Today we are going to talk about how I built a 6 figure Etsy shop, including 5 things I have done at the beginning of my handmade business journey to build my shop quicker.

1. Utilise push notifications

Whenever I put my store on a flash sale, or I put my item back in stock, the people who favourite my Etsy shop would receive a notification, and so I utilised that. I really encourage store favourites in my shop because of this. 

Whenever you list new items in your store, it comes up in the Etsy home feed for those who favourite your shop, so make sure you encourage favourites as much as possible. 

You can take this one step further and send them a coupon/ discount code when they favourite an item in your shop, which they will receive as a notification via the app, and an email.

This is why it's so important to look at the buyer journey and utilise these methods of contact between you and your customers. 

2. Drive your own traffic

Before I got consistent sales, I increased my sales volume by driving my own traffic. I have a video called 'how to get favoured by the Etsy algorithm' which you should definitely watch HERE.

What tends to happens is that you have an item listed that doesn't sell, but then suddenly on month 4 of being listed, your item starts to sell. It continues to sell the next week, and the week after too. What's happening here is that because you are getting sales on this item, Etsy then pushes this listing up in the algorithm.

Etsy is being sent a 'trust signal' from that listing in your store and 'boosts' your listing further up in search results. I artificially did this by driving my own traffic through marketing and social media. 

What we are doing is shortening the timeline so we're not waiting 4 months for the listing to sell, we are getting there faster by driving our own traffic. 

3. Go deep before you go wide

Niche down to one type of product. I went deep before I went wide. And what I mean by this is that when you go wide, you have a large scope of products. For me, I started off by selling a lot of different jewellery (minimalist jewellery, big jewellery, colourful jewellery, small jewellery, monotone jewellery). What happened is that my sales started to go down and it made no sense because I had more listings, and more variations of products, and I thought I was bringing in more people and yet, I was getting less sales. 

This is because I was going wide when I needed to go deep on one niche of product, for one target market, with one specific problem, at one specific point in their lives.

So I recommend going deep before going wide. I built my brand with one niche of product, and I sell jewellery which is incredibly saturated market to be in. 

There's nothing stopping you from stocking more products at a later date when you're more established, but to get those first sales and to that initial 6 figure mark, you need to niche into one type of product first.

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4. Don't hop on the band wagon

I didn't leverage trending products. I wanted to be popular and get sales all the time, all year round so I didn't leverage popular products. 

What this means is, do you remember when slime was a thing and there were so many Etsy shops that hopped on the slime band wagon? There were even Etsy shops that started out just selling slime or slime themed merchandise. 

Before that we had unicorns, and then fidget spinners. Let's be honest, are any of those shops still killing it right now? The answer is probably not because trends have been and gone.

I'm not saying you don't have to look at trending colours and trending styles (in fact, I annually film a video all about the trends of the year on my YouTube channel), but I will not jump on a ridiculously high trending product.

I won't make my shop seasonal either. I won't JUST sell Christmas items, or Valentine's Day items etc. I will keep my shop available to be purchased from all year round. 

5. Find the signals

I really thought about why people in my target audience would buy from me, and what different occasions and reasons would they have to buy from my shop.

All I did was understand who my target audience was, I realised what they were buying and why they were buying it, and I catered for that.

I know that sounds ridiculously simple but it's really not. So many people try to overcomplicate the process and try to reinvent the wheel, but the bottom line is, people are buying from you for a reason. 

They're literally saying 'hey, I want to buy this thing from you but you don't have it in your shop', and they will then go elsewhere. 

The signals are there. People are telling you what they want to see in your shop every single day. When you get visits to your shop, they are telling you what they want to see from you. It's up to you to dig deeper into your shop stats to find where those signals are, and what they are.

So I was looking into what other things people would favourite (apart from my shop or listings), look at search terms and listing stats etc to find those signals. 

If you'd prefer me to visually teach you this blog post, then you can watch it HERE.

🥳 Do you want to learn more? 🥳 

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1️⃣ ✨Are you starting a new business? Here's my best resources:👉 Start here  🏃

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✨ My book “how to be a handmade boss” is like a super intensive course on getting your first sales (plus, it’s a book/workbook hybrid!) 👉  Find out more here

✨ The Shop Doctor - Shop not doing so great? Getting views but no sales? No views at all? Overwhelmed with it all? Check out the shop doctor: 👉 Join here

✨ My FREE masterclass on how to increase your Etsy conversion rate. It's the KEY thing most Etsy sellers miss when trying to make more money and get more sales in 7 days. 👉 Join here

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