Steal like an artist is a book written by Austin Cleon and he writes creativity is not about pulling something original out of thin air but rather remixing reusing and building upon the ideas of those who came before you ladies and gentlemen now that I’m on my way to the
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$3 million Club from just my Etsy shop I can comfortably say that my success on this platform is almost entirely due to looking at what successful people are already doing and imitating it in my own business so in this video I’m going to give you the seven lessons that I Learned from Seven figure Etsy shops that I’ve used as a framework that helped me grow my own multi-million dollar business and lesson number one is to obey the niche I still get emails to this day from people who have signed up using my link asking me what Niche I Think they should start a shop in and my answer is always the same your product is your Niche and you use ideas to Target customers a super easy to understand concept of this is this shop called KD print who Allura estimates has done over 1.1 million in sales they sell Mat prints for any location that you can think of they’ve taken a product which is a poster in this case and used the idea of locations to Target potential customers this is a great example because using the poster Niche they can Target people who want a Colorado themed Product you can even get more specific and target people who want a specific town or city in Colorado they can do this for any towns cities states countries regions that they can think of this shop has basically one product template and they use it to sell tens of Thousands of prints it’s just a map of an area with a name and the coordinates below it they’re not trying to sell pillows and stickers and Maps just one product now paper Imperium company is a more recently started shop that’s at almost $1 million USD and they’re doing a similar thing targeting location-based Interests just in my opinion these are more attractive product templates their style also allows them to sell digital and physical print OnDemand versions which can both be pretty passive unless they’re selling custom maps now how do you pick a product that can sell well I can always just sell an already Bestseller product you can find that by looking at the pr ofy best sellers page to find the bestselling print on demand products or just look at what’s already working on Etsy but either way just sell something that’s already working really well posters are bestselling products for the exact reason that you can Target So many different interests with them but you could sell mat prints on mugs tumblers pillows or a bunch of other products as well just remember the product is your Niche and the design Target the customers seven figure shops understand that picking a product and using the ideas and interests to Target Customers reduces the competition and this is how you build sustainable business when it comes to building out a product line one thing we can always copy from millionaire shops is their product elements a product element is simply an element of an offering that somebody is already using that you can Include in your own business specific product elements might look like this on this jop that’s selling Ai and handmade digital downloads they have have a lot of unique product elements that help them stand out they have a very clear vintage aesthetic across all of their products they have these overlays on top Of their product images that helps build a branded look and provides information and they have these elements like info cards on all of their listings and whatever they’re doing it’s clearly right because they’ve been quite successful if you have one person you’re influenced by everyone will say you’re The next whoever but if you rip off a 100 people everyone will say you’re so original not only can you get in legal trouble if you’re copying someone directly it’s also unethical however stealing one element from a dozen different shops like the product overlays in this example you can learn How to develop your own style that can actually yield results again looking for single elements that we can sample from this shop selling mugs has all different kinds of elements if we look closer than a surface level we could use this red color in some of our own designs maybe We like this typewriter font that’s left Justified ifed maybe we like the way that the video is showing off these designs or maybe we like the repeting colors or the staled font style of this design and we could choose one of those elements to use in our own designs I’ve Covered this before in my t-shirt design tutorial and how to use these elements in your design templates each little element might not seem significant but it makes a difference and separates successful shops from the ones that fall on the 50th page of search results so INF figure shops understand that you can Sample little elements like these from dozens of shops to make up your own style that feels unique from the mockup the design The Branding the colors the titles the fonts the aesthetic the info cards and the small details look at successful shops and Sample elements to Come up with your own Brand This is how they’ve gotten there in the first place copying is directly replicating someone’s work without any alteration well imitating is mimicking or adopting certain ideas behind someone’s work with variations and Al alterations now how do you find successful shops you might ask You can find them manually on Etsy or you can use the tool that I’ve linked down below called aura that I’ve been using a lot in my videos you can use it to filter the top shops based on any category that you can think of and it’ll Give you a list of hundreds of seven fig shops you can also use it to filter out the top listings to find those product elements that we just talked about now you can sample all the elements that you want but arguably the most important element to sample from Seven figure Shops is the proven product images the product image is what ultimately convinces our customers to order from us the good thing is that we can learn exactly what type of images convert the best by looking at the shops that are already killing it allur estimates that this shop called icron LTD who I’ve Mentioned on my channel before has done over $4 million or a little more than a million a year now having this much success there are obviously clues that we can learn from by looking at their product page we can see that the designs they’re selling all look pretty similar But remember they found those successful elements and they’re selling all of these designs on just a few mockups this shop owner has discovered that at least for their designs these mockups convert better than any others this is the reason that they’re able to get over a thousand reviews on a single item it’s Absolutely in part due to the design and the colors but also the mockup and product image the thing about this is they’re using mockups that anyone can use because they bought them right off of etsy and in fact this mockup is only $6 we could buy this same mockup that we Already know is one of the highest converting and use it to sell our own products and Designs this is how you get high converting mockups and images look at what seven figure shops are doing and see if there’s a reasonable way that you can imitate it without copying again Don’t steal their entire design just steal one element that you like and in this case it could be the mockup you can’t use the mockup and the fonts and the colors and everything just one element at a time and once you’ve gathered the product elements that you’ll be using it’s time to start Making a lot of listings if you were a Salesman trying to sell real estate agent Services door Todo it would take a lot of attempts before someone finally open the door ready to do business with you if you only knocked 50 doors which would feel like a lot the chances of one Of those 50 people being ready to buy or sell at that time is extremely slim you might have to talk to 500 people before you get someone who’s even somewhat interested seven figure shops understand that it takes a lot of listings to be successful the way that you find high- Performing best-selling products is simply by making a large quantity of products quality comes from quantity just by volume this shop called North Prince that’s done over $2 million in profit over the past few years has more than 1,000 listings the shop erson that we looked at has close to 7,000 listings And Allura thinks that this store called pint-sized premium has has done over 2.25 million and they have over 1,500 listings now one thing to note is that this shop for example sells One Design on multiple products so while it might look like they have, 1500 listings they might actually only have around 700 Designs either way this is still a huge number of listings and by repurposing them on multiple products they’re expanding their target audience it’s a pretty common hack to use and you could do the same by offering digital and physical versions or just different items with the same design on them even Shops that are selling jewelry for example have figured out a way to get up a lot of listings so regardless of what your Niche is there’s a way to do it and this also ties back in with the first lesson that we learned because if your Niche is the type of product that you’re selling it’ll be much easier to come up with a lot of listings than if you’re only focused on making vegan cutting boards now making a lot of listings sounds tedious and like a lot of work because it is but it’ll dramatically Help you with lesson number five traffic sources the way that customers find your business is going to determine how much profit you can make on each sale you’re going to have to pay for eyeballs on your store one way or another on Etsy you’ll pay the 20c listing fee and then You can choose whether or not to run Etsy ads to those listings now I’ve used ads before and personally I don’t like paying for ads on a platform that’s driving millions of monthly visitors to their platform anyway Etsy ads don’t optimize very well again at least from My experience and they dig into your profit more than they add to it unless you’re selling something with at least a 50% profit margin I prefer to rank my products organically using SEO now this isn’t a one-size fits-all model here because some successful shops do pay to Run Etsy ads but there’s also a ton that don’t this shop that we’ve already looked at doesn’t run any ads to their products instead they list a bunch of products with good SEO that eventually rank on the first page of searches now this shop that we’ve also talked about Selling digital downloads also doesn’t run any ads they’re using their title tags and images to rank in Search and then just letting the sales come in if you’re focused right now watching this video you’ll remember that I said you can even get more specific and target People who want a specific town or city in Colorado so the competition for Colorado map print is it around 5,000 other listings but if you sell a Bolder Colorado map print that’s only about 1,000 listings you can reduce your competition by being more specific with who you’re targeting and you do that by Making more listings if you pay to run ads and then you stop running them that listing that was promoted and on the first page of search is going to sync right back down to the bottom of search results when you’re not trying to run ads you can spend more time and money on Making the products you sell better and earning a spot on the first page of search results this is where 90% of the sales come in and once you make your way to the top of a specific search it’s difficult to lose your spot the million dooll shops understand that maintaining Your rank in and search regardless of whether you’re paying for ads or not is essential to keeping those consistent sales coming in big million dooll shops are not afraid to give up a sale if you’re new to selling online or customer service in general you might not know But 99% of your customers are great and are never going to have any issues but that 1% are going to absolutely suck away your time I’ve had my fair share of difficult customers and found a super easy way to deal with them they’re either going to be difficult before or After the sale they’re usually specifically picky about the price the product or the shipping and no matter what you do for them they’ll always expect more if they keep asking for discounts or promise good reviews and repeat business for extra service it’s a major red flag the easiest fix is to Simply not sell to these people I’m talking about the customers who reach out demanding a discount or asking for modifications to a product before they even buy it I choose to have an abundance mindset where I don’t have to work with every an annoying Customer because I know that I’ll have 10 more That are easy to work with I like having as many sales as I can get but at this point if I can sense that a customer is going to be difficult to deal with I’ll get them not to purchase or I’ll just cancel their order now if we look at This shop that’s done over $2 million if we look at their reviews section you can see that they’re really never getting any bad reviews this is because they’re able to handle all of the bad issues and customers before orders ever even come in if one person buys your listing it Means hundreds of other people might buy it as well but if there’s a onear review right at the top of that listing it’s going to drive a lot of new customers away I do everything that I can to prevent taking orders from difficult people or letting them leave a bad Review even if it costs me money now sometimes things on your end as the seller might get messed up too and if that’s the case once the customer asks for a refund I always give it to them you must protect your brand there are countless new shops that end up getting Bad reviews because the the shop owner is afraid to lose out on that little bit of profit or because the customer was difficult so the shop owner just wants to stick it to them seven figure shops can afford to miss a sale or even refund an order but they can’t afford to get Bad reviews they’re not scared of losing a tiny amount of money on one sale they’re afraid of missing out on tons of future business if we look at Shops like this we can see that they’re consistently getting five-star reviews every single time but if we look at this Listing you can see that Etsy pushes that negative feedback to the top making this design look not even worth buying these aren’t even one-star reviews but it’s likely enough to drive away most new customers even if the defects weren’t on the new products I used to think that because I have thousands of Reviews a one star here and there doesn’t matter too much but in reality a bad review doesn’t hurt your overall shop but it can absolutely kill a listing remember if a person buys your listing that means hundreds of others might as well but if there’s a one star Review right at the top of that listing it’s going to drive a lot of those customers away buyers want to see the most likely outcome for their purchase and negative reviews and negative social proof are powerful movers when it comes to getting sales if you spend your time Studying seven fig shops across multiple niches learning the way that they think why they do the things that they do there’s no reason why you can’t grow your own seven figure shop as well ladies and gentlemen I hope this video was helpful let me know if you have any Questions down below and as always
Thank you Alec.
When did you started
Great video Alek! I learned a lot from you. Can you do a video specific to how you handle bad customers? Like how do you spot the bad customers and decide not to sell to them? What is the best way to handle them?
Great video Alec. Super informative and helpful.
Another great video, Alek! Thanks for putting out really valuable info week after week.
Thanks Alek S – what you say makes sense; I shall take your insights to heart as I start out.
Alek is you digital income?
Thanks, Alek. Any news on the Printify product uploader mentioned in your earlier videos?
When you create a new design and product, do you purchase one yourself to test the quality or see how it works out initially?
Hi, can a cm whose order is cancelled, still leave a review?
Your strategy of using locations as a niche is pretty genius. It's cool how you've taken a single product, like mat prints, and turned it into a diverse range of offerings by targeting different places. Quick question: When you're expanding your product line, do you find that the location-based approach works well for new designs as well, or do you experiment with different ideas for each location? Keep up the awesome work!
Thnx for the tip, I'll use it and try it. We'll see how it works. thnx once more.👍👍
Some question came up to my mind, what's the method used by etsy to show your products on their platform so you get the chance to sell and not remain unknown, do you happen to know this? and what are the fastest steps to make your shop outstanding to be able to sell better, do you have a process to do it or just random and SEO?
Who still believe this scam who just making money on clickbait Youtube videos? He using bots farms for complimentary comments, stealing info from another channels and other fake guru, rephrasing it using AI to feed you with that scam. He using bots who left complementary comments made by AI. You just blind if you don't see this on this channel and comments. I feel sorry for you, gullible losers
Hello Alek, I want to begin on the Print on demand business. I am watching your videos to have a guide to begin.
I am Colombian and I live in Colombia, almost all of your videos are talking of how to make de business in Etsy but for is not possible because I don`t have a US or UE residence. So my best option to begin is ebay. To you have some video talking about Ebay and what you can recommend mi in this platform.
Thank you a lot!
Hi, just would like to know if ut is available without the design skills? Thanks
I love your videos- I started a small Etsy store and I’ve done a little research to work it around. I’ve come across your videos after I’ve made the shop and these have helped me molding how to work my new lil shop.- I can’t wait to get more of my designs put up and see how this goes!
Fantastic!! Fantastic! Fannnnnntastic post! Extremely intelligent and informative.
I have to say thank you for these videos that you create for all of us. I must say you are an excellent teacher. I have only watched a handful of your videos so far and I have learned way more than I could have imagined. ♥
Wtf majority of the comments are nearly identical to eachother, weird asf
Hey Alek! Do you have a video on seo?
how do I make these maps tho? thought I saw a video somewhere(not by you) that was showing how to make them on google maps or something like that.
La Sra. Grace es legítima y su método funciona de maravilla. Sigo ganando dinero cada semana con su nueva estrategia.