7 Strategies I Use to Grow on Etsy FAST
Why are some shops able to open and start making sales right away, while others are left grinding along for months picking up the scraps, or worse getting no sales at all.
I can confidently tell you that it is possible to grow quickly on Etsy and reaching 4, 5, maybe even $10,000 a month quickly, is possible and it isn't too difficult if you follow the steps that I'm going to share with you in this article.
To be very clear, this is not about getting rich quick. These are simply seven tactics that will help you grow your shop faster so that you can get sales early on. With without burning out or giving up too soon.
7 Strategies to Increase Etsy Sales Fast
Strategy 1: Become a Customer
If you want to grow a new shop quickly, then the very first thing you have to do, is become a customer. When you're first starting out, try and spend a few minutes each day browsing Etsy as if you were a customer. Pay attention to the listings that jump out at you and pretend like you're looking for something specific, ideally the type of product that you're trying to sell.
So if you're going to open up a poster print shop, look at the other poster print shops and look for products that you would buy if you were a shopping customer for that type of product. Pay attention to if it's the mockup or the title or the shop name that catches your eye for each listing. You can go through and favorite these listings. Then look at the purchase options. Are they digital downloads or physical prints? Are they a custom or pre made product? How long does it take to arrive? Then read the reviews. Look for what people like and dislike about these listings after they've already bought it.
The goal here is to become your ideal customer so that you can build out perfect listings that match what they're looking for. And you can also do this in reverse so you can look at listings that you hate that you'd never buy. If you come all the way down to the bottom of search results, you can skip ahead to a later page, usually anything after page 10, like around 17. These are going to be the listings that didn't rank very high up and there's a reason for that to go through and look at all the listings that you don't like and pay attention to which elements you don't like so that you can avoid those mistakes in your own shop.
When you're able to shop like your Ideal customer, you'll know exactly what they're looking for and you'll be able to make listings that they'll just be waiting to buy.
Strategy 2: Track Your Competition
After you know what you're looking for in terms of listings, pay attention to the shop that are posting those listings for sale. I recommend looking for at least five shops that are all selling the product that you plan to sell and tracking how well they do over time. I'd look for shops with lots of reviews and sales data so that you know you're modeling your shop after someone who's already been successful.
And ideally, the younger the shop the better. Because since the algorithm does change over time, whichever shops are working right now are usually the best ones to model. So when you find a shop, you can use a tool like Listing View to analyze that shop and see its performance over time. Specifically, you want to see how long they've been selling for. You can also get a good idea of their estimated revenue over that time frame.
Soon Listing View will have all these tracking features built right into the platform so that you can monitor shops performance over time. But however you end up doing it, Paying attention to what's working currently is How you scale up your shop quickly.
Strategy 3: Design Systems
Now one of the hardest things that you'll have to do to scale your shop quickly is have the ability to Build out high quality designs quickly. This applies to everyone who's selling print on demand and digital downloads, which is what I teach in the six figure storefront course.
But the reason that this is so difficult is because creating great designs can be difficult. You have to figure out what's currently selling and then you have to be able to make those designs and you have to have the ability to make a lot of them quickly.
This really comes down to just building out a great design system. A great design system has three elements. First is capturing ideas so that you know what designs to make. Second is turning those ideas into usable elements that you can transform into unique ideas. And third is building out designs and automating the design process.
Now, this is the system that I help you build out inside the six figure storefront course. And it makes it so that you can scale up your design making quickly. I realized early on that I was not going to be successful if I was only making one or two product designs per day. But I also didn't feel creative enough to come up with hundreds of designs.
And this is where the design system really takes over. You start by capturing design ideas based on what's already proven to work. You reverse engineer those captured designs into design elements so that you can build out new unique product designs. And then you build out and automate the design assembly. Building out product designs is probably one of the most daunting parts of this business, but it's also one of the most important. The quicker you can scale up your design production, the quicker you'll be able to grow your shop.
If I had to start over today without all the skills that I have now, I would focus on building out a system that enables you to create designs without having to squeeze your brain dry of creativity. The goal is just to be able to sit down, make some designs and get them uploaded so you can continue on with your life.
You shouldn't be spending five hours a day making a single design, that's how you grow your shop slowly. Plan out and build a system that will help you make designs over time.
Strategy 4: Automation Systems
Now, if you are able to scale up your design making, then you'll have a bunch of designs that you need to get uploaded to your product and posted for sale in your shop. Having listings available for purchase is how you make money, after all. So the faster you can get listings up, the faster your shop will grow.
Part of the reason I'm almost always able to get sales within the first week of opening up a shop, is because the time it takes me to build out a catalog of products is much faster than normal with my automated systems.
With your designs ready, there's three things that we can automate so that we can get those designs on the product and listed for sale in your shop as soon as possible.
First, you have to automate product mockups. The mockup is the product image that your design is displayed on to make it look how the font final real product will actually look. Mockups will make or break your business, and typically the best kind come right off Etsy in a regular image format. This means that for each design and mockup combination that you want to make, you have to drag your design file over top your mockup image, figure out how to merge the images together, and then export that image so that you can use it in your listing.
As you can imagine, this takes quite a while if you're doing it by hand for lots of designs. That's why I have the Photoshop mockup script that automatically generates all of your product mockups without having to actually do anything yourself.
With your mockups done, next you have to automate the process of getting your designs onto the product you're selling and getting those products listed for sale. This is where Pre List comes into play.
Let's say you finished 10 designs that you're ready to upload. We can use the Pre List product uploader and select the product that we want to upload to. And then we can just drag all of those designs that we've made into the uploader. Then we can use title generator with some keywords so that we don't have to manually input and scramble them. And then we just click "Publish". And this will publish all of those designs right into our Printify store.
Once they finish uploading right inside of Printify, you'll see all the products and we can publish them directly to Etsy. But we still have to add our tags, info cards and our product mockups so we can come back into Pre list And here we can just select all of those products that we just published to Etsy and press Edit.
Here's where we can change everything about these listings. For example, we can go into the Tags section and I Found a similar top performing listing over here on Listing View. So I can just copy all the tags right off this listing and I can come paste them into pre list to apply them to all of our listings all at once.
Next, in the images section I can just drag in the mockups that we created using the mockup script for each listing and you can see it updates in real time. Then if I need to add something like a color or a size chart, I can just drag that in and it'll apply it to all the listings all at once.
Again, if I have another info card, I can do the same thing again. Then when I'm ready I can just publish these changes and after a few seconds and letting it load and sync over. If we go check the shop, you can see all of the updates are live.
Imagine that if I had to do this all by hand for each design that I made, it would take 5, 10, maybe 20 minutes to upload individually. And you just saw me do that basically in real time. And once we finished the mockup generator in pre list, it'll take even less time.
If you want to grow your shop quickly, then you have to automate the things that take up the most time, like making mockups, uploading your designs and building out listings.
Strategy 5: Using A.I
Over the last year we've had a lot of changes. We've had policy changes and Etsy algorithm updates, but most notably we've had AI. Now look, I didn't have AI when I was first growing my six and seven figure shops, but if I did, I would have gotten there a lot faster.
Etsy announced this year that AI and AI art would be allowed on their marketplace. This means that you're not only allowed to use AI to come up with product ideas, but you can also sell products made entirely or partly by AI. This might trigger some people, but when I posted all of my AI product tutorials, people would tell me how it wasn't going to work and that selling AI images wasn't allowed.
Well, now we can see how it's doing. The thing is that you can use AI to make products, or T shirts or mug designs. Or you can use different types of AI like ChatGPT to come up with product ideas or design sayings. The point is, we've just barely scratched the surface of what AI can do, and if you're willing to include it in your work to grow your business, you'll get sales a lot faster.
Strategy 6: Ignore Analytics
Now look, if you want to grow really fast, then you need to distractions. And that's why, especially in the beginning, you should ignore your analytics.
Look Stats and analytics are a big deal, Printify flew me all the way from Denver, Colorado out to Riga in Latvia to speak on two topics, which happened to be how to get your first sale and how to use analytics to grow your shop. What I realized when I was thinking about how to talk about these two topics was that analytics help you grow after you've already had some growth. Early on, focusing on things like your views and your visits or how many favorites a product got, it can be more of a distraction than a help.
Now don't get me wrong, your shop stats can let you know that you're going in the right direction, but fixating on them can cause you to get distracted from what actually matters, which is posting great products for sale. If you want more views and more product favorites and ultimately more sales, then staring at the numbers won't bring them in, but posting more great products will.
The only analytic that I pay attention to is how many products have been made and posted for sale. You just need that one listing to pop off so that Etsy has a reason to promote the rest of your catalog. That's why you're just one listing away.
Strategy 7: Remember What's Possible
All of these things have been very tactical things that you can do if you want to grow your shop quickly. But tip number seven is a little different. See, business is a mental game and if you don't have the right mindset going in, then forget about growing a shop quickly or even at all. This is why it's so important to remind yourself what's possible and remind yourself why you're doing it.
Look, maybe you don't need to make millions of dollars. Maybe an extra two to $3,000 a month would still change your life. Or maybe you do have a larger appetite like myself, and you do want to make 10 or $20,000 a month or more. Maybe you hate working at your job, or you just want the freedom to go travel the world. The point is, just remember why you start.
Personally, I like coming to platforms like Listening View to see how well other shops are performing. Seeing how many sales they're getting and how much money is truly out there. That's what keeps me going and inspires me. 20,000 sales in 11 months, 17,000 sales in a year and two months, 21,000 sales in a year in two months. If you're able to make 20,000 sales at $5 profit each, that's a hundred thousand dollars a year. And that's exactly what got me started kept me going and maybe it can do the same for you.
