How do you make $100 a day? Answer: selling on Etsy. In this blog, we dive deep in how to build a profitable store with Etsy – starting with as little as $20.
Watch the video below:
(Click Here to Watch on YouTube)
Do you want to learn how to learn how to build a successful, six-figure dropshipping store? CLICK HERE to join The Dropship Club!
Today, I want to reveal how you can start making $100 (or more) per day.
It’s NOT like selling on Amazon where you need $1,000+ to start, or dropshipping, or affiliate marketing.
In fact, you can start THIS business with just – wait for it – $20!
Yeah, just $20.
For the same price as lunch, you can build a business that offers TOTAL freedom in life:
- Time freedom
- Geographical freedom
- Financial freedom
Yes, that’s me working in the middle of the dessert.
Best of all, anyone can do this. You don’t need any previous experience or tech skills to start making sales.
OK, let’s cut to the chase: What business am I talking about?
I’m talking about selling on Etsy.
This is an eCommerce site where you can buy and sell handmade goods made by other merchants. It works a lot like eBay, but without the bidding aspect: you list your items for sale and people buy it.
Etsy started out as mostly an online marketplace for people to sell handmade craft items. But over time it’s evolved and grown. Now people open lots of different Etsy stores that focus on different niches and types of items.
Selling on here is super lucrative, as each year, over 35 million people come and buy items from stores on Etsy.
While there isn’t an “Amazon” number of buyers or sellers on Etsy yet—there’s still a hell loada’ room to make a great income. And I want to show you how.
So, without further ado—let’s dive straight in.
(By the way, at the end of this post, I’ll reveal an extra step to this tutorial you can follow to supercharge your sales in the beginning. Though this time, instead of $20, you’ll need $100 – so this is entirely optional)
Question: “What do I sell on Etsy?”
Yeah, what do you sell — costumes? Books? Jewellery?
No, no, and no.
You’re selling something way simpler: T-shirts with funny memes and jokes.
What was your first opinion on this tee? Simple? Plain? Boring? GOOD, because that’s exactly what it is.
It’s literally just a white t-shirt with black text. How could something so simply make you $100/day? Well, there’s actually one simple reason: they make funny gifts for friends and family.
For example, this t-shirt would look perfect on my mom.
Just kidding. But hey, I know I’d get a few laughs here and there — and that’s the whole point: people aren’t buying these t-shirts to look classy or in-trend…
..they buy them because they evoke EMOTION in others – happiness, fun and excitement.
While the person receiving this shirt isn’t always going to have the last laugh, t-shirts like this even help to express someone’s personality.
Take the store WitticismsRus – an Etsy store that sells lots of different types of items that feature jokes and cute sayings.
(Admittedly, some of these are not family friendly)
Did you see the mug that features the text NOPE? It’s been “favourited” by over 400 people. That’s a LOT of people. This alone means we know it’s a very popular item or them.
But we don’t even need to guess, because check it out – 5 people have this item in their cart today.
If we assume they are buying the cheaper $14 mug instead of the bigger, more expensive $19 mug, they would be making $70 from these 5 sales alone.
But it gets even better, because check this out. They have a t-shirt version of this mug. And look: 7 people have this added to their cart! That is $126 worth of sales. So far, we’re up to $196.
This is living proof of how easy making money on Etsy can be – given you use the right strategy.
“But wait: do I have to ship the item to the customer?”
I know right? that’d be way too boring. Plus – where are you going to store a bunch of t-shirts and mugs? In your house?
This is where the twist comes in. As a seller, you don’t need to do ANY of “that.”
- Tirelessly tape up dozens of boxes every day to ship…
- Storing 200 mugs and 500 shirts in your spare room…
- Run down to the postal office to ship of 100 orders (that took the ENTIRE day to package) …
Instead, you use a Print on Demand service.
These fulfilment services print your designs onto custom items, on demand. Basically, as soon as a customer orders.
For example, Printify is a print on demand service – arguably the best for Etsy sellers. And they let you create custom items like mugs and t-shirts. You can create an account for free (which is perfect for beginners), then create your products you want to sell in it. All you do is place your artwork you’ve created in-advance and place it on top of your chosen product, like this t-shirt.
And thanks to Printify’s Etsy integration, you can then list your items you’ve created with Printify for sale in your Etsy store. Each time a customer adds one of your items to their cart and buys it…
…Printify’s printers will be notified of your sale. They will then print that 1 item, and then package and ship it directly to your customer. It’s COMPLETELY hands-off, and you don’t have to buy any products in-advance.
As you can see, Printify charge $9.03 to print 1 custom, basic male t-shirt if you have a free Printify account and not a premium one. Once you start making more sales, upgrade to the premium one. Well, as you can see, WitticismsRus are selling their t-shirts for $18, with shipping being an additional cost for the customer.
After Etsy’s selling fees which are VERY low by industry standards, that would leave WitticismsRus with $7.08 in PROFIT per t-shirt – a 39% profit margin. Which means, it could leave YOU with a 39% profit margin – if YOU take action.
And in the future your margins would increase even more after buying a premium Printify subscription, discounting the items even further. These are very high profit margins, which makes it even easier to build your store up to $100/day if you put the time and effort in.
For more on Print on Demand, check out our YouTube video tutorial below:
Alright so we know the plan: we want to sell our own witty t-shirts and mugs and products that we can print on demand on Etsy and build our own $100 a day store. But how are we going to find memes jokes and phrases?
Well, honestly, the best way is to just to find these stores that are selling meme and joke items and see what other words and phrases successfully turning into money-making products and sales.
You can then make your own variation of their most popular products. And let me show you why this a good idea.
So let’s come to a new mug for example – “Not That Type of Doctor.” This is a common graduate PHD joke.
It’s actually based on a TV Trope: the trope being that the only doctors that exist in TV shows are medical doctors and no other forms of academic doctors.
It’s being sold by a store named StrictlyBusinessMugs. And as you can see, they’re a super popular Etsy store as well, with over 9,000 sales.
And like most Etsy Print on Demand stores, they’ve got a small percentage of super-popular items that bring in regular sales.
For example, this mug above is in 15 peoples carts. People are regularly buying it.
Now some people will find this mug because it’s popular and snap buy it. But others, well, they will look at their options. And so they’ll come to the search bar and type the item in and do a search for it to see if there are any similar mugs. But there aren’t many, there are only 5.
Like if we check this one out as can see it’s not very popular because well, it’s a pretty plain design – it uses very basic, kind of ugly font on a plain white background.
And if we open this other mug here that is very similar, we can see the exact same thing – very boring black font on a white mug.
So honestly, it doesn’t surprise me that coming back, that the first mug we saw is by far the most popular version of it. It’s got a professional looking font which fits with the idea of what a new PHD graduate would like.
And so this would be a great opportunity to piggyback off of these sales and create your own design because it’s pretty easy to make a variation on this mug.
For example, you could take this exact same font but switch colours around – make the white mug and keep the same font but make it black instead.
Or, you could maybe spice up the font by using this free font – Flatline Medical Font – for the doctor text.
And maybe you try could try something a little bit different – you could print this text art onto a travel mug instead to give the potential customer more options.
But first: HOW do you find these ‘winner’ designs that are jacking the majority of sales? Answer: you “uncover” them by finding mugs we know customers have added to their cart.
And the easiest way to do that is to open up your browser search functionality and type “people have added this to their cart.” And if we do that all of the items that have been added to people’s carts have been highlighted so we can easily identify them and sift through them.
Now when you’re sifting through these designs: focus on ones that are PURELY simple word art. IGNORE designs that are elaborate or feature images.
So for example, this is a good mug to make your own version of. It’s just basic TEXT. And we can see it’s SUPER popular as over 20 people have added it to their cart.
But THIS mug – this alpaca mug – you want to IGNORE designs like this because it’s a much more elaborate, complex design that, even worse, features artwork. So we have to say no to it.
(Which is sad, because I absolutely love Alpacas)
It’s important you stick to designs that only use text based images. Why? Well, because we’ve got a $20 budget, and almost anyone can create basic text art for FREE!
Here’s the thing… as we’ve discussed before on this channel, if you wanted to hire a designer to make you a piece of original artwork like this on say Fiverr or Upwork, you’re looking at minimum $25 per design.
So just 1 design breaks our $20 budget. But take a look at this…
I’ve replicated this exact same text art in photoshop. And it took – 5 minutes? It’s literally just text. This is all these meme shops are doing: making basic text art and then slapping it on print-on-demand products. Now I used photoshop which has a monthly subscription of $9.99 but you can use a free open source graphics editor software like GIMP which does the same job.
But I don’t suggest that you just copy them. Instead, make variations of the same product.
So I went ahead and made my own variation here: it’s very similar but as you can see it uses the stereotypically academic font (insert) – which makes it more targeted towards the demographic here of students.
And you know it might take you 5 or 10 minutes or maybe even 20 minutes to make 1 design. But once you’ve got 1 design, well, you can just repurpose it with different text.
Here’s another example – a store that’s just created a few templates of this “eat, sleep, repeat” design. They simply plugged different words into it, and a really easy way to create new designs to test fast. In eCommerce we call this product testing.
And this is how these stores work: they add LOTS of different products to their store with different jokes targeting different groups of people like soccer fans and anime fans. And they see which items and designs do well – and which ones don’t.
The ones that do well stay in their store, and the ones that don’t sell will eventually get removed. And they can add lots of these jokes because they either use simple word art, or reuse word art and just plug in different jokes.
“OK, so when do I start using my $20?”
Each time you list an item on Etsy it costs you 20 cents, where item stays up on the site for free for 4 whole months. So if you’re serious about this business, I recommend that over the next week or two, you go out there and create and list 10 products a day in your spare time using this strategy.
Your goal is to get up 100 products to “test” – and $0.20 x 100 is $20!
When listing products, make sure to do simple search engine optimization techniques. This basically means making your listing more “visible” in the search results.
Think about it — what sort of people would want to buy this PHD mug?
Well obviously, people that want to give a funny, fun gift to their friends and family who either have PHDs or are soon to be graduating with them.
If we type in PHD in the search bar on Etsy, we can see the most commonly searched, relevant keywords – “PHD gift,” “PHD graduation gift,” and “PHD mug.” (Can you see?)
So what I recommend you do is you use this technique to research relevant keywords like that for your product, then use them in your product tags when listing an item.
Make sure you include these words and phrases in your item listing too. We can see that this seller did it here in their title.
(Consumers don’t really read titles on Etsy, they focus on the images, so feel free to keyword stuff like they did)
And make sure that you also put the joke or phrase you’re targeting in here as well. I also recommend putting those keywords inside your product listing description – not just your title.
And when writing your description, don’t just put two lines of text. Spend time and look at top selling stores and base your description off of what they do so that you look professional and trustworthy. And remember: Printify DOES have a refund policy for non-customized items, so you can take advantage of that to add further trust.
Now, the BONUS step: How to “supercharge” your sales ($100 required)
Although perfectly legal, this may come across a little sneaky. Though you can decide yourself what you think. Here’s how it works.
First, we need to understand how the search algorithm works. If you were to type in the word “PHD mug” into the search bar, you can see (underneath the search ad results) a bunch of mugs the algorithm has selectively chosen as the first mugs that show up.
This is important. Because, obviously, the higher on this page your item sits, the more likely people looking for a PHD mug to gift their friend are to find YOURS and to BUY it.
So here is a question: how is it that Etsy’s search engine algorithm sifted through hundreds of mugs and chose this mug to show near the top of its results?
Well, there a few factors, but the biggest is recent sales and conversions.
You see, what Etsy really wants to see is that your item has 1) recently been purchased and 2) that a high percentage of people that opened your item listing went ahead and bought it.
Now you understand it, the next step is learning how to GAME it. Which is pretty simple with this “secret” bonus step. It goes like this:
Step 1: Create a heavily discounted coupon for your item and give it to your friends
Basically, what you want to do is go into the coupon creator inside your Etsy account and make a coupon that applies a big discount – like say, 99% – to the item with a no order minimum requirement. You then want to give this coupon to your friends. And make sure they create their own Etsy accounts.
Step 2: Have 5 friends each buy a different product from your store using a search keyword
So what you now want them to do, is to sign into their Etsy accounts, go to the search bar, and type in the keyword you’re trying to target, like say, ‘PHD Mug.’ You then want them to scroll through the results until they find your mug, and to then click on it.
Because your mug and store are new, if you’re targeting a popular keyword with hundreds to even thousands of related items, they may have to click through several pages of results to find the item.
Step 3: Have them buy the item immediately using the discount coupon & reimburse them
When they click on your item listing, make sure that they buy it immediately without leaving the page or bouncing. This will indicate to Etsy your product has a high conversion rate of people landing on your item listing to then purchasing it.
Because your friends will be using a discount coupon, your sales fees will be super low. And you can reimburse them the cost of the item and shipping they paid.
Step 4: Get them to leave a review with a photo
And finally – ask each of your friends very nicely to leave a review and upload a photo of the item they purchased with it. And hopefully they will leave a 5/5 star positive review!
And for legalities and transparency, you can have them say that they were given a review copy. As the long as the review is reasonably detailed and includes a photo, customers will still trust it.
Again this is entirely optional, but it’s a great way to boost 5 of your items to the top of the search results, while also getting reviews for your store, to build trust with your new customers.
So, what’d you say — not bad for a $20 start-up?
Want to learn the blueprint wildly successful dropship stores follow to make six-figures?
Six steps to building a six-figure Dropship store
In it, I’ve included:
- How just one “winning item” can earn $10k/month. Yep. A lot of people don’t realize this… but most stores make the majority of their money from just a handful of items!
- The right way to choose AliExpress suppliers. Picking the right AliExpress dropshipper is crucial to drastically reduce things like refunds. Learn how to pick the right suppliers.
- Why long shipping times DON’T matter. A lot of people are scared to start Dropshipping because of “long” shipping times. You’ll learn why this doesn’t matter inside.
- Why six-figure stores take ONLY 2 hours a day to manage. You’ll learn how they utilize apps like Oberlo to make their stores semi-automated… making managing orders super simple!
Click Here to Access the Free Book