Look guys, I have made a lot of mistakes in my time as a new entrepreneur and Etsy shop owner that I wish a video like this would have come across my YouTube homepage a long time ago because that may have fixed or prevented or helped me as a new entrepreneur. Hence why this video today is really, really something that I just wanted to pour my heart and soul into in making a list of mistakes and things that I just wish I knew when I began my business and just any business for that matter, not just Etsy. This video will be more Etsy-specific and print-on-demand related, but you can apply a lot of this to really any business. Without further ado, if you're new to this channel, my name is Heather. I am a top 1% Etsy and print-on-demand business owner. I have started and grown multiple Etsy shops to multiple five figures and six figures, and I've helped a lot of clients and students and subscribers grow their businesses to over five figures and six figures and beyond. We're going to get right into the nitty-gritty.

details of the mistakes I made, which is, first of all, a thing that I've talked on this channel about before. But I focused a lot of my efforts into quantity and not quality in my business when I began, and specifically, this is relating to Etsy and running a print-on-demand business. I watched so many YouTube videos, and I read so many threads on Facebook groups and communities about people who I found the common denominator for success with a print-on-demand business. It tended to be a high quantity of listings. Now, I let this steer me way wrong in the beginning of my business because I was focused so much on quantity. I kept thinking, Okay, I have to post hundreds of listings a month in order to grow my business. Now, with print-on-demand and Etsy, there is a correlation with a high quantity of listings, usually over a few hundred listings to a few thousand listings, and having success on Etsy. However, the thing I didn't factor in was that a lot of these sellers had been on Etsy for multiple years, and they didn't just

create all these listings overnight so I focus so heavily on uploading hundreds of listings or trying to upload as quickly as I could, and I got burnt out within a few weeks on Etsy because I realized, Oh my goodness, this is a lot of work. I'm not getting any sales. I'm spending so much money on listing volumes and the 20-cent listing fee for every listing I create, and I'm not seeing any return on investment. And that is how I really got into burning out in my first month with ATM print on demand, to the point that I almost didn't even continue in my business. I started focusing on quality instead of quantity, which basically I just slowed it down a lot, and I focused on only doing three to five listings a day. Now, this is still a high volume of listings for most sellers, but for me, this was the amount of listings that allowed me to create higher quality listings but still up my repetition and make sure that I was still adding quantity in some regard as a new seller or even a seller maybe

you're not seeing sales, and you're uploading tons of listings, but you're not seeing a return on investment for those listings you're uploading. I would start to slow down and focus on all the elements that create a high-converting listing. Now, again going back to SEO, we're looking at your listing photo cards. Maybe your mockup images need to be upgraded and updated. Maybe you need to look at your design placed on the mockup image. There's just so much that goes into a high-quality listing, and I would recommend watching the video I'm going to suggest up above in order to boost your conversion rates on those listings. My second problem and mistake I made as a new print demand business owner was simply that I was not tracking on a month-to-month basis on my expenses versus profit. It got to the point that I realized I was losing money for a little bit on a daily basis. I was actually losing money because I wasn't watching my ad spend, and this is a very easy fix. One solution I found is just

having a profit and loss sheet that I could look at on a monthly basis, and it was easy to do and track, and I would do it on the same day of every month. Now, what's really exciting about this video is I have recently released a profit and loss tracking sheet that you can purchase down below in the description, and this is geared towards Etsy preneurs and Etsy sellers who want to track their profit and loss and have a really easy and useful spreadsheet that they can track month-to-month. And it's as simple as just downloading the monthly statements in your Etsy Shop Financial dashboard, and then all you have to do is download your expenses. So, if you have a production partner like Printify, you can easily download those expenses per month, upload that into the sheet, and then if you pay for mockups or other software, that will all be added to the sheet that you can easily manually do. It really only takes 10 to 15 minutes per month to import all of your data into the spreadsheet so that you can analyze how

much you're spending in ads, how much you're spending in maybe mockups. This sheet is really, really valuable for your business in the long run, and I highly, highly recommend it to those of you who may not be tracking your data right now. You may be looking at your data maybe on a daily basis. That's something that I did when I first began my Etsy shop, and again, the mistake I made is every day I would track, Okay, I got three sales. Then I would put it on my notes app on my phone, and I started doing that, but I wasn't doing it every day. What I recommend is looking on a weekly to monthly basis because a lot of the times you could lose money some days, and then you can be at a profit on other days. That either balances out, or you may see an average profit per day in your business by looking at a weekly and monthly tracking system. The third mistake that I made as a new seller on Etsy was I started chasing seasonal niches more than focusing on Evergreen.

niches, and once I focused on Evergreen niches, I started to see sales on repeat in my business all year round. Now, if you're new to niches and seasonal versus Evergreen niches, seasonal niches are niches that are usually holidays or a season that sells only for a few months, and then you won't get sales after those few months. So, examples are St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Christmas, Halloween, Fourth of July. These are all very seasonally based niches, and these types of products and listings tend to sell only for 3 to 4 months, and then you won't see sales the rest of the year. Now, what I decided to do is I shifted my focus to Evergreen niches, which sell all year round. Now, not to say my sales didn't pick up come the holiday season; that was really nice. With Evergreen niches, you can also market them towards the highest sale seasons of the year. One example is Christmas, so you can put in your tags and title Christmas gift, and then your

starting to market an evergreen item for the season of Christmas. So at this point in the video, you may be like, Okay, I know evergreen niches sell all year round, but what are they really? Evergreen niches tend to be niches that you either identify with, they are a hobby or career, and/or something that someone is very interested in. And this can be as simple as maybe someone is a huge foodie, and they love pancakes or noodles, and they just want to wear t-shirts and sweatshirts that say some funny quote about noodles or ramen. That is something that is a niche in itself. The foodie niche, if you will, is a really strong niche that you can design for. Now, if we're talking about occupations, maybe I would look into what occupations that you currently work in or have worked in. So maybe you are a secretary or police officer. Those are strong niches, again, that you can design for. And guess what? They sell all year round. That is what I found has really worked for my shop and

has sold on repeat in my shop, and it does increase in sales double to triple in sales come Christmas time, which is another really huge perk of being in evergreen niches. So, the fourth mistake I made as a new Etsy seller is I relied heavily on ad spend for traffic when I began, and I noticed that this was burning through my money really, really quickly. I was so happy, at least looking back, to see that I stopped spending on ads and I started focusing on SEO and organic traffic routes that actually boosted me even more. Once I started rerunning ads a year later, and I started seeing more and more sales through ad spend and organic traffic routes. If you're newer and you're not seeing sales on ads, and you're just burning money like I was, maybe that is a sign for you to switch your focus to the product and the SEO instead, and really lock down that before you go to ads. And then later on, when you do use ads again, you could boost your traffic double to

Triple to quadruple the times and double and triple your conversions on that traffic as well, so that could be a huge Pro to focusing more on the organic and free traffic routes first. So, the fifth business mistake I made is I did not schedule in enough me time and just play in my schedule. I know that might seem kind of silly to say aloud, but as far as date nights and self-care, so going to get my nails done, going to get my hair done, going to the gym, going to hang out with friends and family. At first, I was so focused on work, work, work. I would add that into my schedule, and that's all I focused on was, Okay, on Saturday and Sunday, I'm going to work 8 hours on my ATY and PR on-demand business. There were things that I was lacking in my self-care during this time that I had a moment of burnout. Once I quit my 9 to 5 and I started working full-time on my business, I had severe anxiety and problems as far as mental health goes.

and I've shared that on my Channel that I have struggled basically my whole life with mental health. That's something that I try to be vulnerable and Raw on this channel about. But for someone who has already suffered from anxiety and mental health disorder prior, this just led to severe burnouts. So, it's really important to schedule some fun in your life rather than just having a full career work schedule and not enough fun. So, the next thing that I wish I did in my business when I began is I focused on niches that I was passionate about. And I watched a video and I followed someone who said, you know, don't do things that you are passionate about because you're going to be designing and designing time and time again on things that just might not sell, which I agree to a certain extent. However, I found that the niches I was very passionate in, I actually sold three times more in, and that led my business to becoming a multi-6 figure business on Etsy. I wouldn't Focus primarily if you're focused on a niche or you're

passionate about something that's very, very micro. One example may be that you love picking strawberries, and while there is a very large amount of customers and a good customer market for strawberries, picking strawberries specifically on a t-shirt may not be the best niche to go into. It might be a really great niche, though; I don't want to discredit that, but just thinking about how micro that is. How can we kind of broaden our range of products and listings we can create? So, instead of strawberries, you can do all different types of fruits, and maybe going into vegetables. And then, as you go into vegetables, you can look at the SEO tags and titles that really work for vegetable t-shirts and maybe tote bags. Maybe you can create cottagecore graphics for those niches and for all the different types of vegetable lovers and fruit lovers, and maybe going into farming and maybe organic-based niches. What I recommend to those of you is to make sure that your passions are just not in a super small micro-niche, and

that you are kind of branching out to the adjacent niches that also sell on repeat, and you can find and scale through that as well. The seventh thing that I fell into doing that was not serving my new business was I had a no refund, no return, no exchange policy that was very, very strict when I began. This is kind of a little bit of a controversial suggestion and recommendation, but what I really recommend to new sellers is to offer a 15 to 30-day return and exchange policy. This is your business, this is your shop, you can 100% do whatever you are most comfortable with. If you are not comfortable accepting returns and exchanges, that's completely okay. But I do want us all to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. As a new Etsy shop, if I was a customer and I stumbled across a shop, they have zero sales, zero reviews, zero photos for me to look at in this listing, and I see a listing I like, the product I like, the design of the product, and I scroll down and I see they

don't even have a return and exchange policy. The next question I would ask myself as the customer is, I would say, should I buy and trust this shop? Now, by it having no return on exchange policy, my risk tolerance would be very low, and I probably would not buy from that shop. I would probably click out of the listing and go to a competitor's listing that has some reviews and some sales, and they may have a return and exchange policy. What you guys can see that I'm getting at here is just that your customers will have a lower risk tolerance with the lower amount of sales and reviews that your shop has. I don't want to say it was all the return exchange policy, but at that same moment when I turned on my return in exchange, I did see more sales. One of my largest mistakes that I made in my business, especially in the first year of business, was I sought out legal and tax help later than I should have. Luckily, I sought out that help before the first end of my financial year, so My First Year on Etsy.

I sought out help before the end of the year, which was really good because I was able to have some tax benefits. I almost missed out on an LLC S-Corp election. There are a lot of tax benefits to having an S-Corp election if you're located in the United States, so I would look into that if you are a new LLC. Now, the thing that didn't save me thousands of dollars is I sought out the wrong bookkeeping help when I first began with my Etsy and print-on-demand business. So, I hired a bookkeeper that just was not trained enough and experienced for transactions based in Etsy and print-on-demand. I hired the wrong bookkeeping. I was trying to go the cheaper route and hire out bookkeeping that I thought was good. It was not a good move on my behalf. I had to eventually hire a CPA group who fixed my books, and I ended up turning in my taxes late, and I paid penalties for late tax filing in my first year of filing taxes for the business due to all the bookkeeping stress and problems I

had the ninth and final mistake. That this is a bonus mistake, if you will, is that I wish I grew an email list sooner in my business. When I began, I started on Etsy, and then I eventually opened up a Shopify store as well, which a lot of people don't know. On this channel, I speak a lot about Etsy because I primarily sell on Etsy. I eventually closed my Shopify shop because the Etsy shop was doing so well on its own. During the time on Shopify, though, I found that email was my biggest marketing driver for my business and for my Shopify shop. I eventually took that Shopify list and I started emailing for my Etsy shop. So anyone who was subscribed to Shopify, since my business was the same on Etsy and Shopify, I emailed that list and I said, Hey, we're back on Etsy. If you want to shop, here is where you can shop. And I saw thousands of dollars of sales just from that Shopify list that I just wish I grew sooner. What I really wanted to introduce in this video, if you haven't

heard of it already is everb email that I will link Link in the description below. It is free to use at 500 subscribers, which generally it takes, I'd say, months to two years to grow to 500. Sometimes you can get it much sooner, though. It is completely free under 500 subscribers, which is really, really nice, especially if you're starting with a new email list. What I really love about the everb email is there is the ability to create a lead magnet with a QR code. So, what a lead magnet is and does for your business is it brings in email subscribers with some type of coupon or freebie that you can give by people signing up for your email list. So, you can give a free PDF guide as an example of an email lead magnet, or you can also offer a coupon, so a first-time purchase coupon of 20% off by people subscribing to your email list. And by having a QR code, that can significantly increase the amount of email subscribers going to your email lead magnet and actually subscribing on your Etsy shop because

people can simply take their phones, scan the QR code, and then sign up for your email list. Then, they will get an email by to sign up for the 20% off. It is so easy with the EverB Chrome extension and tool, as you guys can see to the side. And once you add that, you do need to start a campaign. So, when people sign up for that email lead magnet, you will send them an email straight away. Again, I'm just showing how I easily do that in the S of this video to make this video a little bit of a quick tutorial as well. Even if you're not actively emailing those subscribers, I would just highly recommend starting to build it because this is where your customer base is. And let's say you want to go to Shopify, or you want to go to Amazon, or a different platform, or your own website eventually. You can take that email list and take them over to your new platform or website that you're on, and you're not losing your customer base. That's just something I really recommend to a lot of

you who are looking to start on Etsy, or you've been on Etsy and you want to grow your amount of consistent sale volumes per month. Without further ado, guys, that's it for this video. If you have any questions, please comment down below, and don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. Turn on all notification bells so you can get my future video notifications as they come about. Don't forget to stick around for that blooper reel, and I'll see you all in the next video. The third mistake I made, and if anyone caught that, you are an OG subscriber on this channel. In the beginning of my channel days, I used to do the Hunger Games sign on accident all the time. If you are a Hunger Games fan or your OG subscriber on this channel, please comment something or a quote from The Hunger Games down below. I will very much appreciate if you did that.

8 Etsy Business Lessons I Wish I Knew Sooner

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