write guest articles for blogs. Lets break down the five main reasons you should be writing guest articles.
Increase your network:
When you are writing for other blogs in the handmade community, you have the opportunity to meet other like-minded people. Let’s face it…we all need to make connections and hang around people with whom we have things in common. Do you belong to an Etsy team? Do you join groups and Fan pages on Facebook? Putting your heads together helps everyone get things done faster and in the long run, can improve your business.
Get More Recognition:
A little recognition goes a long way, and writing for other blogs in the handmade scene can increase it greatly. Just by writing articles for other blogs, readers understand that the blog publishing your article sees you as an expert in the topic you are writing about. The more you write the more your recognition will build.
Expand Your Exposure:
By writing on more blogs and websites you will reach different audiences and expand who sees your brand. By writing guest articles, you are building a permanent brand that can bring you more traffic and sales.
Contribute To The Handmade Community:
We all have learned one or many things from blogs in the handmade community. Guest writing helps you give back and contribute to the handmade community. From featuring handmade goods to teaching, blog posts help the community in a huge way.
Build Back Links:
When you are guest writing on a blog, you should be given the ability to link back to your blog, Etsy shop, and other sites. You should also be allowed a short bio that you can leave at the end of each article. Back links will help your SEO, especially when they come from well known, relevant blogs.
Did you know you can guest post right here on Handmadeology? Here is all the info you need to get started.

My golden rule for my business is…. “The second your creative business becomes a chore and you lose the fun, it’s time to change it up!”    Don’t get me wrong, running your own business can have it’s down times, but the beauty of owning your own business is you have the ability to change it up when things get mundane and boring.
Here are a few more articles from creative business owners that are selling on Etsy and living their dream!
When I launched my Etsy shop I had no knowledge of the internet except email and YouTube.  I have learned so many valuable lessons over the past few years.  What stands out the most and what I will never forget is to never stop believing in yourself.  If you have a passion for what you are creating and selling you will succeed.  Love what you do so you can do what you love!!

Is there a Handmadeology  article that has  impacted you and how you run your Etsy business?  If so, let us know which one in the comments below, so we can bring you even more helpful articles in the future.
Connect with Handmadeology:

etsy facebook app
94% of Etsy sellers use Facebook as the primary marketing method for their Etsy shop according to a survey of 600 Etsy sellers. The top two concerns with Etsy and Facebook are:
• How do I increase the number of my Facebook fans?
• What should I content share to connect with my fans and generate more sales?
Fanpageology connects your Etsy shop to your Facebook Fanpage with the ability to create customizable tabs that will take your Facebook marketing to new levels of effectiveness. Fanpageology provides you the tools you need to increase your fans that are targeted customers and connect with them in ways that encourage more sales and brand loyalty.
Fanpageology gives Etsy sellers the ability to create fully customizable content to share on Facebook using 19 features with a simple drag and drop system that lets you immediately see how it will appear on Facebook while you create custom tabs.
Fanpageology empowers Etsy sellers to do the following on Facebook:
•Promote and share treasuries
•Put your Etsy shop on Facebook
•Create an inventory slideshow
•Share testimonials with Etsy feedback
•Run contests
•Create an email list and collect email addresses
•Put web pages on Facebook tabs
•Share Etsy team information
•Promote with coupon codes
•Run contests and product giveaways
•Build brand awareness with videos, pictures, text, and hyperlinks
•Share your Etsy shop About Page details
•Create buzz and viral content
•GAIN MORE FANS with fangates! (Fangates allow you to create incentives for non-fansto like your page and generate phenomenal proven results)
Fanpageology is a cutting edge tool taking Facebook marketing to new heights for Etsy sellers!
Subscribers will also have access to how-to videos and educational materials taking the guesswork out of Facebook marketing as well as harnessing the power of Fanpageology -making your Etsy/Facebook connection extremely effective.
Get ready to experience more engaged fans, additional sales, and Facebook content that your fans really want to see in their news feed!
Join us as Etsy and Facebook help make each of our small business dreams come true – with Fanpageology!
We are excited to help Etsy sellers manage their social media marketing and create more time to run their Etsy shops.
Thanks ,
Timothy
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When do I need to incorporate a company?



Founders of startup companies often wait to incorporate a company until they are confident that their concept is viable or fundable.  At some point, however, an entrepreneur will need to formally incorporate a company.  Several reasons exist for taking the step to incorporate.


  • More than one founder.  If there is more than one founder, the likelihood of an argument about how the equity should be split in the new company increases dramatically.  Incorporating a company and issuing stock to the founders will help prevent misunderstandings among the founders about equity splits.  Trying to clean up pre-incorporation promises to grant equity in a startup company is a painful task, especially if founders part ways before there are formal documents in place to deal with the situation.  Please keep in mind that even if a company is incorporated, founder stock purchase agreements with repurchase rights over unvested stock if founders leave are not included with the documents from typical online incorporation services.
  • Creating intellectual property.  If there is any IP created and there is more than one founder, then incorporating an entity and assigning IP to the entity is important.  Otherwise, if a founder leaves before incorporation and IP has not been assigned to the other founder or an entity, then use of IP created by the former founder may be problematic.  Once again, please keep in mind that the documents from typical online incorporation services do not contain IP assignment provisions in connection with the purchase of founders stock or separate IP assignment documents.
  • Hiring employees or third party contractors.  Although I’ve run into a situation where the former CEO of a Fortune 500 company personally paid an “employee” out of his own pocket for a year prior to incorporation while incubating an idea, most founders will need to incorporate a company if they intend to hire employees.  In addition, if an entrepreneur needs to engage third party contractors, it generally makes sense to incorporate a company so that the third party enters into an agreement with a company instead of an individual.  In addition, any IP created by the contractor can be assigned to the company instead of an individual founder.
  • Issuing stock options.  Many entrepreneurs do not have the cash to pay third parties and may partially compensate third parties by granting stock options or giving them the opportunity to purchase equity at nominal prices.  Although it is possible to have pre-incorporation agreements to grant equity upon incorporation, it is simply easier to incorporate a company and grant stock options or equity to satisfy these promises.
  • Launching a service/product and general liability issues.  One important reason for incorporating a company is to protect the stockholders against personal liability.  If a company complies with corporate formalities, creditors of the company generally cannot reach the stockholders to satisfy the company’s liabilities.  Thus, a company should generally incorporate before launching a product or a service due to potential liability issues, as the risk of liability to a founder increases with customers or users.
  • Obtaining visas.  If a non-U.S. citizen/non-permanent resident founder intends to work in the U.S. on a startup project, then the founder should work with an immigration attorney on a strategy to legally work in the U.S.  Incorporating a company and demonstrating that it is a “real” business with sufficient capital is typically a prerequisite to a visa application.
  • Starting capital gains holding period in the event of a stock sale.  If a founder sells stock of a company in a taxable transaction and it is held for greater than one year, then the capital gains tax rate is 15% for founders in the 25% tax bracket and higher. These days, it is fairly easy to develop a hit iPhone app or Facebook app and sell a company fairly quickly.  I represented a couple of Facebook app companies last year that were sold in taxable transactions.  One app was sold by an individual founder and the app was only several months old.  Unfortunately, the founder was unable to receive the benefit of long-term capital gain tax treatment on the asset sale (and ended up paying the same tax rate as ordinary income on the sale proceeds).  The other app was sold by an individual founder and the app was only several months old, but he had the foresight to incorporate a company more than a year prior to the sale and assign IP to the company.  The buyer bought the stock of the company as opposed to the app itself.  Thus, even though the app was less than one year old, the shares of stock of the company were held for greater than one year, and qualified for long-term capital gain tax treatment.
  • Funding.  Obviously, if third party investors want to invest in a startup idea, there needs to be an entity to accept the investment.  Generally, I prefer to incorporate and issue founder’s stock at nominal prices well in advance of a Series A preferred stock financing because it is difficult to justify that common stock should be priced at $0.001 per share while Series A preferred stock is issued at $1.00 per share.
Incorporating a company is a serious step that results in out of pocket costs and ongoing tax and other filing obligations. In addition, if a founder still has a day job as an employee of another company, then the founder will need to review the founder’s employment documents carefully in order to determine if there are any issues. The first step in deciding whether to incorporate or not is to discuss the situation with a competent attorney.
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Monday, December 9, 2013

5 TED Talks Every Entrepreneur Needs To Watch

Where can you spend countless hours watching the world’s smartest people give passionate speeches, at no charge? TED.com, that’s where. TED is amazing. Seriously. And below is a collection of my 5 favorite TED talks every entrepreneur should watch. Enjoy!

Tony Robbins Asks Why We Do What We Do


Seth Godin on Standing Out

Rory Sutherland: Life Lessons from an Ad Man


Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce


Alexis Ohanian: How to Make a Splash in Social Media


There you go! Five great TED talks to inspire, motivate and further develop yourself as an extraordinary entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed these videos!
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The Brilliant Hack That Brought Foursquare Back From the Dead BY RYAN TATE

Dennis Crowley. Photo: John Francis Peters/WIRED
Dennis Crowley thought his 13-year dream might never come true.
Crowley is the founder of Foursquare, the seminal social networking service that broadcasts your location across the net and serves you tips and deals based on where you are. This past February, the New-York-based startup boasted 40 million registered users, but it was facing competition from countless others — including the mighty Facebook — and as far as Crowley was concerned, his service had never worked as it should. Rather than automatically sending users tips as they moved from place to place, the Foursquare smartphone app required them to “check in” every time they wanted information about their location — a time-consuming process that rewarded sitting still rather than exploring and discovering new experiences.
Crowley always envisioned Foursquare as a fellow traveler, dispensing relevant information unbidden — sale items as you entered a boutique or popular appetizers as you sat down at a new restaurant
Crowley always envisioned Foursquare as a fellow traveler, dispensing relevant information unbidden — alerting you to tucked-away bars as you strolled a neighborhood, sale items as you entered a boutique, or popular appetizers as you sat down for dinner at a new restaurant. But time and again, he was stymied by the massive technical challenge of building this kind of system. “I was worried it wasn’t going to work forever,” Crowley says.
Finally, after 13 years of trying, Crowley has cracked the problem, thanks to a wonderfully clever data hack from two big thinkers on the payroll: lead engineer Anoop Ranganath1 and data scientist Blake Shaw. A new version of Foursquare began to roll out this fall, offering the kind of “passive notifications” Crowley had always dreamed of, and last week, with the release of a new app for iPhone and iPad, it reached out to an even wider audience. According to the company, users interact with the new app 60 percent more frequently than they did on previous versions, and they spend 30 percent more time with the thing. Of the more than 1 million “pings” sent in the first two months of the new service, about 40 percent were at least opened by the Foursquare faithful.
The trouble is that, over the intervening years, other companies have begun to have the same dream as Crowley. App stores are crawling with similar services. Silicon Valley venture capitalists have pumped tons of money into location apps. And then there’s Facebook, whose social networking service is a mainstay for hundreds of millions of people across the globe. But now that his app is working as he first envisioned 13 years ago, Crowley is unbowed.
“There’s going to be 100 million people that carry software in their pocket, [and] everywhere you go it’s going to tell you about stuff that you normally wouldn’t have known,” he says. “I think that stuff is going to be built by Foursquare.”
Anoop Ranganath and Blake Shaw. The pair debugged the new version of Foursquare by taking walks 
around the city.Photo: John Francis Peters/WIRED

Engineer Meets Data Scientist

It all began when engineer Anoop Ranganath sat down for a chat with data scientist Blake Shaw.
In January, Ranganath took on the task of building a prototype for a new Foursquare app. By the spring, even he had to admit that the project was a mess. It caused batteries to drain after just a few hours. It gave bad directions. It sent alerts at the wrong times — tossing users recommendations for a nearby fashion boutique when they were comfortably seated at a bar around the corner.
The problem was the method the prototype was using to identify location — a straightforward combination of GPS, Wi-Fi signals, and cell towers. It couldn’t always find the right signals, and even if it did, it tended to seriously drain the battery as it searched.
But when Ranganath told Shaw about the problems, the data scientist had an idea. Why not take a shortcut? Foursquare already had a massive database of check-ins — location information about the places its users most liked to go. And this data didn’t just include the place where someone had checked in. It showed how strong the GPS signal was at the time, how strong each surrounding Wi-Fi hotspot signal was, what local cell towers were nearby, and so on. Leveraging this data meant that Foursquare could still grab a good current location even if users were underground, near a source of radio interference, or facing some other signal obstacle. Chances are, some prior Foursquare user had seen the world through the same flawed eyes and reported his or her location.
“It’s one thing for us to match one point to another point, but we have a lot more options when we can match a cloud of points to another cloud of points,” Ranganath says. “It was very much an ah-ha moment for everybody.”
Blake Shaw. Photo: John Francis Peters/WIRED
Foursquare’s ability to cut through the noise of crowded cities didn’t only help the company locate its users. It also reduced battery drain. Suddenly, the app didn’t need to activate the phone’s radios nearly as often. Instead, it could use a technique called “geofencing,” telling the operating system that it didn’t need to check anything unless the phone crossed certain geographic boundaries. Before, those boundaries had been fuzzy and hard to set, so Foursquare had to stay awake more often. Now, those boundaries were clear, and Foursquare could sleep for long stretches, waking up to look around only on occasion. “We realized we can build probabilistic maps of how your phone sees the world,” Shaw says.

When Programmers Get Exercise

Despite all the high tech, Foursquare’s system needed refining, and for the development team, that meant many a walk around New York and San Francisco, where Foursquare’s engineers are based. Crowley tested the system too, and provided a key insight that helped make the recommendation system far less annoying: Only poke people with tips when they are in unfamiliar locations — traveling to a new city, for example, or visiting a new restaurant where their friends have left advice.
Whether the new Foursquare is as useful to the general public as it has been for its initial testers remains to be seen. But in the wake of last week’s launch, Crowley is still aiming for his magic number: 100 million users.
Only poke people with tips when they are in unfamiliar locations — traveling to a new city, for example, or visiting a new restaurant
Others don’t quite see the app in the same light. Ben Lerer, CEO of Thrillist Media Group, a publisher of local online entertainment guides, says that while the new passive notification system “has been awesome” in his personal experience — accurate, relevant, and unobtrusive — he’s not sure it will be a game changer for the company.
“It’s a really compelling technology that [could] help them get bought by Google or Facebook or somebody else,” he says. But he doesn’t think the tool “will explode their numbers.”
Some people even question whether this sort of app is really the future. Mike Krieger — the co-founder of the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service Instagram, which began as a Foursquare “check-in” competitor — believes it makes more sense for location services to be part of larger applications that do far more than just track your whereabouts. “Location is as important as ever,” he says, “but leading with it doesn’t seem to be something that people have really gone for.”
Certainly, the days when people used Foursquare just to check-in — just to show everyone on the net where they were — have long since passed. But for Crowley, that’s a welcome thing. “You really had to know how to use Foursquare to get all the value out of it,” he says. “The best version of Foursquare is the one that you don’t have to remember to use.”
Crowley’s engineers agree. But for the moment, they’re just happy they’ve built what they set out to build.
“This is something we’ve been wanting to do since the beginning, just kind of waiting for the technology to catch up,” Ranganath says. “Now, the big surprise is that we’re here.”

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