Transcription
Today I want to show you exactly how to sell digital products on the internet. But before you ever sell a thing, I want to show you exactly how to reverse engineer digital products that other people are selling with a ton of success.
Also, I want to cover all the beginner mistakes that people often make so you can save yourself the time and headache. Because the thing is, there are a ton of new AI tools out there that make this process a whole heck of a lot easier. So this quick video will be your shortcut to digital product success. Let's get into it.
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Step one, we need to know what to sell. Unfortunately, this space is jam-packed with scammers and gurus selling courses. I have no course to sell you. This is a free YouTube video. And so, yes, selling a digital product is easier than a physical product, but you have far more competitors as well because of that reduced friction. So we want to find the right products that find the perfect balance between supply and demand so you don't spend months banging your head against a wall trying to sell the same personal finance spreadsheet that 10,000 other guys are selling.
My favorite place to reverse engineer these products is Etsy. Now, you can also sell digital products on Gumroad, Shopify, Creative Market, and a dozen others, but Etsy is the godfather of them all. It has the most data, it has the most buyers, the most sellers, it's publicly traded, and I know how to work the system a little bit, so I'm going to show you.
Okay, so there's the old-school way of reverse engineering Etsy, and then there's the growth hack cheat code new-school way. Both work. The growth hack is even better. Let me show you the old-school way first by reverse engineering the reviews, and then I'll show you the absolute cheat code way that you're going to love. Let's start by sharing my screen.
Okay, now when I go to Etsy on my computer, this is what I see. Like any other algorithm, Etsy is biased towards my searching behaviors and my purchase history. I just bought a hat on Etsy two days ago, so when I scroll down, look at that, it's showing me the hat I bought. It's showing me products that I've been researching for content, but it doesn't show me the best products to reverse engineer. So I'm going to do something a little tricky here.
Now, this is a pure look into what's selling on Etsy. So I'm just going to go here and search "printable." I'm going to go to "instant download," and then I'm going to filter by "top reviews." Then I'm just going to start browsing. What do I see here? 11.2,000 reviews, 7,300, 750, no reviews. So I'm going to open up in separate tabs some of the products that have the highest amount of reviews. Alice in Wonderland, whatever this is, prices right, sheet digital steampunk junk journal, and then look at this, fancy skulls digital wallpaper, 87,000 reviews, which means they could have sold up to a million of these things because only a small percentage of people ever leave reviews. All right, that's five items, it's enough to get us started.
Now, for whatever reason, people love these digital printables of skulls or steampunk. Out of curiosity, let's go to Google Trends and see if steampunk is trending right now. Trends.google.com. We're going to go last five years. Hmm, doesn't seem to be climbing. In fact, it seems to be shrinking in popularity. Nonetheless, we're going to press on. And right here, we can see that this steampunk item only has 27 reviews, whereas Pula Art Studio in aggregate has over 16,000 reviews. So I don't care about this item right here.
Another thing you can do is go to their store. So you can see they have 702 items for sale, which makes a lot of sense why we didn't see a lot of reviews for the same item. They have a lot of SKUs. Okay, so I already don't really like what I see here on Pula Art Studio. Nothing is really standing out. Seems like a waste of my time. So we're going to move on.
Okay, now Digital Curio here has 87,000 reviews and only seven for this one item. You see, a lot of the trick to this is finding a seller that has a rare combination of thousands of reviews but not a lot of products. Those are the diamonds in the rough.
Okay, now we might have something here. Victoria Designs has 54,000 reviews, so let's click into their store. Okay, 452,000 sales, half a million sales, but they only have 1,600 products, which is quite a bit less than these other two sellers we were looking at. Remember, on Etsy's homepage, all we did was search "printable," which could be tens of thousands of different things. And for whatever reason, it's showing us a bunch of sellers that sell junk journals, but there are thousands of sellers in the printables category that sell all kinds of other things: coloring pages, stickers, napkins, math or science homework pages, you name it. So we're already seeing that junk journal is a trending category. Let's go over here to Google Trends and see what "junk journal" shows. Look at that, junk journals are exploding. What is a junk journal? It's a handmade book or journal that uses recycled and found materials like old book pages, etc.
Okay, now here's the shortcut way, and you're going to love me for this. We're going to go back to Etsy and search up the same thing. Doesn't matter, "printable" in this case. Then you're going to click on "all filters." "Star seller." Star sellers have an outstanding track record for providing great customer service, yada yada yada. Okay, in other words, they're selling a ton of crap. Check that.
Now, Etsy used to have a bestsellers category, but they discontinued it, probably because people like you and I were reverse engineering the best sellers. But they still do it, it's just hidden. Show results. Okay, star sellers. So this shows the sellers that are like, reliable. Well, look, this entire store has only had 69 reviews, so it's not a very big store. They don't have very many good products, or at least it's newer. But go to the URL and replace the word "star" with the word "best," and look, all the products change. Now you have best sellers. This is freaking amazing. Let's click on this silly goose.
So this is the bestselling printable according to their search results. Okay, so 20+ views in the last 24 hours. Now, if we click on the store, it will tell us right here, 175,000 sales, and I bet you a big chunk of them from this one printable. Another thing you can do is use ChatGPT's operator or Manis, manis.im, to go scrape all the best sellers on Etsy, the bestselling products, and the bestselling stores.
Okay, so we're going to go on this one. 29,000 reviews for this store. Click on the store, 462,000 sales across 9,000 different products, and their best seller is right here. Guess the price of these baby essentials. Whoever gets closest to the actual cost wins. So it's a baby shower game, I'm guessing. Another good thing to learn from this is how are they listing their products? They have a graphic, they have multiple pictures, six pictures, it's personalized, it's got great design. Okay, but we're going to reverse engineer this. We're going to take this picture and we're going to save it, and then we're going to go to PixArt.
So PixArt is kind of like Canva, but AI-first, AI-powered. What I love about PixArt is a lot of these other photo editing tools have AI integrations, but PixArt lets you bulk edit images and pictures with AI. So for now, we're just going to do this. New project. Sure, keep the pixels the same. We're going to upload that image. We're going to upload. Okay, there it is. We're going to add AI enhance because you can only get a certain quality on Etsy. So automatically, you look at the before and after. Boom, it's a ton better. Apply.
So PixArt, or any AI product nowadays, really does best with images, artwork, and not words as much. For whatever reason, AI struggles with words. So I'm going to look up "printable wall art." And it's funny because even though you can't filter by best sellers, the button will still pop up when you reverse engineer it. Star seller. Boom. Look at the images that are on the screen right now. Type in "best." There you go.
Okay, so clearly this Easter bunny just crushes. And guess what? It's almost Easter. Antique white art. Let's look at the seller. 1100 items, 63,000 sales. So we want to find something similar to this. So I'm going to take a screenshot. Boom. We're going to go back to my files. New upload. Screenshot. Let's just see what happens when we click AI enhance. Okay. Okay, better. Still has the watermark on there. So let's play around with the AI image generator here. Show me printable wall art of a rabbit in grass. And then you can pick a style. Boom. We're going to upload the image because we want it to be in this style. Okay, generate images. Okay, look at that. You got that option, that option. That looks awesome.
So if you want to sell Easter printables on Etsy, or for whatever holiday is coming up next, go to Etsy, reverse engineer, find something that's absolutely crushing, and use PixArt and their AI generation tools to come up with some other designs for yourself.
Now, I know what you're thinking, "Okay, well, how do I start a brand new, fresh Etsy account and just start selling stuff?" Number one, you can use Etsy ads on a printable like this. Your cost is zero, it's only your time. So the cost to acquire a customer can be whatever you're selling the product for, less Etsy's fees. Number two, you can buy Etsy accounts that have established feedback. You're not necessarily buying a full store or a business or anything, you're just paying a little bit of money for an account the algorithm already favors.
But if I were you, I would spend literally four to six hours reverse engineering a ton of categories. Printables is just one, coloring books, pages, all kinds of stuff. Find those diamonds in the rough that have amazing designs and that are proven to be bestsellers. With these hacks, move them over to PixArt, come up with some alternative designs, and just start listing them and see what gets clicks or views.
You can even list them on Facebook Marketplace. Honestly, Facebook Marketplace is the best place to test concepts like this because you could take five rabbit designs like these, you could list all five of them in the exact same market with the exact same description, a pure A/B test. You can keep the title the same, even, and the price the same, and then you can just see. Facebook shows you how many views and how many clicks and how many messages you get from each ad. Which one is getting the most views, clicks, messages?
Or you can use this guide, and I'll link it in the notes. You can use my Facebook ad guide. I just tweeted this yesterday. I got 300,000 views, a ton of positive feedback. Use that to launch some Facebook ads. $20 budget each, same ad, different design. See what people are clicking on. Then move the winning design over to Etsy.
And I'll refer to one more tweet for you. This entrepreneur I love tweeted this: "First-time founder, I want to build something totally new. Second-time founder, I want to be 90% the same." And that's where he ended it. And then I commented as the top comment: "Third-time founder, I assume that this growing market is big enough to support at least one more entrance." As in, these Etsy designs. So I'm going to start by 100% copying the existing business because everything I change increases the likelihood that I'll have suboptimal success over time. I'll organically discover optimizations and changes that make me unique, but I won't make those changes until the data speaks for itself. Copy what works. Change nothing. Eventually, you'll find things to change, but don't change in the beginning.
Share this with a friend, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner.