KickstarterForum.org

Looking forward to hearing more about your journey as it sounds parallel to mine. I have made and sold jewelry at a local Open Studio once a year for the past 6 years, and people always ask if I have an etsy page. I signed up but never went as far as creating a store. I expect as with crowdfunding, you need to not just have a crowd, but do some PR work as well if you want sales to happen.

We've been on Etsy for just over 4 years now (if I remember right) with http://www.shireeodiz.com and as several of you have mentioned, it's not as easy as just posting great products and great content. Although they would probably like to distance themselves from eBay and Amazon, Etsy have one major common denominator - a search and discovery algorithm. Without learning the basics of how their algorithm works, you will be forever fighting for traffic. Even when you do know how the game works, it's still not easy.

Some of the basics for getting exposure with Etsy SEO are:

1. Keep customers happy and get good ratings
2. Ship on time (preferably with tracking) and update your Etsy account - late shipments are starting to affect search rankings.
3. Use product variations on a single listing to attract more buyers to one page
4. Sales history counts so be attractive with price and promote your best sellers first (Etsy doesn't want to 'waste' their traffic on dud listings). Remember that Etsy makes more money from listings that sell - they're happy, the buyers are happy and good sellers are happy when the most sellable listings are higher up in search.
5. Remember to use keyword rich titles and tags
6. Build reputation and sales history by getting traffic from external sources (social media, newsletters, blogs, etc)
7. Use promoted listings on Etsy to keep your best sellers selling
8. Regularly post new items for fresh traffic
9. Create new listings for old listings that didn't sell, rather than relisting them. This tells Etsy that it's a new item (perhaps worth promoting) rather than the old one that they know didn't sell. Relisting is okay a few times, but once stale, make a change.

Good luck!

Great advice! Thanks for sharing!!

Great advice, Danielsetton. I was inspired by Krys to start my etsy store, and finally listed some items over the weekend. After I did that, I started reading the Etsy Seller Handbook. I really should have read that first. Lots of great advice from Etsy there. Lots of room for improvement.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/WeavingsByCelia

Celia from Mystic Makerspace

I did make those little crochet figures. A friend's daughter asked if I could make her a star wars figure, so I made some out of yarn. Then I had this idea to use thread, and I started making these 2 inch figures which are much harder to make but the end results are so much more fun. You can find the yarn sized ones elsewhere on etsy, but I have not found the small ones. Now that the store is populated, I need to start the marketing. Let's see how long it takes me to get to that.

I have 3 Etsy shops and they do well. I actually accidentally started my first shop when I was with Sign A Rama and I just needed some extra cash but the location I worked for closed down and I had to keep paying my bills so I just started working at it. Currently, one of my favorite shops that I manage sells vinyl decals, graphic design, and screen printed apparel and last year I sold well over 450 items on that one shop alone. The key is to set up you listings (like you mentioned) correctly.....This means a good title but I don't really think the length of the description makes a difference. I love to help people on Etsy either expand their product selection.

The thing to remember on Etsy, is most of your customers will be other shop owners so getting involved in the forum is key to getting your views up...when your views go up you get in more treasuries, when you get in a treasury you are effectively getting your products advertised on other people's Etsy profile, which equals more sales. One other thing I feel is important is that your Etsy listing will generally be listed in Google Products so go look at the products you will be competing against on Google and look at how they construct their listings.

I am currently working on another Etsy shop, website, and product line so I will just do the same thing I have done in the past and it should do the same as the other shops I work.

Thanks,
Kyle Sanders
Etsy: http://SlapStickVinyl.etsy.com
Kickstarter Campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tshirts/graphic-guitar-skins-and-line-of-custom-guitars

Thanks for sharing your insightful story. I have an etsy shop that is doing reasonable well. I design quotes/custom maps and sold over 4000 items in the last 3 years. The shop didn't do too well at first. It only picked up during the 2nd year when I went back to school and really needed income desperately. I literally spent my entire summer school break creating hundreds of new designs + listings and updating the tags and descriptions like an insane person. You can say that my sales picked up due to my desperation lol.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/PuffPaperCo