My Etsy Journey Part 7 - the new buzzword SEO

The last couple of months have been super duper busy. May was one of the good months for me, exceeding 30 orders. It inspired me to push harder, to put in more prints into the shop. I also started experimenting with printing on ceramic mugs, badges and fridge magnets. A fairly decent response so far.

I attended a London Local Sellers meetup. It was great to meet my Etsy peers, quite a few of them in a similar stage in their Etsy journey as me. A few months old, still grappling with marketing, promoting and the new buzz word SEO!

Although at the end of the day, it's the quality of the product that needs to stand out, but it could always use some SEO help. To let people know you exist in the first place, you need google to know you exist. A very useful tool called EtsyRank really helps in fixing all your tagging, seo and keyword issue up to an extent. I brought up my ranking from a low D and Es to healthy A and B.

It also shows how your listings pop up in Etsy searches. If it appears on page 1 (ideal) or comes up somewhere in page 10....completely useless. Even if you might have the best product, I doubt too many people have the patience to browse more more than 5 pages. Also keeping in mind that increasingly buyers are using their mobile phones to browse, and it can get quite cumbersome after a couple of pages.

I realised it's very important to pay attention to descriptions. Google hates generic copy paste, so I try and make sure that every listing has a different story. Also makes for interesting reading for any buyer. Another good tool is 'Google Keyword'. It shows you the trending and popular keywords that people search while looking for a particular kind of product. So make sure all your 13 keywords on Etsy are optimised and not wasted.

Here are some of my latest prints up on the shop.
www.eyeforlondonprints.etsy.com

My Etsy Journey Part 5: New Friends on Etsy and The Etsy Resolution 2016

I briefly mentioned on my previous post about making friends on Etsy, It is in fact a huge deal. 

It all started with the Facebook group called Etsy Resolution 2016- UK. To someone like me, or probably most people who are new to online retail, setting up a shop can be a daunting thought.

Or maybe it's just a 'creative' thing. We creatives are more often introverts, shy, self doubting and terribly sensitive. Was I generalizing? On joining this group I realised I wasn't alone. 

We all had the same questions nagging us...

'What if I set up a shop and nobody buys my work?'

'What if this is because my work sucks, therefore I suck and now my entire self worth is shattered'

'I see a lot of shops on Etsy, selling stuff that are a lot better than mine, so why should I even bother?'

'What will my friends and family think? Will they look at my work and make fun of me? I may never be as successful as some of my other friends on Facebook who have brilliant online businesses!'

And this was just the beginning, my poor husband bore the brunt of all my nagging doubts. He was trying to be supportive, and instead I was looking for every excuse in the book.

I can across this piece of creative which to be honest completely changed my outlook. I was happy being the cynical pessimist, but this somehow spoke to that tiny 'optimist' bug buried somewhere within. 

Having finally gotten over myself, I finally set up my Etsy shop in the end of January. The Etsy Resolution FB community, then became a sort of a lifeline. I was just learning so much. Discovering SEO and 'tagging'. I always thought hey- if my work was good enough, people will come. WRONG. Not gonna happen. I needed to figure a way to lure them in, keep them interested, keep them coming back.

But how do you get the first followers, the fans? We (the Etsy FB group) started by helping each other out. Lets like each others pages. Let's favourite our shops. Let's follow each other on Instagram. Let's build Pinterest boards together. Lets build the momentum. Thus began the 'Likeathons' and the 'Favethons'  (The cynical me was thinking again- what's the point of this mutual admiration club, how is it going to lead to sales)

I was proven yet again terribly wrong! In fact now I have sold to quite a few people from within this Etsy group. And I didn't even know it, till they happened to mention that they saw my work on a post in the group. When I looked up customer's FB profiles, I noticed that some of them were friends of friends of someone in the group.

I made it point to thank them personally. For liking, sharing and supporting. Anne Marike Pit, a fellow artist from the group was the first who bought one of my prints. It's a funny story, which I will share in my next post. From online to offline. I met a fellow Stokey resident, Marie Remy. A successful Etsy seller : 'The House of Celeste'. We have hung out a couple of times, even did a life drawing class together.

I think this whole process is going to be a slow burn. No instant flash successes. On an Etsy webinar hosted by Patricia Van Den Akker of  The Design Trust, she stresses the importance of social networking, and we should be spending a minimum of 40% of our time marketing and the 60% creating. Setting small weekly, monthly goals and following a social media timetable is a good start- I hope I can keep up the discipline.