257 | Enhance Your Etsy Sales with Lauren Keplinger

Have you found success in selling your products on Etsy? Despite the changes that Etsy has made over the last few years, the search engine is full of value for small businesses to take advantage of in growing their brand. In this episode, Lauren Keplinger joins us to share how you can enhance your Etsy sales through your product listing, keywords, and even mindset about Etsy!

Today’s episode is brought to you by my free Email Marketing For Product Makers Guide, where you’ll learn how to map out 12 months of emails in under an hour and learn more about strategies for wholesale and direct to consumer audiences!

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Selling on Etsy

After a decade on Etsy, Laruen Keplinger has learned quite a bit about the platform, what products work for her niche, and how to rank in the search engine with particular products. Through her experience, Lauren has found that the most successful stores are those of seller who have a clear cut vision of what they want to sell and who their products appeal to—which is a great business model to follow in general for sellers.

It’s even more beneficial for sellers to be selling a product that’s already doing well on Etsy, as this sets you up for a built in audience on your selling platform. Speaking of selling products that already do well, it’s important to consider over-saturation, especially when it comes to creating work.

When you have a clear definition of your product and audience, it’s easy to stand out. If you don’t have that clearly defined or created, you’ll run into issues with oversaturation, not only on Etsy, but in retail as a whole.

Shifting Mindsets for Selling on Etsy as a Business in 2022

While in the past, Etsy has been portrayed as a platform that supported its artists, in recent months, there has been a shift in the perception of Etsy by many sellers. It’s important to remember that Etsy is a business that offers a means to an end for selling. When they adjust their pricing structure or their business, it’s a business decision that you can’t take personally—as Etsy doesn’t owe sellers anything. Etsy is a business, just like you. This transition has been a natural shift in their business model.

A few technical shifts that do affect sellers on Etsy include their push for free shipping and the stress on customer service for grading of shops.

How to Rank High on Etsy

Similar to Google, Etsy is a search engine, which means your shop and products need to be optimized for search. There are a few things that impact your rankings including title, tags, and description.

One of the easiest ways to maximize your ranking efforts is to properly describe your products. While some buyers will be searching generic terms, others will be searching in more detail, so it’s important to consider these when making your listings. Another consideration is to not be too technical in your industry keywords, as your buyers may not be searching for.

Consider asking people outside of your industry to describe your products, as this will help you to best label your Etsy listings to rank for the keywords that your customers are looking for.

Measuring SEO Efforts

While it doesn’t take Etsy very long to catalog your products, it does take time to collect data. Two important measurements to consider are visits and conversions. As you’re looking that those, it’s important to look at trends over 30 days when measuring your SEO efforts.

When looking at your Etsy dashboard, you can see which listings are bringing in the most visits, the most conversions, and more. You can also look at conversion rates and if you’re not selling on a product that is getting a lot of visits, there could be a disconnect that needs to be adjusted in your listing.

Common Mistakes on Etsy

While it is easy to get started on Etsy, that doesn’t mean you’ll find success right away. One of the biggest mistakes is when people expect overnight results. Setting realistic expectations will eliminate that frustration and discouragement that comes with not selling like more established shops.

Another common mistake is in the photography that sellers are using on their site. In the past, photography didn’t matter. Since social media has changed our expectations on what photography should look like, it’s impacted how buyers are looking at small businesses and brands within Etsy. While buyers love the idea of supporting a small business, they don’t want the products to look like a basement-made product.

Lauren’s Advice to Brands on Etsy

If you’re a brand that has been on Etsy for a while, but you’ve also established your own ecommerce site and let your Etsy shop fall to the backburner, Lauren has some words of wisdom for you.

Consider keeping your Etsy shop as there are buyers who feel loyal to Etsy and continue to come back to Etsy for your products. As long as you can continue to get in front of new people on Etsy, those additional fees you have to pay are worth the additional sales.

You can always try to push those Etsy customers over to your main website as well to buy directly from you and continue to drive traffic from your own marketing channels to your own ecommerce website as well.

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MEET LAUREN:

Lauren Keplinger started selling on Etsy in 2012, and has since built her monogrammed baby shop to over $800,000 in Etsy sales. In 2018 she started LaurenKeplinger.com and the Crickets to Cha-Chings podcast, where she teaches other women entrepreneurs to build, grow, and scale their e-commerce businesses to a meaningful income for their family while not letting the business take over their whole life.

CONNECT WITH LAUREN

WEBSITE: laurenkeplinger.com | INSTAGRAM: @lauren.keplinger | PODCAST: Crickets to Cha Ching

Connect with Katie Hunt

Katie Hunt is a business strategist, podcaster, mentor and mama to four. She helps product based businesses build profitable, sustainable companies through her conferences, courses and coaching programs.

Website: prooftoproduct.com | Instagram: @prooftoproduct