Tips and Tricks

Can I make a living selling on Etsy?

Can I make a living selling on Etsy

As rags-to-riches stories of people who became millionaires pursuing their hobby on the arts and craft marketplace Etsy makes headlines every other day, it may have triggered a curiosity in you, whether you can replicate those results or maybe just make enough money to pay off that student loan. This stands especially true if you have a penchant for the arts and handicraft.

The fact is that people do make money on Etsy. But to ensure that you can follow suit rather than make a half-assed attempt and quit midway is to know what makes a successful business on Etsy. Well, the businesses themselves are not sharing any quick-shortcut guides to success. But with a little research, you can easily find what sells, how to sell it and how to scale it up until you can quit your job and be your own boss.

Can you make money selling on Etsy

Can I make a good money selling on Etsy?

What sells on Etsy?

The first thing that you’d want to know is what sells. There are more than 800,000 stores selling a whole range of diverse handmade stuff on Etsy. Log on to the website and check out some of the categories. Do you have a reasonable amount of expertise making any of those? There are so many diverse things that you will surely find something that you are skilled at. But that’s not nearly enough.

Be ready for failure

Etsy was launched in 2005 and unlike back then, the competition has skyrocketed. Unless you are selling something that only you could think of, chances are that you will be facing stiff competition from someone else who will also be selling the same thing. So, in all fairness, be prepared to fail and adapt to it by switching over to something that has less competition maybe. This applies even if you do not find a competitor but your product just doesn’t take off.

Drive traffic

The world is on social media. And that is the best way to drive traffic to your Etsy store. But you have to be creative. Don’t think purely on the lines of Facebook and twitter. There’s Wanelo, Instagram, Tumblr, Quora, Shots, Ello and Hyper. Take advantage of the many options, check where you are getting most of the traffic from and work the most on that one.

Be realistic

One of the reasons why people end up being disappointed is because they have unrealistic expectations to begin with. While there is every probability that you may end up becoming a millionaire, start off with low expectations that are much more achievable. How about $100 every month that you can use to add to your income or pay off a small loan? If you can achieve that amount consistently, it is only a matter of scaling up what you are already doing. But if you think of achieving a million bucks in six months, you will in all probability, end up quitting midway because you were not able to even come close.

That’s it. I hope that helps to clear off some if the doubts that you had in your mind about getting started on Etsy.

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1 Comment

  • Reply
    Diane Negron
    October 13, 2016 at 8:01 pm

    Thank you so much for this article. It gave me a few new ideas! 🙂

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