Category Archives: resources

Introducing Paper + Spark

google cover w box copyHello there! I have some exciting news to relay to all you lovely Lazy Owl followers. We’re currently working on opening a new business and launching a new brand, Paper + Spark! 

Paper + Spark is the fruition of a dream I’ve always had – to create a line of paper goods specially crafted for other entrepreneurs, busy moms, and all-around creative hustlers like myself.

P+S will offer fresh, fun, and functional everyday essentials for your desktop, workspace, and home. Our goods are colorful, motivating, and inspiring…but most of all functional! We know you don’t have time or space for extra clutter in your life.

If you already follow Lazy Owl, I’d encourage you to check out some of the P+S goods that are designed just for small biz owners, like these goodies:

Give our shop a look and I’m sure you’ll love our colorful bold patterns and motivating goodies.

To sweeten the pot, we’re offering all Lazy Owl readers a 10% off discount from now until the end of 2014. Use coupon code LAZYOWL10 to receive 10% off your entire purchase.

We’re also currently offering a giveaway to win your own binder designed by you! 

Also, I’d love to hear if there are any paper or office goods you’ve been dying to see as a creative biz owner. What sort of office goods would make your life easier as an entrepreneur? Let’s work together to get your idea made!

You can follow Paper+Spark on facebook, instagram, or twitter, and sign up for email updates & discounts here. And don’t worry, we’ll soon be publishing more great content, articles, and resources here on Lazy Owl too!

Resource Round Up, volume 5

lazy owl boutique downloadsHere are some helpful tools, apps, articles, resources, and other goodies I’ve found on the interwebs recently:

  • On my constantly on-going quest to master social media, I’ve downloaded this fun app from A Beautiful Mess. It helps makes your pictures prettier! You can also add graphics, doodles, and text. Most awesomely, it allows you to easily share your pics on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever social media tool you’d like.

a beautiful mess app – lots of pretty and fun!

  • I conclude by encouraging you to visit our latest series on pricing your handcrafted goodies here at Lazy Owl. Our final segment on this topic will be a reader Q&A, so I encourage you to stop by and post any questions you have about the ginormous topic of PRICING!

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Resource Round Up, volume 4

creative bizHere’s what I’m digging on the interwebs this week!

  • I picked up these chocolate bars on a whim (cannot resist anything with dark chocolate) from a local market in Houston. Three days later I went back and bought the entire stock of dark chocolate & salted brown butter pecan brittle. Absolutely to die for. I guess this isn’t a business resource, nor is it on the web (sorry non-Texas peeps)…but I still feel like it’s worth mentioning. I consider good chocolate a vital resource….for myself…
  • I feel like I’ve been mentioning Instagram a lot lately (follow me @lazyowlboutique!), but there’s just so much to learn and I’m having fun learning it! Here’s yet another awesome article about how to effectively use Instagram to promote your boutique biz. This post is full of great ideas and different ways to use Instagram.

lazy owl boutique business plan

  • Ok, so this is sort of cheating…but since I haven’t had a chance to officially announce it yet or anything, I’ve got to say that Lazy Owl’s newly released e-course & workbook about crafting a business plan for your creative business is also one of our favorite resources on the web this week! Right now we’re celebrating it’s release with a special sale price of only $10. So for the price of a couple lattes, you can download over 50 pages of goodies for your creative biz!

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How are Customers Finding You on Etsy? – Interpreting & Utilizing Your Etsy Shop Stats, part 5

etsy statsHi there! Welcome to our fifth and final article in this Marketing Magic series on effective ways to use and interpret your Etsy shop stats. I hope you’ve found this helpful thus far! Here are the links to the previous articles for a recap:

In Test #3, we discussed analyzing the various sources that generate traffic to your Etsy shop. On a similar note, today we’ll discuss traffic sources from within Etsy.com that lead viewers to your shop. So we’re not talking about people doing a Google search, we’re talking about people that are either already browsing Etsy.com or already somewhere in your Etsy shop.

#4. Review Your Traffic Sources FROM ETSY

The Thought Process 

Once a viewer finds your shop or listing, however they found it, you want to keep them there (by “there” I mean within your shop) as long as possible. Think about if you owned a brick & mortar shop. Customers would come in and browse, see an item they like, possibly add it to their cart, move on and see another item they liked, and keep browsing on and on. Your internet shop is different. They might land on a listing page from a Google or Etsy search and never see the rest of your shop other than that one listing. It’s up to you to help them browse.

The longer a viewer spends browsing your listings, the likelier you will be to make a sale, or at least get some items favorited. There are several things you can do to keep a viewer browsing within your shop, and you can use your Etsy shop stats to monitor your progress.

The Testing Procedure 

Once again, filter to a weekly or monthly view of your stats. Check out the other box below your graph, titled “traffic sources on Etsy”. This is basically giving you a drilldown of the “etsy.com” number listed under the “traffic sources” box to the left. Examine where your inner-Etsy views are coming from. Possible traffic sources from within Etsy can include the following:

    • Your Shop – when a viewer clicks on a listing from the home page of your shop
    • Your Listings – when a viewer clicks on a link (to another listing, to your shop home page, to a category section, etc.) from a link within another one of your listings
      etsy titanium earrings

      turquoise rosette titanium studs in my shop – see how etsy automatically adds some links to other listings in my shop

      traffic to etsy shop

      • Search – a viewer searches for something from the Etsy.com home page
      • Search within your shop – a viewer searches for something from the search bar on your Etsy shop page
      • Other possible traffic sources include the Etsy home page (score!), treasuries, favorites, convos, Etsy’s browse sections, teams, or another shop’s listing.

Questions to Ask Yourself Now 

      • Where is most of my inner-Etsy traffic coming from?
      • Do I have a substantial amount of views coming from within my shop, like from listings and shop sections?
      • Are there steps I can take to increase the links and connectivity within my shop to increase a viewer’s browse time?
      • Are there steps I can take to increase my page ranking in Etsy search results?
      • Have treasuries and my participation in Etsy teams or forums been a good way to drive traffic to my shop?
      • What can I do to increase my chances of being featured in treasuries and on the Etsy front page?

Lessons Learned

Unless you were featured on the front page, you want most of your traffic to be coming from Your Shop and Your Listings. Yes, search traffic from Etsy.com is great, that means your tags are doing their job. However, lots of views from your shop, listings, and section pages means that people are sticking around after they found you via search or whatever other method. It means they like your shop!

To boost these views, make sure your listings have helpful links included in them. You can link to other relevant listings or categories. Here are some examples of effective listing linking:

      • “If you like this style of ____ check out my other _____ here.”
      • “Check out my entire line of _______s or my shop section of _____ here.”
      • “If you’d like this _____ but in another color/size, see my _______ here.”
      • “Back to our shop here _______”
      • “Check out the _______ that matches this listing.”
etsy links

another example from my turquoise rose studs listing – see all the links to other places in my shop that I have sloppily circled

The idea is to think like your target customer and provide them little links and breadcrumbs to other parts of your shop that will make their lives easier and increase your chances of making a sale. The good news is that these days, Etsy does a pretty good job of adding a lot of links for you already. On each listing page, they will automatically add links to other listings in that same section, a link to convo you, and a link to your about page.

Don’t forget to monitor your progress after you’ve tweaked your listing links and any other keyword or tagging work. Check your traffic stats on at least a monthly basis to see if your views from Etsy searches or inner-shop browsing has paid off!

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We hope you’ve enjoyed our series on how to analyze and interpret your Etsy shop stats! We’ve discussed just some of the many processes you can perform to effectively utilize and analyze your Etsy Shop Stats. After running through these tests, remember to continue checking your stats to see if your efforts have improved your traffic. Our goal is to get more people to your shop and increase your sales. Happy selling!

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Coming Soon! Your Creative Business Plan e-course & workbook

Exciting news! Lazy Owl will soon be releasing our very first Crafting a Business 101 e-book and e-course, Creating a Business Plan. The e-book will be a thorough expansion of our popular Business Plan blog series, with lots more printable worksheets and valuable content added. It’ll also include some inspirational info and links to other resources and goodies. Since this will be the first release of our first e-course ever, for a limited time, we’ll be offering it for a very special rate to our email subscribers. Enter your email address below to be added to our subscription list, and be the very first to know as soon as the Creating a Business Plan e-book is released (and get it for a very special low price)!

crafting a creative business plan lazy owl boutique

coming soon!

We’re offering so much more than just a simple, boring, static business plan! Completing our e-course will help you…

  • Hone in on why you became a creative entrepreneur in the first place, and inspire you to keep on trucking through any bumps in the road
  • Research and define your ideal customer and your target audience
  • Determine the best outlets to both sell and promote your creative business
  • Spend your marketing time more effectively
  • Craft the best message and language to sell and market your products across all platforms
  • Stand out from your competition
  • Build a solid foundation for your creative business
  • Create a simple, usable business plan that you can use and get inspiration from both now and as your business grows

Our Crafting a Business Plan e-course and workbook will include:

  • An in-depth guide on how to create a usable and effective business plan for your creative business, whether you’re new to being an entrepreneur or just want to re-tool your current plan (or lack thereof!)
  • Printable worksheets and prompts for each step of your new business plan
  • Over 50+ pages of helpful content, printable worksheets, inspirational quotes, and other resources

As they say, those that don’t plan, plan to fail. A solid business plan is essential to succeeding in today’s competitive handmade industry. Enter your email address below to receive our newsletter and learn more about our upcoming e-course!

Enter your email address:Delivered by FeedBurner

UPDATE: It’s here! Check out the link by clicking on this banner:

crafting a business plan

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Where’s Your Traffic Coming From? – Interpreting & Utilizing Your Etsy Shop Stats, part 4

how to use your etsy statsOur latest series of Marketing Magic articles discusses how to analyze your Etsy Shop Stats to help increase your views and boost sales. Read the intro to the series here to get started. You can currently read about test #1, reviewing your keywords, and test #2, sorting your superstar listings from the duds.

We’re now moving on to test #3, reviewing the sources that lead traffic to your Etsy shop.

#3. Review Your Traffic Sources

The Thought Process

How are viewers and potential customers finding you? Are they searching for a keyword or phrase on Etsy or Google that eventually brings them to you? Are they clicking on a pin on Pinterest, or were they reading a blog article about your product? There are so many ways customers can find you; it’s essential to monitor how viewers are and are not finding your products. This is especially true if you are participating in any sort of marketing campaign, like using a Facebook business page, participating in a giveaway, or pinning your items. You want to know if you are using your time effectively or wasting energy.

 The Testing Procedure

Let’s take some time to check the traffic sources listed on our Etsy shop stats page to see how viewers are finding you. Once again, filter to a monthly or weekly view and check out the “traffic sources” box just below the graph. This box lists all the places that your views are coming from.

lazy owl boutique

“Etsy.com” means traffic that came from “within” Etsy, via search or other internal Etsy links. Note that these views are further broken down in the box to the right, “Traffic Sources on Etsy”.

Direct traffic generally means someone who typed in your Etsy shop URL, clicked on a bookmark, or clicked on a link in an email or on their phone.

This box will include third party search engines (like Google or Yahoo), Pinterest, Facebook, blog URLS, and other social media sites as sources as well if they are applicable. You also might see traffic from Google Product Listing Ads that Etsy has placed on your shop’s behalf.

 Questions to Ask Yourself Now

While looking at your list of traffic sources, think about the following questions:

  • Did I perform any marketing or promoting efforts this month to generate traffic to my shop? Do I see an increase in views from a previous month due to this?
  • How much traffic do I see resulting from my social media sites (like from Facebook, Pinterest, your tweets, etc.)?
  • What social media outlet seems to be working the best for me this month and bringing in the most traffic?
  • Do I have any traffic coming from an unexpected source, like a blog or site I didn’t know about? You’ll want to be sure to check these sources out, if anything, to say thank you!
  • How much direct traffic do I have? This is potentially from people with your business card or who have heard about you via word of mouth.
  • Did I buy any online advertising space this month? If so, how much traffic am I seeing from this?
  • What social media sites or other sources seem to be missing from my list this month?

Lessons Learned

This analysis helps you determine whether your marketing and promotion efforts are effective. It can also help you decide where to allocate your precious time. For example, is Pinterest bringing in twice as much traffic as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? then spend more time pinning.

This test is also helpful if you compare your results and traffic sources to past time periods. If you’ve ramped up your Facebook marketing efforts or started a new blog, you can see whether traffic from those sites are increasing over time.

This process can also be particularly educational if done following a specific marketing effort on your part. For instance…

  • Did you just do a craft show and hand out lots of business cards? Monitor to see if handing out all those cards helped increase your direct traffic.
  • Are you selling on a group deals site or participating in a giveaway on a blog? Monitor to see if you’re getting traffic from that source to make your participation worthwhile.
  • Did you just write a blog article about your product or brand, or start a new blog recently? Keep an eye on your traffic to see if your new work is affecting traffic.

This analysis will tell you what’s working, and you can obviously capitalize on that. But don’t forget to look for what sources are missing from your list. Are you tweeting all the time and not seeing any incoming traffic from Twitter? Then you may need to reallocate your time or adjust your Twitter marketing plan to be more effective. Did you pay for ad space or participate in a giveaway and see hardly any incoming traffic from that? Now you’re armed with more info before participating in something similar next time.

How are your traffic numbers for Etsy.com and Google/Yahoo/Bing searches? Monitor these stats over time to see if you’re doing well with SEO/keyword tagging or if it’s time to adjust and boost your page rankings.

The general idea behind this test is two-fold: 1) You are learning how to use your time wisely. Spend your marketing time on the venues that are driving the most of your traffic. 2) You want people to find your shop and products from a healthy mix of searches and links around the interwebs. You need lots of both types of traffic to be truly successful. We recommend a site like IFTTT.com to set up automated processes on your social media outlets to help increase traffic from these sources.

Check back soon for our fourth test with your Etsy shop stats. We hope you’re enjoying this series! What questions do you have about reading and analyzing your Etsy shop stats?

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Resource Round Up, volume 3

internet business resourcesHere’s what I’m digging on the interwebs this week!

  • Seriously amazingly awesome website I just found – ifttt.com. IFTTT (I don’t even know what it stands for, but I love it) allows you to create “recipes” to automate all sorts of technological process connected to your apps, sites, and various accounts. It’s great for both business and personal use. Just a few examples – every time you list something on Etsy it can automatically post it to your Facebook business page, every time you post something on Instagram it will tweet it for you, it can text you the weather forecast every morning when you wake up, it can automatically back up certain emails…the possibilities are endless and amazing. This site is a MUST for using your internet time more effectively!
  • I’ve been loving the essential oils kit I bought from fellow Texan and Etsy seller Cassia Aromatics. The dream state blend has been helping me get to sleep easier, and I love diffusing the oils in my new cute little diffuser for a quick pick-me-up throughout the day. I also picked up The Complete Book of Essential Oils & Aromatherapy to get more ideas and recipes for using my new oils (if you use essential oils I’d love to hear any tips or tricks you might have for a newbie!).
  • I love Tara Gentile’s post about five ways to generate revenue now. Her ideas are always outside the box and get you pumped up about your business. Reading this post this week has gotten my business wheels turning, so you can expect some announcements and new things coming from Lazy Owl soon!

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Sorting the Superstars from the Duds – Interpreting & Utilizing Your Etsy Shop Stats, part 3

Our latest series of Marketing Magic articles discusses how to analyze your Etsy Shop Stats to help increase your views and boost sales. Read the intro to the series here to get started. Test #1, reviewing your keywords, was discussed here last week.

This week, we’re discussing another easy analysis you can perform while looking at your Etsy shop stats.

help with etsy stats#2. Separate Your Super Star Listings from the Duds

The Thought Process 

Your shop’s listings are your selling points. Whether you have a ton or only a few listings, you’ve probably noticed over time that some listings seem to be getting a lot of views and favorites, while others are barely seen. The discrepancy could be caused by many things; maybe you’re selling a mixture of more popular (and thus more viewed) and less popular (and less viewed) items. That makes sense and probably applies to you to some degree. However, it could also be due to some other factors.

The Testing Procedure 

Again, I suggest looking at your stats in chunks of at least 1 month’s time (like “last month”’s view for example) for this analysis. After filtering your dates to this view, scroll down to your “pages viewed” area. check out your top 2 or 3 viewed items (that are not pages or categories), we’ll call these your superstar listings…along with your least viewed 2 or 3 items (you will have to click to the very last page), or your duds.

You can click on the listing’s link in your stats and get individual stats for just that item, but it’s also helpful to look at the actual listing so you can view the keyword tags, title, and description you used.

Open the listing pages and the individual stat pages for your superstar listings and your duds, and get ready to do some thorough examination.

Questions to Ask Yourself 

What do your superstar items have in common? Try to think of every possibility, especially beyond the obvious ones (like they’re all Halloween-related and it’s October). Here are some starters:

      • Do they all have great photographs on pristine white backgrounds?
      • Do they all use the same keywords or tags?
      • Were they all renewed that month?
      • Did they all get traffic from a similar source, like treasuries, Twitter, or a recent ad campaign?
      • Did they get more views from within your shop or from keyword searches (this tells you if someone spotted it whilst already in your shop or came directly to it after searching on Etsy)?
pyrite nugget wire wrap ring

This was my superstar listing last month. Great clean and clear photo, good tag and title usage, and being featured in a handful of treasuries helped make this listing popular.

Now for those dud listings. What’s wrong with these guys? More questions to ponder regarding your least viewed items:

      • Is it my pictures? Could I use better, more appealing photographs?
      • Should I refine or retool my listing title and keyword tags to make it more searchable and SEO-friendly? Maybe your product is awesome, but people just aren’t finding it.
      • Should I refine the item’s description to make it more appealing to my viewer? Does my description answer the most common questions a buyer might have? This might not really affect your views (since someone would click on the item before even seeing the description), but it can’t hurt!
      • Could it be a problem with the item’s price? Does it seem too cheap or too expensive at first glance?
      • Does this item not fit in with the rest of my shop’s inventory?
      • Is this a seasonal item that I should think about not renewing until the right time of year?

Lessons Learned 

Note what you learned from this exercise. Are certain keywords or tags really popular right now? Maybe you could apply these to more of your listings. Do listings with a certain look or feel seem to be doing better? If you figure out some secret ingredient that seems to be boosting your superstar listings, try to incorporate it throughout the rest of your shop. Or maybe you need to be making more items that are similar to your superstars!

Take time also to analyze what sources are bringing the views in for your superstars. Are they being found from keyword searches, from links within your Etsy shop, or from a social media blast? Take note of what you’ve been doing that’s working and what’s missing.

There are also probably some steps you can take to improve your dud listings’ chances of being found and seen. At the very least, you have little to lose by sprucing up their tags, titles, or photos to breathe a little new life into them. However, if you notice some of the same listings showing up in the dud section each time you perform this test, you might consider not renewing them next time to save yourself a few cents.

Periodically monitoring your superstar and dud listings for patterns is just another way of using your Etsy shop stats to boost your views and sales. Come back soon for test #3, and don’t forget to read back on test #1, reviewing your keywords, if you missed it last week. Also, check out our step-by-step guide on how to easily download your Etsy sales spreadsheet!

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An Easy, Step-by-Step Guide to Downloading & Analyzing Your Etsy Shop Sales

As small business owners, we are swimming in a deep sea of numbers, stats, and financial data on a daily basis (whether you choose to ignore this sea or not is a different story!). Luckily, what you may not know is that Etsy makes it super easy for shop owners to download their sales info in order to calculate their net income in a relatively painless process.

download your etsy csv file sales

You can download your sales data from Etsy on an annual or monthly basis and quickly export this info to a spreadsheet, where it can be sorted, filtered, summed, and utilized with other data. This is a quick and easy way to calculate all sorts of helpful numbers, including your total sales and shipping, which will be especially helpful for tax time.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to download your sales data from Etsy, and what to do with it once you’ve got it (please note that I use Excel for my spreadsheets):

step by step guide how to download your etsy sales file

 

step by step guide how to download your etsy sales file

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’ll then see a screen that looks something like this:

step by step guide how to download your etsy sales file

There are lots of different things you can do from here. Etsy offers several items for download, including a spreadsheet of the listings you currently have for sale, your orders by item, your orders by total, your direct checkout payments, and your direct checkout deposits. Read the descriptions to see what else you might like to download. For now, we’re going to use the orders download to calculate our total sales.

Etsy also gives you the option of downloading any of these spreadsheets for a specific month of a year, or for an entire year. Right now, we’ll download all of our orders from last year.

step by step guide how to download your etsy sales file

downloading etsy sales step4 copy

Since I’m using Windows, I’m going to open my file in Excel. From here on out I’m going to give you some step-by-step instructions on how to format and set up your sales data in Excel. You can obviously format it however you’d like, this is just what makes sense to me, and may be helpful if you’re an Excel novice.

After you’ve got your file open in Excel (should automatically open if you selected “open” in the previous step), let’s first make the column widths all pretty so we can actually read all this data.

downloading etsy sales step5 copy

Now we’ll add filters so we can better analyze all this nice data.

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Etsy gives you a lot more information here than you probably need, like the names and addresses of all your customers. While the ship state might be helpful to filter for sales tax purposes, we can hide a lot of columns to make our data more manageable. If we decide we need it later, it’s easy to unhide a column.

downloading etsy sales step7 copy

I like to freeze my top row so that as I scroll down I still can refer to the column header to know what I’m looking at.

downloading etsy sales step8 copy

Then we format all our financial data to actually look like money rather than just a number.

downloading etsy sales step9 copy

Now it’s time to use a simple formula to get some great data, like our total sales, total amount we got paid for shipping, sales taxes collected, and credit card fees.

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Excel makes it easy to use the filter function to sort by all sorts of things. Here, we can put our sales in chronological order. We could even choose to only look at one month or one quarter’s worth of sales (also helpful for quarterly tax returns or payments). We can use this function to look at only paypal sales, only international sales, only sales over or under a certain dollar amount…the possibilities are endless.

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Let the big green letters below represent the following:

downloading etsy sales step12 copy

Don’t forget that your gross sales on your tax return should include everything you got paid for shipping as well. You’d report A + B as sales on your tax return. E, your credit card processing fees, would be a tax deduction.

You can copy F, your Etsy net sales, to your personal bookkeeping spreadsheet and then add in any other revenue streams and subtract all your other expenses to get your business’ true net income.

So there you go, a step-by-step guide on how to utilize this wonderful asset that Etsy provides for us! If you didn’t know this existed, I hope you found this helpful. You might also want to check out our ongoing Etsy Shop Stats series of articles to get help on another free asset that Etsy provides!

Do you have any questions on how to download and intrepret your Etsy sales spreadsheet?

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the etsy seller spreadsheet by paper + spark

Are You Using the Right Keywords? Interpreting & Utilizing Your Etsy Shop Stats, part 2

free marketing tips for creative small businessesOur latest series of Marketing Magic articles discusses how to analyze your Etsy Shop Stats to help increase your views and boost sales. Read the intro to the series here to get started.

Let’s move on now to a few quick and simple tests or processes you can perform every so often while checking out your shop stats. I try to give you some procedures to perform and things to think about that might not be as blatantly obvious as just glancing at your stats chart every few weeks.

#1. Review Your Most Popular Keywordshow to use your etsy stats tutorial

The Thought Process 

Most of your listings are probably found via search, whether on Etsy or another search engine like Google. Using smart keywords, tags, titles, and descriptions and making your shop SEO-friendly will go a long way in boosting your search page rank and thus your views. A thorough review of the keywords section of your stats will help you spot weaknesses and opportunites in your listings’ tags.

The Testing Procedure 

To make things more manageable and effective, I suggest looking at your stats in chunks of at least 1 month’s time (like “last month”’s view for example) for this analysis. Take a look at your top 10 or so keywords in the “Keywords” box in your shop stats. It might even be helpful to start a spreadsheet or Word file where you make note of which keywords seem to be drawing in the most traffic over time.

Questions to Ask Yourself

  • What are my most effective keywords? Which keywords are showing up time after time?
  • Can I apply these popular keywords to more of my listings?
  • Do I have any keywords or phrases showing up here that I’m not already using as listing tags?
  • Do I have any keywords or phrases showing up that I’m not using in my titles or the beginning paragraph of my descriptions?
  • Are there any tags I’m using a lot in my listings that are rarely showing up here?

Lessons Learned

First, make sure that all applicable listings have your most popular keywords and phrases as a tag, part of the title, and somewhere in the first few sentences of your description. This ensures max SEO-ability. When I talk about tags, I mean those 13 special words you enter in the tag section when you create a listing. Tags influence where and how your items show up in an Etsy search. Good keyword usage in your title and description helps you for offsite searches, like on Google.

Second, see what keywords might be listed in your top 10 that you aren’t already using as a tag. Start using these more often in your tags, titles, and descriptions.

Finally, look at this as a sort of round-about way to figure out what tags and keywords are not working. Sometimes, using keywords that are too “generic” can be a waste of important tag space. You will likely show up on results page 100 for the keyword “purse”, but you might show up on page 2 of “leather crossbody purse”. Being more specific will also bring you viewers that are more likely to buy your product, since it’s exactly what they are looking for.

mint green bag by freshandpoppy on etsy

Don’t be afraid to experiment with your tags and keyword usage, especially if you are just starting out. If you have two similar listings and you’re debating how to tag them, you can use them as a testing ground. For example, if I have two pairs of crystal earrings, I might use “estate sale” type tags on one, and bridal & wedding-related tags on the other, to see which type of keywords are being searched more often.

Paying attention to your keyword stats will help you improve your listings and boost your views. Tune in for our next Marketing Magic segment for test #2 on how to effectively analyze your Etsy shop stats.

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