On average it can take months to make your first sale. So don’t give up hope to quickly.
I think that art is always going to be a bit slow here, as it’s not exactly an essential item that you really can’t live without. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people out there who want it if only they could get to see it. It’s a question of getting your work under the right person’s nose at the right time. This is not easy, you have to work at it.
There is a very useful post pinned to the top of the discussions in Etsy Business Topics Team.
https://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/business-topics/discuss/12013569/First, your shop will be more visible when you can get more items in it.
The way I see it, there are three pools of people you are trying to reach out to.
1. The Etsy community. Your Tags and titles need to be tailored to help people searching on Etsy to find you. Use ALL of your tag spaces available. There are people here who are here just to shop, plus fellow shop owners are all potential customers too. To get yourself more visible to this group take part in the community side of things here. Join and be active in a variety of teams, (in a meaningful way rather than the promoting – “here’s my item, buy me”). Make treasuries that help to promote other people, some will get to notice you, like what you do and return the favour.
2. Off Etsy contacts that you make yourself. You need to work on drawing people specifically to your shop who might not even know about Etsy. Get a FaceBook page &/or Twitter and work on creating your own following. Blog &/or have your own web site. Give out your business cards at any exhibitions, craft fairs etc that you get involved with. Family and friends can be effective advocates for your work, let them know what you are trying to achieve. (My mother-out-law is my greatest fan; she always has one of my bags on her and is happy to boast about both her talented son without the shop and his talented partner with the shop).
3. Random people doing Google searches. Getting your titles and tags correct for Etsy also helps with Google searches. Plus getting those key words repeated in your descriptions in the first how-ever-many-words also helps. There are teams here that specialise in SEO (Search engine optimisation). Study your shop statistics &/or get Google analytics, these give you valuable clues into how people find you.
Hope some of that helps. There are other people on Etsy who are much more expert on these things plus this reminds me that I really aught to go back and look at the sellers handbook myself. There is always something I could be doing better.
L
Last thought – it can take courage to be someone’s 1st customer. At least you already have a record of positive feedback from the purchases you’ve made. This gives a clue that you are probably a nice person ;-) How about getting a friend to make that first purchase? – or is that cheating???
