Transcription
I was just trying to make an extra $100 a month so I could sign my daughter up for gymnastics. But one random Etsy sale changed everything. No business degree, no followers, just Canva, Wi-Fi, and two kids under five. That one digital product opened the door for something that I didn't even think was possible. And now I've been able to make over $27,000 selling digital products as a stay-at-home mom.
If you've been watching videos like this and secretly wondering, "Could this work for me?" This is the video I wish I had when I was getting started.
Before Etsy, life was a lot. I had quit my job in 2018 when I found out I was pregnant, and we quickly became a one-income family. We had a few thousand saved. We lived below our means. We thought, "We'll be fine." Then I got pregnant again, and our second daughter was born in March of 2022. We had always planned for me to be a stay-at-home mom, but as prices kept climbing, it kept getting harder and harder to make it on just one income.
I remember quietly looking up jobs and daycares on my phone, hoping no one would notice how anxious I was about our bank account. But my oldest daughter had just been diagnosed with autism, and something in my gut was telling me that I just could not send her to daycare where she wasn't able to tell me what was happening while she was away from me. But still, our bank account kept shrinking, and our credit card debt crossed the $20,000 mark. And that was after cutting expenses and selling everything we could think of to bring in some extra money. Even my husband started a few side hustles so that we could make more money, but it just wasn't enough.
And the more I looked into it, daycare wasn't even an option. Every place I called had a waitlist of at least 18 months, and the cost for two young kids was more than our mortgage. It felt like I was stuck between two impossible choices: Give up time with my kids to barely break even, or continue staying home and keep falling further and further into debt.
So, one night after my kids went to bed, I sat on the couch, opened my laptop, and searched how to make money from home as a stay-at-home mom. I didn't want to sell to friends and family. I didn't want to dance on TikTok, and I didn't want anything that drained me. I wanted something that gave me freedom. But everything I found either needed childcare or sounded like a complete scam until I stumbled upon something that sounded like I could actually do it in this season of life, and that was selling digital products.
There was no inventory, no sleazy DM convos. All I had to do was create something once, and I could sell it over and over again. And that was the moment everything started to shift.
When I found out you could sell digital products on Etsy, I was skeptical because I thought Etsy was a place where people like knitted things or sold handmade goods. I didn't even know it was a place that people could sell digital products. But the more I looked into it, the more it made sense. I wouldn't have boxes of MLM products collecting dust in my closet. There would be no awkward, "Hey girl," messages just so I could secretly sell them something. And I wouldn't have to try to explain to my husband where the grocery budget went because I spent it all on Facebook ads. It would just be me, Canva, and the chance to create something once that would make sales while I was doing laundry, cooking dinner, or even sleeping.
So, I made one digital product. It was a cleaning checklist. I added tips, tricks, and other time-saving hacks to help people implement what was in the cleaning checklist. And that made my product different from all of the other cleaning checklists that were already on Etsy. I listed it. I didn't post on Instagram. I didn't have a following. I just followed a few random Etsy tips I had found from YouTube videos. And then I waited.
Nine days later, cha-ching. Someone I didn't know bought my cleaning checklist. It was proof that I could make money as a stay-at-home mom without missing out on time with my family. And that's when I realized I could actually do this without childcare, without social media, and without paying a penny for Etsy ads. That one Etsy sales notification gave me hope. And that was something I hadn't felt in a really long time.
And from there, things started to move fast. In my first 90 days of selling digital products on Etsy, here's what happened.
October of 2022 was my first full month selling digital products on Etsy. So, you can see here my revenue was $315.71. And for the people who don't know, revenue is just the overall amount I made. It is not what got deposited into my bank account. So, that was $315. And so, my first sale was on October 3rd of 2022. And then I went to zero sales the next day. And then after that, I made $8, and then $13, and then back down to zero. And so this is what it is like selling digital products, selling anything really. You'll have good sales days, and you'll have bad sales days. And that's okay. That's normal.
And so we can see here, like the stretch, I had no sales for a while, and then it started picking up until October 16th. I had no sales, and then for the rest of the month, sales kept going higher and higher until it peaked up here with a $51 day as a stay-at-home mom, which was so exciting to me.
So, here is my revenue, and let me show you how much was actually deposited into my bank account. So, we can see here, October 22nd, my net profit. And if we look over here, Etsy is telling you what your net profit means. And so, this is what I got deposited into my bank account, was this $237. And you can see a breakdown of all the fees, sales, all of that that was taken out. So that is what I took home in the month of October, which would have been my first full month selling digital products on Etsy. And at this time, I think I just had two or three digital products in my shop.
Now, for my second full month, which would have been November of 2022, you can see my revenue jumped over $1,000. It went up to $1,318.59. And so over here you can see I made a sale every single day in the month of November, with my highest revenue day being $140 as a stay-at-home mom. No ads, anything. And so at this point, I still maybe had like five or six digital products in my shop, but I didn't add a lot of products in my shop. My digital products were very specific. They were very thought out. I wasn't just putting up random products trying to make a sale. I really was intentional with the products that I listed in my shop, and I really thought about how can I make them different.
So, I still had less than 10 digital products in my shop at this time, but I managed to still make over $1,300 that month. And so, that's revenue. Let me show you my profit. So, November 2022, my profit was $1,032. And again, you can see the breakdown of the fees, the marketing, and this is just Etsy doing their own marketing. I did not use social media, and I did not pay for ads. So, this is Etsy doing their own marketing within their platforms. So, this was what I got to take home in the month of November.
And then to round out my first 90 days would be December of 2022, where I made $2,400 in revenue, with my lowest sales day around $19 would be a low day. And then my highest sales day was $212 in one single day. And so this was just blowing my mind at this point because I had just been listing for like 90 days. And so at this point, I still had less than 10 digital products in my shop, or just about 10 digital products in my shop. So still not a lot of products in there. But this was my revenue, $2,400. And for my profit, we can see here, December 22nd, my profit was $1,900. So that's what I got deposited into my bank account. And then I can show you like the off-site ads, the Etsy ads is nothing because I wasn't running any ads. Off-site ads is what Etsy runs themselves. They took out $50 for that. Then the other fees like listing fees, transaction fees, processing fees. So those are all of the fees there. This is what I made in sales. This is what I got to take home.
So that was my first 90 days selling digital products on Etsy. I made a profit of over $3,200 in just 90 days as a stay-at-home mom. No social media, no ads, and I only worked in the mornings and at nap times. So, just working while my kids were sleeping, this did not interrupt my routine as a stay-at-home mom.
And there were two key things that helped me make money fast on Etsy without having a social media following. One was that I chose a trending product idea. I saw that ADHD was trending on TikTok. So instead of making a regular cleaning checklist, I decided to make an ADHD-friendly cleaning checklist. And I figured out ways to make it actually ADHD-friendly, like with the tips and tricks and keeping things very concise and using checkboxes. So simple things that would help the ADHD brain. And that is one reason why my product did so much better than the other cleaning checklists was because mine was super specific to ADHD. And that was a trending topic at the time. It was just starting to gain popularity on TikTok. And that's exactly what I noticed. And so I listed my product using that ADHD trend and making my product actually ADHD-friendly.
And number two was that I got serious about my shop during Q4. And so Q4 is when a lot of businesses make the most money. If you don't know, the calendar year is broken down into four quarters. So Q is quarter 4. And so there's Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. And it's Q1 is January, February, March. Q2 would be April, May, June. Q3 would be July, August, September, and then Q4 would be October, November, December. And so for a lot of us Etsy sellers, our sales will start picking up around Q3 because of the back-to-school season in August, and then they'll just keep going up from there because then we have all of the shopping holidays where people are just already in the spending mindset. And so we tend to make a lot more money during October, November, and December just because of the shopping behavior in the US where people are spending more money than usual.
And this is why Etsy works so well for beginners because we already get the built-in traffic of people going to Etsy to buy things, and Etsy is just showing our products to those people who already want to buy something. So, we don't have to worry about building our own audience. We are tapping into Etsy's audience of almost 90 million shoppers.
And so, if you want to get started with this, I'm going to share with you the five-step process that I followed so that you can follow it, too. And if you want the details of this process, like step-by-step video tutorials of how to do each thing, then make sure you join the sales sprint. The details are in the description, and that's where I walk you through all of these steps with video tutorials showing you exactly how I was able to list my products so that Etsy promotes them for me.
The first thing I did was research products that people were already buying. I used eRank to help me do this. And so, if we look over here, what I did was I put in a keyword. And so I put in something like "cleaning checklist." eRank gives you the searches. And what you want to do is look for what has mostly green bars because that is how you find a product idea that has a high search volume. So over 600 searches per month. And the competition is less than 20,000. So it's around 16,000. And my criteria that I like to use is the searches are more than 300 searches per month, but of course, the more searches the better. And I like the competition less than 20,000. And then again, of course, the lower the competition, the better. So, high search volume, low competition. And so, if you can get all green bars across here, that is what you want. And so, I made a cleaning checklist because it has a high search volume, low competition, and I figured out how I could make my checklist different from the other checklists that were already on Etsy.
The second thing I did, once I knew that this cleaning checklist had a high search volume and low competition, I went ahead and created it in Canva. And so now you can use PLR templates, which are private label rights, and that is someone else creating the product, and they are giving you the right to edit it and resell it in your shop. But I couldn't find any good PLR templates when I was starting. So I had to make my product from scratch, which took me probably two to three weeks. Like, it was a long process. And so now listing products, I can get them done in an afternoon because I'm starting with templates that have already been created. So do not create your products from scratch if you do not have to. Use templates and make the process so much easier and so much faster. So that is step two is just creating your product.
Now, the third thing I did was I made my listing photos and I modeled them after best-selling listing photos. And so here's an example here. This is not my product, but here's a product that's getting 157 sales per month. You can see it's only 3 months old and it's a bestseller. And so that's what I would look for. I look at a product that is a bestseller. That lets me know that these listing photos are converting into sales for them. So they must be pretty good. And what I'm looking at is seeing what they're putting on there. So, this tells you eight different pages included. So I put that on mine. I think mine was like 30 pages. And I put that right on the front. I put like 30-plus pages. And then I'm putting on the front two of my listing photos, I put "editable," "printable," and "digital," telling people the different ways they could use it. I put "ADHD cleaning checklist." I put the title on there, and then I had pictures of the product. And so that's the process you want to do when you're trying to make your listing photos is find a bestseller that is a product of what you are creating. So if you're creating a unicorn invitation, you're going to go up here and type in "unicorn invitation" and find a listing photo that has the bestseller badge and model your listing photos after that because that is what's working.
And so you're just going to look through here and see. I looked at their video, and then I just go through here and I saw that they had all these different sizes, and so I offered these different sizes too because if it's working for them, then it can work for me too. On all of my listing photos, I showed them more pictures of the product. And so I'm just looking through here and seeing, so they have daily, weekly, monthly. You know what I did? I went back to my product and made sure that I had cleaning checklist for daily, weekly, and monthly to make sure I could stay competitive. People will finish their product and they'll go and look at these bestsellers and they'll notice that their products don't include these things and they don't bother to even add them. What I did was I made my product. I looked at these listing photos and I was like, "Oh man, okay, they included that. Let me go update my product." And then I'd come back and I was like, "Okay, they have that too. Let me go update my product to include that, too." So, just because you have created your product, that does not mean it's done. Once you are doing your listing photos, it would be very wise for you to consider going back to your product and including things that the competition is including so that you can stay competitive. And so this is what I did. I just made my listing photos look very neat and clean, like there. They have this light background. They're showing you the product in every single listing photo. They're calling out benefits and features of the product. And that's what I did with my listing photos. And that's what I recommend you do too, is base your listing photos off of a bestseller product that is similar to yours.
The fourth thing I did was I optimized my digital product for search. I knew I didn't want to post on social media. So I made sure that I learned search engine optimization, or SEO. What that is is just you telling Etsy what your product is. So you do that over here with your product title. So how they have "editable ADHD cleaning checklist." This is something someone could type into the Etsy search bar, and that's what you want to do with your SEO. It's search. So you want to make sure that these words are things people are searching. So another thing people could search: "cleaning tips and strategies," "speed cleaning printable," "monthly cleaning schedule." And so you don't have to put everything in here, like you can see "daily, weekly, monthly." So if someone puts "daily cleaning schedule," then Etsy knows what this product is and it can show this product. If someone puts "speed cleaning schedule" or "speed cleaning tips," Etsy can mix and match your keywords and know who to show your product to. And so that's one place to put your SEO is in your title.
Another place is within your description. So again, here they have keywords in here. So they put "daily," "weekly," and "monthly." Again, in here they have "ADHD." Down here they put "cleaning tips and strategies." So, they're just reusing the words from their title and they are putting it down here in their description just to make sure Etsy really knows what this product is and they can show it to the correct people. And then for analyze listing, so this is eRank, by the way, where I'm getting this data. If we scroll down to their tags, this is another place you'll want to pay attention for your SEO. You can see here all of these high keyword scores. That means it has a high search volume, low competition. So, "ADHD household chores," "ADHD cleaning," "ADHD checklist," "ADHD cleaning list." These are all really good keywords. And so that's why this product is getting a lot of views. Besides, they could be using social media or anything like that, but Etsy would promote this product anyways because they have really good SEO. If you're using eRank, the keyword score should be high, or I like to do keywords that are above 50. So 50 and above to me is a good enough search volume and competition ratio. And so that's what you want to do is optimize your listings for search engine optimization, and you won't have to rely on ads or social media to make sales. Etsy will promote the product for you.
And the fifth thing I did was just keep rinsing and repeating that process. So I would find the product ideas that had a high search volume, low competition, create that product. I would make my listing photos based off of a best-selling product, and then I would list it on Etsy where I was using search engine optimization. And I just kept repeating that process over and over and over again. And that led to me getting more views and more sales while I was cleaning, while I was cooking, while I was at the playground with my kids, while I was sleeping. Etsy was promoting my products while I was living my life. And I didn't have to worry about posting my entire life on social media just to make some money. Etsy was promoting the products for me.
And my life looks so different now because of what Etsy has allowed me to do for my family. I was able to buy a new car seat for my daughter with our Etsy income. And that might seem small, but it was the first time in a long time that I could just buy something our family needed without having to put it on a credit card. And we've even been able to join a homeschool co-op this year for our kids. And I didn't even have to stress about how we were going to afford it. I could say yes to the field trips, the fees, and the supplies, all of it, without feeling guilty or without stressing out. That's what Etsy has done for us. It's not just the money, it's the peace of mind, and you can do this, too. A year from now, your life could look completely different. And it all starts with you listing your first product. But if you're stuck on what to list or you're worried about choosing the wrong digital product, then don't miss this video where I share with you seven low-competition, super beginner-friendly digital product ideas where I also give you a few templates to use so that you can start making sales even with a brand new