Here’s something for you to think about…

If your products or service came up in a conversation between two people (neither of which is you), what would they be talking about?

It might take a little time or imagination, or it could come straight to mind. Hard or easy, you would do well to consider not just one, but many hypothetical conversations about the things you sell.

What adjectives do they use?

Do people talk about how useful your product is?

How pretty it is?

How fun it is?

How it makes them feel when they use it?

Do they have a story to tell about your product?

Where it came from?

What it’s made of?

Who made it?

How it impacts the greater good? (think Tom’s Shoes)

What is the answer to “Where did you get that?”

Obviously, it will include “Etsy”, but is your customer inspired to go further and mention you by name and direct people to your shop, blog, or social media?

The point of all this is…

Imagining yourself as the proverbial fly on the wall observing a conversation about your products can help you see your business from a new perspective.

I have to be honest, it can be frustrating and you shouldn’t try unless you’re willing to work to change the answers you don’t like.

The first questions above, the adjectives, will help you understand the physical selling points of your product. Words like cute, fun, pretty, strong, helpful, cheap, etc. will help you know what words to put in your product descriptions to get more conversions.

The second part, the part about having “a story” to tell is where you really graduate to another level of smart business. If you can master the art of creating a story that connects your customer to your shop and your products on an emotional level, that will take you very far indeed.

Tom’s Shoes did it by providing a free pair of shoes to a child in need with every purchased pair of shoes. The idea of “social responsibility” in business is strong and a good thing. The book Start Something that Matters by Tom’s founder Blake Mycoskie is a great motivator on that front.

But what if you don’t have the profit margin to be able to buy yourself a pair of shoes, much less give any away? You still can find a story to tell about yourself, your shop, your motivation, or your products.

I’ve always said Etsy sellers have an opportunity to tell a story about where their products come from and create an emotional connection that way. People like to tell others what makes their purchase unique. Offer them a story to tell.

The last part, Where did you get that? is a bittersweet pill.

On the one hand, the more people out there saying “I got it on Etsy!” the more overall shoppers will find Etsy every day. On the other hand, they just might completely forget to search for your particular item when they get to Etsy and they could even try to find it and find a competitor instead, which would kinda suck.

The best possible scenario would be for your customer to actually hand out a business card, so it might make sense for you to include a few extras in your packaging. I think the more likely “best case” scenario is your customer telling a quick story about you and your great “extra-mile” service, hopefully complete with your name and twitter handle!

It’s About Word of Mouth

The least expensive advertising you can get is also the most effective. Word-of-mouth advertising costs you very little (maybe some freebies in an order, or the cost of some thank you cards, etc.) but the value can be worth thousands of dollars in sales.

People love to talk about the things they buy and it’s very common to open a conversation by commenting on something you imagine the other person is proud of and might want to talk about. This is how word spreads so it pays to be thinking about it.

Perfection is Ever-Elusive

Go through this exercise today and you’ll immediately see ideas you can implement to improve your business. Go through it again next month and you’ll see more. Same thing next year.

No matter how hard you work to perfect your process, your offer, and your story, there will always be more to do. So let it motivate you to press on, not frustrate you into quitting.

Tips or Thoughts?

I’d love to hear your story about what you do to improve word-of-mouth advertising? What works? Am I missing the boat?

Would it surprise you to learn that most major retail operations have entire departments within their company whose main purpose is to “spy” on the competition? It’s true.

It brings a few thoughts immediately to mind:

• There must be some value in doing this. It must add to the bottom line.
• I’m happy to be online where visiting similar businesses is just a click away.
• No wonder unique new ideas are so rare… they just copy each other.

As you can see, the last idea is a little bit contradictory to the first. Here’s another contradiction for you: the idea of similar businesses being called competition is wrong for creative online businesses. They are just similar. They aren’t you, and nobody has to lose for you to win. There is no competition. (read more)

So no further use of the word “competition” on this blog.

However, there is so much to be learned by watching what others do! Especially when those others are experienced and have paid the high price of learning the hard way. To not go out there and take a close look would be really kind of foolish.

How to learn from similar businesses

Reaching back to the comparison with a “real world” retailer, imagine yourself as the person assigned to “shop” the store down the block. You head over there, pull into the parking lot, and do your thing.

The key to doing your thing well is in being very, very, very observant. Every input your five senses receive can teach you something from the moment you approach the property.

We talked the other day about finding out who your customers are by looking at the customers who buy from similar businesses. But that’s not all you see when you visit.

• How are the products arranged and presented?
• Is the feel of the store more discount or more luxurious and high-end?
• What is the apparent quality of the products?
• How does the pricing compare to the quality?
• Does staff welcome you?
• Are you drawn in, or do you feel the urge to leave?
• Is the store bright, or darkened for mood?

You also see who’s buying.

• Who are the customers?
• What do they wear?
• How old are they?
• Are they predominantly male or female?
• Observe how they interact with the store and the products.
• Observe everything you can about them.

Are you still with me? I’m giving you the keys to the kingdom here. I know you can daydream about shopping. Do it! I know you might not see the correlation between a real store and an Etsy shop, but trust me, there is one and it’s not tiny.

Imagine the job of shopping a real world store, or even go out and give it a try if you’re serious enough about this. Then you can bring that experience online.

Then when you visit similar shops to your own, you’ll know what to look for.

When you find an area that you see in the real world, but not online, such as “Does the staff welcome you?”; ask yourself this:

“How can I?”

“How can I make it feel like someone is welcoming people to my shop?” You’re creative, you’ll figure out something awesome.

Learn about your target market, but don’t stop there.

The genesis of this post was a discussion on identifying your target market. The great news is that you can learn much more while you’re out looking around.

Find and visit similar Etsy sellers. Read similar blogs. Pay attention to items similar to yours in regular stores while you’re out.

The whole-entire-time let your brain be a sponge for information. Absorb everything you can about what you like, what you don’t, and why.

Then, when you put your own unique and personal creativity into it and put it all together, you’ll end up with something far greater than you ever would have imagined!

Go for it! Pretty soon, you’ll be the success story and new sellers will be shopping you for ideas!

How do you maximize the usefulness of treasury lists for Etsy promotion of your shop?

Do you recommend joining Teams, and if so, which ones?

These are two of the many questions sent in by Etsypreneur readers and the next step in our current Etsy Success Series of Daily Tips emails.

Treasuries and Teams have one major aspect in common so let’s look at that first, then take a quick look at the unique ways each can be helpful.

Community

If there was one word that I felt most correlated to success online it is this one: community.

This is true for huge success stories like Groupon or Pinterest and it’s just as true for an Etsy shop. Building a community of like-minded people around your name/brand/shop/blog is really the biggest goal you should have.

Even without great products a community will at least help you generate some income through your blog. But if you combine a great product with a great community, you’re sitting on a true winning opportunity.

Both Treasuries and Teams are community-based activities that increase your involvement with others and therefore can help build your circle of connections, friends, and contacts online.

Treasuries

When I look at Treasuries I think to myself… there is an opportunity we’ve never really taken advantage of. We just haven’t gotten very involved in that side of Etsy yet.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Treasuries, which you can read more about here, are a member curated list of 16 great Etsy finds. You pick out 16 items that you like and include them on a treasury list. Here is an example from an Etsypreneur reader:

I’ll cut to the chase. The key opportunity here, both for the sellers who are featured in treasuries and in the creator of the treasury, is in the concept of “curation“. There is a huge opportunity online in anything that involves sorting through the giant mass of information and culling it down to only the best stuff.

This applies to blog posts, news articles, sales and deals, and shopping, especially in a marketplace like Etsy. Etsy is huge-ginormous. Nobody has time to look at everything and it gets frustrating to know that there could be some really incredible bits of awesomeness that you just don’t have time to find.

That’s what makes a trusted curator a major player in a market like this. If you build a reputation for creating treasuries that are exceptional, then you can build a community of people around those treasuries.

Eventually sellers will be thrilled to be included on one of “your” treasuries and more and more of your lists will hit the front page.

The ways being known as this “curator extraordinaire” can be good for your bottom line are many and too much for this post. But they are there and you’ll find them.

So the first and biggest opportunity I see with treasuries is in curation. But that takes a ton of time to build-up. Time browsing, time promoting, and time waiting for people to take notice. It’s a multi-year plan to really “get there”.

But there are also shorter term ways a Treasury can be helpful. The most important is the idea of reciprocity. You share someone’s items in your treasury and they are that much more likely to return the favor. The more times your items are featured anywhere, the more sales you’ll eventually ring-up.

Just don’t have your feelings hurt when people don’t acknowledge what you’ve done. Some sellers don’t see any value in treasuries, others just don’t do them. For a busy seller, it can be hard to even thank everyone who includes your items in treasuries. That may seem hard to believe, but the numbers can get overwhelming. Lots of people out there.

I encourage you to work with treasuries a little bit and we may try to bring them more into our day-to-day so if we do I’ll share with you. I think there is real long-term opportunity in the curator thing.

Etsy Teams

Etsy Teams are another way to get involved with the community that is already established around Etsy.

Much like the site Meetup.com helps people find groups with interests and activities similar to their own within the borders of a certain city, Etsy Teams help you find other people who share your interests and are already on Etsy.

We have an Etsy Team for Etsypreneurs and members share new products, sale announcements, social media ideas and links, and talk about business tips and questions. If you’re not a member, I invite you to join us there.

There are thousands of Etsy teams set-up around every imaginable subject. And Etsy itself offers up some great ideas for teams on the “what is an Etsy Team” page. For example:

• Shop owners can create local street teams to organize craft fairs
• Shoppers can gather together to share their passion for a style or type of item
• Shop owners around the world who make the same type of items can network and promote their teams
• Members living nearby one another can meet and hold regular meetings
• Bloggers and boutique owners can team together shops they’ve featured along with their readers and patrons
• Members can rally for a charity or other cause
• Mentors can volunteer to help others
• Shop owners can run an online sale or promotion together
• Members can come up with ways to use Teams that we haven’t even imagined yet!

Just reading this list of ideas gets me excited about the potential of teams.

Patience is Key

It seems like every time I write a post for Etsypreneur I feel a little overwhelmed. It’s because I don’t think in terms of just this one post. I’m thinking of the last twenty posts I’ve written and all of the “to-do” items therein.

It’s a pretty much impossible for one person to cover every possible aspect of online business building at the same time. You’ve got to focus on the things that you feel most comfortable with and that will have the greatest impact on your goals.

As you get one area “under-control” you can expand into more.

It’s also about knowing where you’re trying to go. The concept of being a great treasury curator has all the makings of a full-time job to do it at the highest level. So you have to decide if that’s what you want.

If it sounds like it could be, there is a ton of opportunity in being a respected curator. A TON. Just be prepared for a long-term effort.

A Great Bit of Reader Feedback

Here is what Heather from Heather McCaw Art said about treasuries and teams:

For me, treasury-building is a chance to tell a story. For that reason, many of my treasuries have a literary bent. My first such treasury was inspired by the novel “Swamplandia!” I remember digging through vintage shops on a scavenger hunt to find old Florida tourist paraphernalia and alligator teeth jewelry. You can imagine my excitement to join the new “Poetsy” team. Its purpose is to create and promote treasuries inspired by song lyrics or literature. I’m having a lot of fun with it and hope it continues to grow.

Although it seems the majority of featured artists never respond, I have made some very enriching contacts through treasury-building and those eventually led to wonderful conversations about our work and lives. Being an artist is a solitary pursuit, so it is important to make connections however you can. I can’t see that it has led to any sales per se, but teams and treasuries have personal rewards and they can give you a boost when sales are slow. I just think it’s important to avoid spending all your time involved with teams and treasuries, as it cuts into valuable time to create.

Great ideas and advice.

Malaika from HMD Designs wrote a great blog post on her Etsy in Real Life blog about her experience wth Etsy Teams. Check it out here.

Go Team! Build the Treasury!

What about you? How have you used Etsy Teams and Treasuries? I’d love to hear more thoughts and ideas in the comments!

~ Tim

An awesome reader sent in the following question:

What are the top ten things I can do to to get more Google hits to my Etsy shop?

Here’s the thing with SEO: Search engines are looking for the best result available for the search in question. So the two steps to ranking well in search are first to try and actually BE the best result available and second to try to understand how search engines make that determination.

They guage this using a long and complex set of indicators. How long your shop has been online, how many people have shared or liked your shop or your items, how well your item titles match the keywords in the search, and how many other places link to you are all part of the equation.

You can only do so much. Focusing too heavily on search is a bad idea. It’s much better to focus on the customer and keep asking yourself how you can do a better job of showing, sharing, and telling about your products.

But as for good solid SEO, here are the top ten items (there really is no order):

1. Create a blog and write posts about your products – See Using Your Blog to Promote Your Etsy Shop
2. Engage in social media and build a following
3. Provide tools for social sharing of your blog posts and images – see Like Building is the New Link Building
4. Connect your Etsy shop to Twitter and Facebook
5. Try to build links to your items within Etsy
6. Use relevant and search optimized keywords in titles – See Etsy Shop SEO Video
7. Write good item descriptions
8. Syndicate your shop and participate in Google product search
9. Pin images of your items (and try to get more pins)
10. Increase the number of items in your shop

As I read through the list above and consider these steps I’m again confronted with the question:

What size do you want your business to be? What is your goal?

If your goal is to create a long-term business then you’re not going to dislike the idea of putting many hours into doing these things right. You’ll also be more comfortable with the reality that this is only a small part of success selling online.

Search is more likely to be a source of additional sales for a shop already on-fire than it is to be a source of a sustained level of sales for a shop that doesn’t get customers from many other sources.

In other words, don’t count on Google for success!

If you put too much weight in the items in the list above you might tend to make some mistakes.

For example:

• You’ll write blog posts about your products that aren’t anything more than a picture and a link. That’s not helpful and too much of that can hurt you.
• You might try too hard to build links within Etsy and end up essentially spamming teams and forums with links to your items. This is bad.
• You might go too far with keyword usage and have titles that are flat and boring.
• You might increase the number of items in your shop just for the sake of larger numbers, when an “improved selection” in the eyes of customers is what you need.

So to sum this idea up, the ten item list above can be a gold mine if you make it a part of your daily selling routine.

I’ll repeat that last part: Your daily selling routine.

Building your business on Etsy can help you to shape a perfect-fit selling routine for you, your life, and your products. It might seem unnatural at first, but it really doesn’t have to be. Selling is fun and it can easily fit into everything you do in some small way.

Remember that your products help people and are worth the money. Just keep your conversations natural. Tell people you have a business. Share your excitement for what you’re doing. Tell your story so we know why you do what you do. Tell stories about individual products and what they mean to you.

These are easy selling methods that are interesting and get attention. They work great over time because online, everything stays. Real conversations are indexed by search engines and people browse old posts of interest.

How do you feel about selling?

Let me finish with a question or two of my own. Is part of the allure of “SEO” because it’s automatic and you don’t have to “sell”? Are you comfortable with the idea that you are a “salesperson” for your little business? Does the idea of “selling” make you want to quit?

I’d love to hear your answers on these questions because it might give me some insight into how I can help you reach the levels of success you really want to reach with this. Thanks for taking the time to share in the comments.

As we continue with the current Etsy Success Series, in which I’m answering questions sent in by readers of the Etsypreneur Daily Tips email, I often find myself smiling as I write.

I smile because the questions asked are so often simple and complex at the same time. They beg for short, one-line answers, followed by a “no, seriously” then a 100 page report offering an “extended” answer to the same question.

Such was the case with yesterday’s post “How to Boost Sales on Etsy” and such is the case with today’s question:

The Long and Short of It

Short first:

A one character answer. I’ve set a new record for brevity in written communication! The only way a shorter answer is possible is within a marriage, using unspoken communication such as a raised eyebrow or a sharp, laser-focus, squinty eye look that says: don’t mess with me right now.

No, seriously…

The long answer:

Actually, money isn’t the only way to measure success. This is especially true if you have your Etsy shop in-part as a fun activity to do on the side.

However, if you’re building a business then it’s good to remember that the actual goal of a business is, indeed, profit. On some level.

So, for businesses, there is some truth to the one-character answer above. Watch the bottom-line and if you’re making money, great. If not, why not? When will you?

But most online businesses don’t make immediate profits. What about before you start to make money?

Pre-Profit Measures of Success

Once you start seeing a steady flow of income from your efforts, whether that income is $300 per month or $3000, you’ll naturally start to measure your success mostly using that metric. You’ll simply add-up your sales from various sources and see how you’re doing month-over-month.

But before that steady income starts to flow, and probably for the first few months after the cash hits, you might use other methods of measuring success.

It’s similar to measuring the success of a building still under construction. It may not be serving it’s intended purpose yet, but that’s because it’s a work-in-process. While “under construction” there are a number of ways to measure success.

Measures of Community

I’ve listed “measures of community” first. That’s because as I look at the landscape of what’s happening online, I’m increasingly convinced that the only reliable way people are going to have of sorting the massive numbers of choices online is going to be through their communities.

I think there’s going to come a time when you’ll have to make a conscious effort to find something your “friends” don’t like. That’s because technology is going to continually put those things our friends do like or “have liked” in front of us, whether we ask for that or not.

Whether or not that’s a good thing is a different subject, but what it means for your business is that you have something tangible and long-term to gain from building up your community connections.

Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and even social connections within Etsy itself all are worth your efforts and while they may not seem to offer the kind of results you might expect early on, there is much to be gained for the patient and persistent.

So the first non-financial measure of success I would track is the number of legitimate followers you have in social circles. (non-legit would be doing things like paying some service to “add 3000 Facebook Likes in one day!”)

Measures of Traffic and Conversion

Yesterday’s post talked about the two elements of selling online. Traffic and conversions. Clearly those are metrics you can track from day one.

Etsy provides pretty good stats tracking automatically and at no charge. You can use it to see where your shop traffic comes from, both from inside and outside of Etsy. You can also see what keywords are being used to find your items and which items are getting the most views.

Using the Etsy Shop Stats, you can also see the total dollar value of your orders for a given time period. You can divide that number by your number of views to get a “$ per view” number which is a helpful measure of conversion.

In addition to Etsy Shop Stats, you can set-up your shop to be tracked in Google Analytics which provides even more in-depth information. Here’s a link to simple instructions for setting up Google Analytics with Etsy.

There is A LOT to really understanding and using stats, but the basic measures of success are: How much traffic am I getting? From where? What percentage of those visits turn into sales? How large are the sales?

Measures of Performance and Connection

While the first type of metric listed above is “measure of community” in terms of size, and the second is a “measure of traffic and conversion” in terms of straight numbers, the third is a less directly quantitative measure.

This is a measure of people and relationships. A measure of your relationship with the people that are represented by the number of Facebook fans you have and the number of views your shop is getting.

This one is hard to measure, and sometimes emotionally challenging. But it’s an important part of long-term success online so we might as well talk about it.

Types of Performance and Connection Measures:

• Blog comments
• Pins, Shares, Likes, Plus Ones
• Email responses
• Convos
• Hearts
• Treasuries
• Personal notes and “out of their way” expressions of appreciation
• Unsubscribes
• Spam complaints

For me, this part of tracking performance is the hardest. For Kim, not so much. She feels much more comfortable in this arena. This is real people talking and she prefers that to an endless string of stats.

Interestingly, I think the information and “business intelligence” she’s learned just from talking has helped propel our success online more than anything else. She listens and pays attention to what people are doing.

She was on Pinterest before it was cool and now has a respectable following there of about 15,000 people or so. That has been huge for EverythingEtsy.com and it’s because she paid attention to people, not stats.

All the stats tracking in the world wouldn’t tell her what people are going to do next! Stats is a measure of what already happened. By listening to people you can get a measure of what’s going to happen.

—————

Overall, the combination of these things can help any online business quantifiably measure success during the time between start-up and realizing a profit, which can be awhile sometimes.

What about you? How do you measure success?

For a couple of days now, I’ve been hinting about a post coming that would answer a question sent in by a newsletter reader. Here’s the question, which is short and to the point:

How do I boost sales in my Etsy shop?

The answer, of course, is essentially what I’m writing about every day. I plan to answer this question, one little part at a time, each workday morning for the foreseeable future.

In other words, the real answer is a little bit more complicated than the simplicity of the question would imply.

Or is it?

How To Boost Etsy Sales — Simplified

In any online business, sales is a result of two components working together.

1. Traffic
2. Conversion

Traffic is pretty obvious right? The more people you get to your shop, the better your sales are going to be. It’s the same with every business in the world.

It’s the second part is really where the rubber meets the road. Conversion. If you don’t convert any visitors to customers then all the traffic in the world won’t help. On the other hand, if you’re a master at conversion, you can make a go of it with just a few visitors each day.

So if you’re wondering how to boost sales in your Etsy shop, then the answer is two-fold. Get more traffic and improve your conversion rate.

Ten ways to build traffic:

1. Advertise
2. Use Facebook
3. Use Pinterest
4. Use Twitter
5. Use Google+
6. Blog
7. Guest Blog
8. Comment on Blogs
9. Offline Marketing
10. Email

These ten action points are all versions of the same idea, which can be summed-up in one word: Engage .

Successful business owners engage with customers every day in as many places and ways as they can. It’s not super-complicated and there really isn’t a secret to it. It’s all about being there live and in-person talking with customers or potential customers.

Don’t fall into the trap of the “copy/paste” method of engagement. By that I mean you should avoid, for the most part, tools that blindly copy your content from one social media platform to another. That’s not to say that you can’t talk about the same thing in more than one place, you can. Just remember that what you’re trying to do is engage in real conversations.

Getting Traffic to Convert to Sales

Once you have the traffic flowing, then it’s all about turning those real people who are really spending time looking at your shop into paying customers.

This is good old-fashioned shopkeeping moved online. It’s about presenting your products in the best possible light. It’s about making your store easy to understand and navigate. It’s about answering the questions and overcoming the objections of the buyer.

10 Ways to Improve Conversion Rate

1. Nice looking shop
2. Cohesive Branding
3. Great photography
4. Plentiful photography
5. Well written descriptions
6. Well written policies
7. Mention related products
8. Understand the customer
9. The right pricing
10. Relationship Building

Try a Little Pretending

When you start working on your conversions, imagine yourself in an actual selling conversation with a potential customer. You’ve gotten past the point of getting their attention and their interest. Now you want to create a desire in them to purchase your product today.

It’s good practice to put yourself in your buyers shoes and do a walk-through. Try and experience the whole process starting with the place you think they might click-through from to get to you in the first place.

What do they see? Is it easy to understand what your store is about? Are you putting your best foot forward and showing off the products you think are of the most interest to your buyer?

Go through your shop with the list above and score yourself on each of these points. Maybe have a good friend do the same thing for you. Just promise yourself and your friend that you won’t get offended by what they tell you!

The growing business is always evolving and improving, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you find that you’ve got a long way to go.

Everyone does. By simply paying attention to these things, you’ll have a head-start on the competition and you’ll be closer to getting more sales.

One last point: Traffic building naturally takes time, unless you’ve got plenty of money for advertising. Conversion improvement, on the other hand, can be done right now. Why not go ahead and make your store look like it will after you’ve had 1000 sales? You’ll get there faster if you do.

What are your thoughts? Any tricks to traffic or conversion you would like to share?

The vintage cash register image came from a blog about a young couple travelling by RV – cool!: YoungSnowbirds.com

A customer can find your Etsy shop and make a purchase in quite a number of ways. The ones most sellers seem to focus on are Etsy search and Google search.

While search, on Etsy, Google, or anyplace else, is always going to be a key part of your traffic strategy, it’s a tough way to achieve sustainable growth. Growth that you can count on. Sales that you can count on.

When we look at all the different parts of building your business long-term, I want you to know how I see the ideal sales cycle.

This way you can know where I’m coming from and you can understand where you may think a different approach is better.

I like this approach because it works for a slow growth micro-business. If you’re only putting in a few hours a week, you want to know that those few hours are still going to be worth something to you a year or two from now, even after you’ve changed your product line or started selling downloads on your own website.

That’s why building a community is important and why I think your efforts should direct people first to your own website.

(don’t worry if “your own website” sounds hard or expensive, it isn’t. We’re going to cover it in depth within the next week or so.)

—————

Here’s the ideal process you want customers to go through when they buy from you.

1. Customer engages with you or your business somewhere online.
   • An email you sent them or someone forwarded
   • Your Facebook Page or another social conversation site
   • A Pinterest pin or other bookmarked content resource
   • An ad you placed online
   • A link to your blog or website they found on another blog or website
   • Etc. (infinite possibilities)
2. Customer arrives at your website, not your Etsy shop.
   • You control the content displayed most prominently
   • You get the chance to put your best foot forward
   • You have an opportunity to promote a special offer
   • You can immediately set the tone for the experience
   • You can answer questions and introduce yourself
   • You can collect that customer’s name and email through a form
3. Customer clicks through an image or a link on your site to your Etsy Shop
   • A link in your navigation that says “Etsy Shop” or simply “Shop”
   • An image on your home page that features a promoted product
   • A link in a blog post that points to a related product
   • An etsy mini image link in your sidebar
   • A category of your Etsy shop from a “Shop Categories” list on your site
4. Customer clicks on all of the images on Etsy for the product
   • Plentiful photography, use all the image spaces available
   • Beautiful photography is so key
   • Clear photography that can be enlarged
5. Customer reads the description of your product
   • It clearly describes the item for sale
   • It tells a short story about the item which enhances the desire and experience
   • It answers questions about the item. How big is it, what does it smell like, feel like, weigh?
   • It answers questions about shipping or policies, or points to the answer
   • It offers information about where to learn even more about you, the products, etc.
6. Customer clicks through from your product to your main Etsy Shop page
   • Does the shop match the website? Is the overall feel cohesive?
   • Does the shop header reinforce messages already displayed?
   • Does it appear that all of the items in the shop are similar in nature and quality to the item of interest?
   • Are there similar items in various colors, sizes, etc.
   • Does the shop have a large selection?
   • How many sales does the shop have?
   • How is the feedback?
7. Customer Clicks back to item of interest and buys {or}
8. Customer clicks through to seller’s profile to read about them more {or}
9. Customer opens a new window and copies/pastes a link from the shop profile to seller’s blog or social media pages.
10. Customer eventually buys, becomes a fan for life, and tells everyone they know.

That’s the ideal scenario for long-term sustainable growth.

Does it seem overwhelming? Don’t worry, you don’t have to build all those components at once. You can do it over time.

But without all of these things, you’re not making the most out of every visitor and you’re not setting yourself up for long-term natural growth.

NOTE: Regarding item #2, you want to send people to your best, most engaging, spot first. The “ideal” that you would send them to your website before your Etsy shop assumes that your website looks and feels at least as professional as your Etsy shop. Until that is indeed the case, you’re better off sending people directly to Etsy.

————–

Does this type of cycle or process sound like how you make purchases? If not, is that only because you don’t know anybody who sells what you want? Would you change how you buy if someone in your circles online sold what you’re looking for?

I’m open to hearing other opinions on this. I don’t think this is the only way, just the best way for long-term sustainable growth. What do you think?

~ Tim