so if you can just get these three things right, you'll be on the right track. Your shop will explode in sales, you'll become financially free, retire on the beach, and all that good stuff. So in this video, I'm going to take my last 4 and 1/2 years of selling on Etsy and condense it down into a three-part blueprint that I would follow if I was starting over from scratch today. I call this blueprint the six-figure storefront because my course is called the six-figure storefront, and it's helped hundreds of students over the last 6 months. Now there's three phases to this blueprint. If you're new to selling on Etsy, and in this context, I'm starting a brand new Etsy shop with zero experience, completely from scratch. So we're going with phase number one, get going. In this phase, all we have to do is get moving. We get our shop opened up, we develop a strategy, we get our shop connected to Printify if we're selling print-on-demand products, and we'll do

some market research to see what products are selling. The sooner we commit and get everything set up, the sooner we'll start making money. Just watching videos and gaining knowledge does help, but it doesn't actually move you any closer to making money with a shop. This is why I created the 9 Minute Quick Start Guide, which you can download and use for free. This will get you from complete scratch, from starting with nothing, to having a business name, a free branded business email, and a shop opened and ready to sell in about 10 minutes if you follow it sort of quickly. And we have some updates in here that will help you avoid getting your shop suspended right away. This is the very first thing that you need to do in order to start selling, so the sooner you take that first step, the sooner you can start making money with this business. And once your shop is open, we can start to develop a strategy. Now, it's my belief that I don't need to create traffic because the traffic is already there. People already come to Etsy ready to

shop. You just have to figure out how to get those people to shop with you instead of someone else. Now, since we're selling on Etsy, which is unlike anywhere else online, we can either grab customers or catch customers. You can grab customers by having fewer, really high-quality listings posted in your shop, and then pay to run ads to those listings. This will force some customers to see your products on the first page of search results. You can identify which listings are paid ads because Etsy will show you right inside of search results. Grabbing customers is the more active approach, and it costs more money since you're running ads. Catching customers is different because instead of paying for ads, you leverage the Etsy search algorithm and the Etsy app and post more products for sale, casting a wider net in the search algorithm. Now, this is an example of a shop that catches customers. They have a few thousand listings, and they're able to do that by posting one type of product, which is t-shirts in this case, and then they use their designs to target all types of different

interests with their product, and they don't actually run any ads either. So, all of their nearly 200,000 sales have all come completely from organic Etsy search and the Etsy app. And you can test this and see this for yourself if you look up any of their products. None of their results will show up as app ads. This is by far my preferred approach because it only costs 20 cents to post a product listing. And if you're paying for ads, the chances are that your first products that you post for sale aren't that good, so you'll probably end up paying for ads and needing to go back and make better products anyway. That doesn't mean that running paid ads, running Etsy ads, or social media content doesn't work. It all can work with the right strategy. I've just found that my strategy avoids the traditional costs and hassles and effort that comes with the paid advertising method. I enjoy having my products rank organically on the first page of search results, leaving me with an evergreen catalog of products where each product

that I have in my shop sells occasionally. All of my biggest shops have been completely built on the Etsy search algorithm, which leverages, obviously, Etsy search and the Etsy app. This shop that I showed in a recent video has never paid for any Etsy ads or done any social media content. It's all completely from organic search. And just so you can be sure, all of this direct traffic, which looks like a large number even though it really wasn't, all came from either website scrapers or secondary search engines like DuckDuckGo and MSN. So your job is to choose if you're going to be grabbing customers with paid advertising or catching customers with organic traffic. Either way, next we have to figure out what product to sell. Now, if you're like me and you want that semi-passive income that Etsy can provide, then you're probably selling either print on demand or digital products. Print on demand is like being able to sell all kinds of physical products like posters, stickers, mugs, ornaments, or t-shirts, all with unique designs printed on them, all without

having to keep any physical inventory or print the designs on the product yourself. With print on demand, your job is to create a unique design, upload it to the products that you're selling, and then get those products to sell. When a customer comes along and buys that product, the printing company will print the design on the product and ship it directly to the customer, and you keep the difference of the sale as profit. You only pay for the product after you've made a sale, again keeping your upfront risk to a minimum. So, if you're selling print on demand products, this is the point where you would connect your Etsy shop to a platform like Printify, which I've been using for years ever since I realized how much better they were than the rest of the competition. When you sell products through Printify on Etsy, you keep more profit, and since they have fulfillment centers around the world, your customers will always have speedy delivery times. So, for example, if I was to sell a mug like this, this is just a custom mug listing. You can see

that it's already selling pretty well. They're charging $250 for the mug, the version with the black handle, and they're also charging about $5 in shipping. So, in total, you're making about $27.50 per order. Now, if we fulfilled that mug with Printful, it would cost about $9 for the mug and another $6.50 to ship it, which is about $115.50. Which means, in total, your profit would be about $112. But that exact same mug only costs about $13 when you use a platform like Printify, which is $2.50 less on every single order. So, your profit would be more like $14.50 if you're using Printify. So, after 10,000 mug sales with an extra $2.50 of profit, that's $25,000 in extra profit. Even if you didn't sell your mugs for the same price that this shop did, and it's the same story with other products like this standard t-shirt. It costs around $16 to fulfill that order with Printful, but the

same t-shirt on Printify comes as low as $13 in total. If I started my Etsy shop today, I'd start by selling print on demand with Printify and digital downloads, which is exactly what I've been doing for the last 4 and a half years across multiple shops. You can connect Printify to your Etsy shop for free, without any subscription costs at all, and then once you start making regular sales, you can go ahead and upgrade to get discounts on all of the products that you're selling if you want to keep more profit. And if you use my link from down below or from the quick start guide, you can sign up and then use my code Alec to get 2 months of free premium, which is worth $60. As a beginner, I'd recommend getting started with print on demand since it's the easiest to get a grasp on, but with an idea of what product we want to sell, we have to do some market research and see what's selling and performing well. We want to sell what people are buying again.

just want to take down ideas and see what's working for other sellers. If it's working for them, it might work for us as well. When we're just starting out, we want to spend a little bit of time each day studying what successful shops look like. You want to see what fonts they're using, how big their designs are, what kind of colors they're using in their designs, what their mockup images look like. And if I'm selling digital products, it's the exact same thing. What does their product image look like, how much are they selling them for, are they made in Canva, or are they using something else? Again, we're not here to reinvent the wheel, we're here to take a slice of the massive Etsy pie. We're just remixing what already works. We want to learn from what other sellers have done and build off the work that they've put in so that we don't have to start from complete scratch knowing nothing. And this is where we enter phase two, get good. This phase is all about setting up a

foundation learning some skills and automation. First, we have to learn some technical skills for how to make products and product listings that sell, and the absolute best way to do this is by recreating products that are proven to work. And I mean literally copying a product and seeing if you can make the exact same design. Now hear me out, the whole point of this is to gain the technical skill, the ability to create something similar. You cannot sell a directly copied design, and we're only doing this to learn the skill of design. When you first get started, you're kind of like, What the heck? I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what design to make, what font to use, how big to make it. And this is why you start by recreating someone else's successful product, not to sell, but just to prove that we can put something together. Again, we don't need to be professional designers, but we do need to treat our business like professionals, and we need to learn how to make print-on-demand designs, copying designs, and learning how to recreate.

them is literally all of the technical skill that we need to transform us into print-on-demand designers, and then the rest of the business can rely on systems. Now, I've got a lot of other videos on designing, which are still relevant, so you can go watch those after this video if you need more help. That being said, there's five key systems for the five key areas of this business. The first system is for getting ideas so that we know exactly what to sell. Second is for getting assets like fonts, graphics, templates, and text effects so that we can turn all of those ideas into designs that sell. Third is a system for building products, which is actually putting something together using those assets and ideas. Fourth is a system for uploading products or bulk uploading them so that you don't have to spend all day just uploading your products to your Etsy shop. And fifth is a listing template system so that you know exactly what keywords, what info cards, and mockups to use in your listings to actually get your products to convert. So, for example, one of my systems is the

infinite inventory Matrix. So, instead of trying to conjure up inspiration and creativity, which is really difficult to control, we built out a system to reliably come up with ideas for what to make and then apply those design skills that we've been mastering to actually build those ideas into designs. It's essentially a huge database with a bunch of ideas inside of it that you can pull from to make designs that are proven to sell. Then, of course, you also need systems for repeatable processes as well. We need systems to automate the process of building designs that sell based on the ideas that are in our inventory Matrix, and then we need a system for bulk uploading them so that we have the best chances of getting sales. Now, I realized early on that the products I was making and posting for sale were only good in my opinion, but the potential customers didn't think so. I learned that I had to make products that they wanted, not products that I thought were good. You can think of this in terms of making products for your family or

friends when it's more geared towards what they would like. It might not be exactly what you like as the designer of it. Getting good is all about understanding your market and who's on the other end, that person that's going to be buying your products, so that you can make products for them. And again, I'm just trying to get you to think in terms of Building Systems because I know how difficult the whole Etsy business can feel at times, especially in the beginning when you first start out. Every little step can feel like it's taking you hours to figure out, so stepping back and looking at it from a long-term system perspective can help keep you on track. When you get your head around this all, it really is just implementing a system to get products listed in your shop. This means essentially just having a template so that you can upload new products without having to start over from scratch every single time. This makes it so that uploading and posting your products is more of a system. You'll know exactly what keywords to put in the

title: What mockups and info cards to use, and you'll be able to do it all quickly. It makes sense that you want to make designs that are already proven to work, right? Getting good is about reverse engineering success that other people have had. We learn the individual technical skills that we need to and build all of those pieces into systems for success. Now, at this point, you should have all of the hardest work behind you. Phase three is where it gets really exciting. We can enter phase three when we have all of our systems in place, and then we can sort of just turn up the dials and push everything into full speed, and ideally scale to $10,000 a month and beyond in profit while hitting those three, four, $5,000 per month milestones along the way. Phase three, or getting great, is the easiest and most profitable phase since you already have a strong foundation. All you have to do is work the systems that you put into place and allow your shop to scale. The whole point of building out our business

the way that we have is so that we can let our Etsy Shop run on autopilot while we continue to do the same amount of work each day. We can work just a couple of hours a day posting our listings to our shop, and when we start making 10, 20, 100 sales a day, our workload won't increase. I realized that in order to make this business work, I had to keep listing products in my shop until I got those few best sellers to rank. It kind of feels like one of those videos where someone's throwing a ping-pong ball into a cup. They never know exactly which shot is going to make it in, but once it does, all of their previous attempts end up paying off, and their video gets millions of views and whatever. With each listing that you post and throw into the Etsy algorithm, it's like taking another shot at having a best seller. If you only have 50 listings in your shop, you're not feeding it enough to get anywhere. If 50 to 100 listings were all it took

everyone would do it. If it took you 20 hours to figure out how to put this listing together, would it be worth it? Well, let's do some quick math. So, 760 reviews. Now, usually, you get a lot more reviews per sale. It's usually about 10 reviews for every sale. But just to be conservative, we're going to say this listing is only sold 760 times for about $7. If I bring up my calculator, 760 sales times $7 is $532 from this listing. Now, if it took them 20 hours to make, we can divide this by 20 and see that they got paid on average $266 per hour to make this listing. Now, each listing that they make after that will get even better, and they'll get faster in making them. Plus, this will keep selling long into the future without any changes. And this is where it gets really passive. You create something once, and it'll keep selling into the future. And while it might seem slow and not worth it at first, it can really pay off long term. You can see

that this shop has made over 100,000 sales, so at an average price of 7 bucks, that's over $700,000 from making resume templates. Getting great at Etsy Drop Shipping is about using and improving our systems. If listings are the food and the fuel for our business, then our systems are the grocery store and the restaurant that makes the food. The best part is, if you're not seeing the exact results that you want to, all you need to do is improve that system and keep working the process. So, if your products get a lot of views but customers never visit your shop, you need to improve your designs and fix systems one and two. If it takes you forever to upload your products, you need a faster upload system, which is system four. If your shop is getting visits but those visits aren't converting into sales at least 1% of the time, then you need to fix your listing templates in system five with better SEO and images. Hopefully, you're starting to see how all of this works because when you have

systems in place. You can diagnose the problems you're having and then address the underlying system, which fixes the problem for all of the future products that you post as well. When you finally post that bestseller in your shop, meaning a listing that sells every single day, ranks on the first page of search results, the rest of your shop will start to move in the right direction. Now, I just showed this for the first time in a recent video, but this is one of my shops from the years 2021 to 2023. But today, I actually wanted to show you when I first started scaling this shop, just the year of 2021. Now, try and remember what this chart looks like and what this graph looks like and how at the beginning of the year we were hardly making any money at all, only around, you know, 3 or 400 sales a month. But if we switch and we look at the visits over time, you can see that this graph looks exactly the same as our sales trajectory, and you can see that the more listings I

was posting every single month. The more our sales started going up, the more listings I was posting, the more money I started making. You're just one listing away from posting that best seller, so don't give up too soon before you post that listing that changes your life. If you want a full guide on how to start print on demand, you can check out this video now. So I'll see you over there.

If I Started an Etsy Shop Today, I’d Do This

E-Commerce, Business and Finance. I'm sharing my financial journey, and the things I've learned along the way.