Hand Lettering, Typography, and Digital Prints

https://www.etsy.com/listing/652794956/we-love-dancing-come-join-us-printable?ref=shop_home_feat_1 ... View more

Hey guys, For the last couple of weeks I've been working on improving my stats & sales through tweaking listings and updates to my very small store and saw a difference and I thought I should share some of the things I did which I thought helped. I've been reading a lot on these boards, and found that there definitely has been a decrease / slow down to sales these last few weeks and it's been attributed to the changes Etsy has been making. I definitely notice the difference, despite having my store for only over a year and making very little sales, I can definitely say my traffic from last year where I basically did nothing on my store (and tbh it looked pretty terrible) compared to now where I've actually been working on it every day, is still less than what it was this time last year. However, trying to keep it positive, in only ten days, I've managed to increase my views from pretty much 0 to about 50-70 a day and have also gained some sales from this. I hope whatever changes Etsy have made that affect our traffic aren't permanent, but if they are we're just going to have to work that little bit harder on our online presence. Firstly, I started by ensuring all my pictures and branding was up to date, decent quality and looked consistent across my store. After this, I began creating new listings, but instead of putting them up all at once, I spaced them out over a 2-3 days each, as Etsy's searching tool now defaults to 'relevance' which is affected by how recently your item has been listed. I finally created a pinterest, and this has proven to be pretty effective as according to my stats, 50% of my traffic in the last few days has come from pinterest and not within Etsy itself. Similar to this, I have an instagram account for my store, and I posted my new listings on this page, and used relevant but popular instagram tags using apps like MyTagger and Popular Hashtag which increased my followings / likes on Insta (and directly *some* traffic back to my store). I run another non-etsy related online store on the side, which has done pretty well for the past year, and found that instagram has a huge potential to direct traffic to your store, but it certainly takes a while. In terms of paid ads, I've been using the Etsy promotions for a few weeks, but I don't feel like it's actually making a big difference to my views or sales. I also find it a bit expensive, and unless you're planning on spending $10/usd a day, I don't feel like it's worth it (in the current market anyway). I've had way more success from Mart Ninja which I found through another discussion board on here. Basically it works by advertising your listings across various social media sites and you also gain rewards / $ by advertising other sellers. https://martninja.com/invite/1131 - It's definitely been more effective than internal Etsy promotions. Finally, changing up the tags, first few lines in my descriptions and listing names to more 'searchable' keywords also helped. I used the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to choose words that were relevant to my shop category. This helps within Etsy and people searching on Google for products similar to yours. I know I'm a small shop and I don't have that many sales, but I thought I would share some of the small tricks and tips I used that I actually saw making a difference. It's definitely been a hard start to the year for many sellers, and hopefully some of these can help you guys. Happy selling! ... View more