How to Start an Etsy Shop Selling Digital Products in 2025 💻 ULTIMATE BEGINNER'S STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

in the last two weeks I created a completely new Etsy shop selling digital downloads specifically canva templates and it took me more than 12 hours to create this new shop from doing the market research to making the template and finally having my first listing uploaded I did get suspended in the middle of it and it took five business days for my new shop to be unsuspended so I'll talk about the suspension part more in this video I screen recorded every single step that I took when making this new Etsy shop from doing the market research

to making the actual template and how I'm uploading everything so if you want to learn how to start an Etsy shop from scratch and you don't even have an idea of what you want to do I will show you everything in this video to give you a bit of background this is the second Etsy shop that I've started this one is the first Etsy shop that I started in October of last year so it has been eight months of me having this Etsy shop and this is the Etsy shop I share about in all of

my monthly update videos for my first shop I didn't share what my shop is on YouTube because I don't want you guys clicking into the shop messing with the conversion rates and I also mainly wanted to see if I could be successful starting an Etsy shop and not doing any social media promotion and just keeping everything within Etsy and getting sales through Etsy SEO and I did so my first shop made more than 3 000 Canadian dollars and because the shop is not public I always get questions from you guys on how exactly I'm getting

my sales how I'm designing everything and so I thought that I would create a second shop to show you everything you will be able to find my shop on Etsy so I posted a little snippet of this chart that I have and a lot of you actually said that you want this so I will create a link in the video description where you can get access to this thing and I guess you can use it as a checklist of what to do for when you start your Etsy shop so with the second shop that I'm

creating I really wanted it to be a legit Etsy Shop like something I could actually see myself selling and not just because I want to make this YouTube video to show you how to start an Etsy shop so I took this very seriously and you can see the market research part took me five hours but then I also spent 30 minutes watching how to use market research tools so this is a legit shop that I have created I put in 100 of my effort and also when I designed the template and I made the like

listing photos and the listing video and when I'm uploading everything I've taken this 100 seriously because I want to show you the quality of the stuff that I'm making because the quality of the second shop that I'm creating is the same quality of the stuff that I've created in my first shop which I would say has been successful so far and made three thousand dollars however I know that because a lot of you will be looking at my shop the conversion rate is gonna be really really low and I've taken that into consideration I think

it for me is just like a fun idea for me to show you how I do things because you always ask me so many questions and I wish I could show you but I don't want to reveal my first Etsy shop so I made the second one so let's talk about the market research that I did first I actually used four market research tools I used everbe sales Samurai Etsy hunt and e-rank for everbe and sales Samurai those two companies actually reached out to me way earlier this year wanting for me to try out their

market research tools so I actually got their premium plans for free and I just started using them when I was making the second Etsy shop I do have affiliate links in my video description if you do want to check out everbe and sales Samurai I would say right now I haven't used both of them to the full extent that I can so I can't give a opinion on how much I like these market research tools but if you do want to check them out you can go to my video description and use my link also

with sales Samurai you can get 20 off and I've included the code below with everbee there is a basic free plan so that's why there's no discount code with e-rank and Etsy hunt I actually bought them myself those companies did not reach out to me I just wanted to try out some different market research tools and so that's why I tried out four in total there are more market research tools out there but like four is already a lot and I thought it would be cool to to see how each one of them Works in

terms of market research so the first thing I did was I watched market research tools on YouTube about everbee and sales Samurai because those were the two that I had initially I spent 30 minutes on this and usually I watched videos that are two times the speed and I thought okay I'm just gonna watch 30 minutes and then play with this myself the first thing I thought I would do before even doing any market research on Etsy is to actually brain dump all the things that I'm interested in because here's the thing I think that

when you are choosing your Niche it's so important for you to choose something that either you have interest in it or two you have some kind of experience in it so for me I wrote down there are things that I'm interested in things that I have experienced in so then what I would do is go into Etsy and go through each of the things that I brain dumped and look at the market research tools so this one is ever be and here's the extension forever B this one is Etsy hunt and then this one is

sales Samurai so at first I started using sales Samurai so I clicked on 500 more and you can see the search volume and competition so this is search volume per month this is how much competition there is per month so if it's just notebook it's a lot it's a lot of competition and from the YouTube videos that I watch apparently what you're trying to look for is high search volume and low competition so like for example this one has like 3 000 search volume but the competition is like 400 000 so that's like I would

not do that but first looking for something more specific so for example one of the things I found was IVF Journal let's see if it has that filter actually let's just search IVF let's just search ibf journal and see what comes up and click this one IVF so let's take a look at the search volume and competition so like this one would be really good like this has high search volume so 3000 and the competition is really low it's 600. so apparently what we're looking for is if this number and this number are similar or

if this number is smaller than this number then it's good I do think if the competition is higher than this number by a little bit it could be okay as well depending on like what people are actually selling you have to take a look at your competitors stuff so I did this for all the ideas that I had in my brain dump and you can see me looking through this one is I had an idea to find Airbnb stuff and then I think under the Airbnb stuff I saw something for toilet so then I started

searching for toilet so this is how you can go down the rabbit hole of looking for things you just search for one thing look at what's there look at what has what has low competition and then you just keep on searching and searching and searching and then if you don't want to search anymore on that topic just pick one of the other stuff that you have in your brain dump so here I love kombucha I actually used to make my own kombucha so that's why I searched for kombucha stuff because when I used to make

kombucha I would like make labels for my kombucha so I thought maybe there are people who are looking for kombucha things okay here and then let me pause this for a sec you'll see that now I'm starting to use everbee so let me show you with ever beeps so if you just search something let's just search IVF journal and then if we go to product analysis we can look at all the products in this category and apparently what I learned from all those YouTube videos that I watched is you can sort for monthly sales or

monthly revenue and see which shop is or yes which product is making most sales and then look at the products so I clicked into the ultimate IVF journal and then I can take a look at this one there are some numbers here for like estimated sales and monthly Revenue I did actually wonder if these are correct so I actually plugged my first Etsy Shop into everv to check and it's not that accurate um and then I was just curious about why it's not that accurate so I did a bit of Googling and obviously Etsy doesn't

release the monthly sales numbers right you can only see how much competition there is and how much search volume so that's what Etsy can show you so on every B's website it says Etsy doesn't share sales data with anyone so we built a smart algorithm that uses data such as views reviews listing history and more to make estimates and this is basically what every single market research tool says like they cannot get actual Etsy sales data so they have to make an estimate so that's why you'll find that when you're looking at different market research

tools you'll find that you might think that is not accurate and it's true it is not accurate and in every single market research tool might have a different result or a different like estimated sales number and that's just how it is and that's because these companies can't get actual sales data from Etsy so they have to use their own algorithms to estimate it themselves so that's why I thought it would be useful to use multiple market research tools but I also think that you can do market research just without using market research tools if you

are confident in your niche so when I made my first shop I didn't even use any market research tools I just was confident in my Niche and the niche did do well and that's why I made sales because sometimes we're a really really small Niche there is no data on these market research tools like they're not going to show that there are people searching for this item because it's so Niche but let's say even every single month if 10 people are searching for that product and if you're like one of the only ones that is

making that product then you will get sales and this is partly the reason why my first Etsy Shop is doing well so when I was doing market research I first used everbee and sales Samurai and then later on I bought Etsy hunt and e-rank just because I was curious to see what other market research tools were like and because I saw that the results for everbee and sales Samurai they weren't always the same so I was like maybe instead of using two market research tools I should use three or four so I clicked some of

them that I was interested in and I looked for ones where the search volume is is lower ish and then the competition is like lower ish so for example I would say this one is lower ish like Etsy descriptions template search volume 124 competition 253 I know this is like two times the amount of this but I would say this is still okay and I feel like I could get into this so you'll also notice that throughout this entire process I have this word document it's my brain Word document but I also take notes on

all the stuff that like I found like for example some ideas after doing the market research I found like I could do things related to virtual assistant or CFO resume template or I even search like teacher things like classroom stuff like baby shower things deodorant label template so when you are doing your market research like my notes are super super scattered and messy and that's okay you don't have to like organize everything super well just take notes on stuff and then you can always come back one thing I was definitely interested was Etsy listing templates

so I would do some market research then I would take a look at what people are actually selling so you can see here I'm like looking at what people are selling I'm clicking using the everbe Chrome extension to see how many sales people are getting but do remember that the sales data is estimated here I'm looking at sales Samurai again and looking at I basically look at the list of stuff to see if I I can like have new ideas and if I can find things that have low competition so then I found this other

Niche and it's whiskey labels I think in general a niche that I found was product labels and so now I'm researching whiskey label and for this one I'm taking a look at everbee so everybody has a similar thing as sales Samurai where where they give you the search volume and the competition but then ever be all also gives you a keyword score which I believe is I think it's this thing divided by that thing okay yeah it is search volume divided by competing listings times one thousand so basically if the keyword score is higher that

means there is more search volume than there is competition so it's a good thing so you're looking for the keyword score being higher like 77 is better than the nine that you have here so I think in sales Samurai I found that the deodorant label template was actually there was some search volume and then really really low competition but then you can see with ever be that like basically it says there's like nothing and then uh the keyword score doesn't even compute it because I think this is so Niche and I actually think this is

a really good Niche you can totally steal this idea by the way but the thing is with really small niches sometimes with market research tools I find that they just can't compute the data because the niche is so small so this is where if you have experience in this and industry then it's really useful so now I'm doing some more research on labels I thought about wine labels maybe wine labels weddings oh yeah I did I did search for like what is actually the keyword score by the way if you're confused like I have a

video playing of the entire process that this is like all screen recorded of me doing the actual keyword research when I was actually doing it in the past one and a half weeks so then the other idea I had was Etsy listing photos camera templates and do you know why I thought about this idea it's because in my previous videos like I made a demo video on how to make Etsy listing templates and a lot of you guys wanted it a lot of you joined my email list because you want something like this like you

don't know how to make listing photos so you wanted a template and so I made that template and I thought oh my gosh there's a huge demand for this and that's why I had the idea that maybe I could sell these on Etsy so that's why I started looking into it so you can see I was looking into it I'll tell you what my conclusion was later on but you can see that like I'm looking at stuff and then I go back and forth between different ideas that I have so here I'm looking at soap

labels and I'm just gonna skip a little bit oh yeah another thing was roller bottle label template like super Niche stuff then I would look at actual listings and look at the sales people are getting take a look at their actual products and then what I started to do was I had two good ideas of things I could do so that was the Etsy listing photos and that was the product labels like the deodorant labels soap labels so I was actually so conflicted I was like I don't know what I should do I think this

was probably maybe one or two hours into my market research out of the five hours that I spent maybe two hours and so I made a table with the good and the bad of each one so I could kind of put my thoughts down on paper and so I could make a decision on what Niche to pick because the niche is actually really important your essay job is based on this Niche you need to pick a good Niche or else you may not make any sales if you pick a niche that is too saturated but

it's not just about whether or not there's low competition or if it's saturated like you can see that with the stuff that I'm typing a lot of it is about whether I have experience doing that how easy it is how hard it is so with the Etsy listing photos the good things were I already know how to make them because I make them for my own shop right and I know there's demand like you guys were signing up for my free template there's also the possibility of you guys buying my product that was actually a

something like I considered because I knew that I would share this shop publicly so I thought maybe I should make an Etsy shop where my subscribers can buy my things because this is just going to be like a test shop right I don't know if I'm actually gonna work on this shop as hard as I am working on my first shop so I thought maybe this could be a like an offering that I have for my subscribers so I did take that into consideration and then the good thing is a lot of the competitors they

don't show examples of how you could use it and they don't like actually plug in um like their templates into these mock-ups and then something else I realized was my competition they have like ugly listing photos covers and I thought maybe I can design better for this one I thought I could realistically do this myself but the bad thing is there is actually a lot of competition and a lot of pages it's like really really low price like I think I saw some that were like five dollars or ten dollars and they have 60 pages

of these templates and so I thought it's just not worth my time it might not be worth my time to make all these it's just gonna take me so long and then the price is so low and then for the other one the product labels idea that I had the good thing was the designs are simple like it could just be one or two pages on canva and then I could sell it for like a couple bucks five bucks 10 bucks so way easier to design than the Etsy listing photos canva templates so that is

good and I did find some Niche products like lip balm and deodorant product labels the bad thing and the hardest thing the probably the biggest challenge I thought I would have is finding the mock-ups to do for the products because I would be let's say for example I'm making a lip balm canva template like a label for a lip balm I would then need to find a photo of a lip balm so that I can put the label on the lip balm and like I would have to find a mock-up photo for every single product

that I do like lip balm deodorant soap candle and to me that just seemed like so much work another bad thing is I'm not familiar with like packaging sizes and what actually goes into the design of some of these labels like I've never made my own beauty products before so I would have to research sizes inches like if I'm making a sample deodorant label I would have to research deodorant ingredients right so I can make a sample of what it looks like so that to me seemed like it's gonna take a lot of time and

for each product I would have to do the research again like for deodorant for lip balm let's say I do like a perfume label or something like I would have to do a law of research and all of these products have different sizes I'm taking a look at what is selling well for people looking into their actual products and just seeing like and just thinking to myself could I actually make something like this is this really realistic for me and how much time is this going to take and also taking into consideration how much knowledge

I have about these things okay right here I'm like looking at resume stuff I think I saw something probably when I was doing research on the listing photos I saw something about resumes oh and then when I was looking at the resumes I found something about obituaries and funerals so then I was researching obituaries and funeral stuff and I actually think this is a really good Niche it's I would say it's similar to weddings like the type of canva templates you can sell compared to the wedding Niche like the funeral Niche it's kind of like

the same kind of designs because you have like invitations to go to funerals and you have the what's it called like the program for obituaries but for sure like the obituary and funeral Niche is way smaller than the wedding Niche that's why I was looking into it because I thought you know these things realistically I could design these in my word document I created another section for obituary canva templates I actually was really really considering doing obituary canva templates and I think when I was researching a lot of them they looked very old-fashioned and a

lot of them they were also designed on core I don't know how to pronounce it cordial and template like it's not canva they were using like another graphic design website and so I was wondering maybe there are people who would want to get like a canva template instead of a cordial or template template so the good things were a lot of the competitors like they're designs look outdated like I didn't see a lot of really modern ones that I personally liked and I thought they were easy to make I thought okay I could probably maybe

use my maximum ad spend because there's a lot of search volume so because there's a lot of search volume then maybe I could do more ads I thought it was would be easy to do mock-ups like the obituaries compared to the product labels the obituaries would be way easier because it's just paper right it's not like a deodorant bottle I don't know if maybe canva is harder to use than these ones I would have to research all of these ones as well the bad thing and I think this is the main thing that made me

not want to do this one is I don't like the idea of just making funeral related things for my shop I do think this is a really really great Niche with a lot of opportunity but I personally just don't want to do that and another thing I saw was a lot of the shops had so many listings like so many like a hundred obituary templates eats and so another another thing I was considering was maybe I would have to have a lot of volume like I would have to I would have to turn out these

listings to be successful oh for the obituaries I did look at Niche or things like funeral template cancer maybe people are looking for specific things if that person passed away from cancer oh and then at this point I started to use e-rank so I signed up for the free version and that's why you see here there's upgrade that's because I didn't pay yet so I just started using it and then I was searching the I was searching for everything again like I was searching the labels the Etsy listing photos obituaries as well it shows similar

stuff like searches um the competition so obviously you would look for the competition where it has green I was looking at wedding stuff the funerals and you can see like when I do market research it's all over the place like this is what I was actually doing when I was doing market research I would look at one market research tool then I would go into Etsy and look at the actual products then I would go look at market research tools then go look at the products then you just like keep going and going going that's

why I ended up spending like five hours on my market research so just keep looking oh did you see that did you see that that was when I found the sorority resume template so let's go back there so I was in e-rank here and then I was scrolling and scrolling I think this one was when I was searching for wedding stuff maybe I should I don't know what I was searching for oh I was searching for deodorant deodorant label template I somehow was scrolling down and down and then I found sorority resume template which I

found oh my gosh look this is so low and resumes are something that I did put on my brain dump like it's something I was actually interested I I think I'm pretty good at writing resumes like when I graduated from University I only applied for one full-time job with my resume and cover letter and I got it that was the government job that I had the one that I worked for uh for two years so then I started looking into sorority resume templates and I'm just like looking at a lot of different things looking at

how people are selling it so I just kept looking at stuff and using the market research tools at the same time and okay you can see with the ever be that the sorority resume template search volume was 157 competition is high ish but then the keyword score is 69 but then remember on e-rank the competition was really low so that's the thing when you use multiple market research tools it might give you like conflicting things so that's why I was checking on all the market research tools and also looking at Etsy myself to see could

I actually make better designs than these other people first I had the idea to do sorority stuff and I was like okay what about the resume Market in general so then I started looking at different resume stuff you can see what I'm doing here then I go back to looking at sorority stuff because I think that is the best idea and then I look at sales Samurai okay so and then we can see here with sales Samurai the search volume is one one five one remember with every B it was like 100 something and the

competition was like 2 000 so the competition is the same but then with sales Samurai the search volume is 1000 so it is different with different market research tools that's why I think it's good to use multiple but I don't think you need like four of them you can you can pick which one you want to use later on I did actually upgrade my e-rank and then I bought Etsy hunt as well so you'll see that later on in this video so you can see here I'm just like it's all over the place like I'm

looking at sorority stuff I'm looking at resume stuff then I had the idea that maybe I could do internship resumes because I wasn't intern when I was in university so I know how to write an intro ship resumes I was thinking about what I could do and what I have experience in so then I looked at resume template 4 and see what comes up like resume template for Mom I looked at other stuff or you can just try different characters what comes up just looking for different kinds of ideas okay so at this point I

decided to upgrade my e-rank so I got the 599 per month plan and then I also decided to get Etsy hunt so with Etsy hunt there is a Chrome extension and then I got the 399 per month plan it's very affordable and I'll show you what the Chrome extension looks like so when you search for stuff this is what Etsy hunt looks like the views and the competition I think this views is like an aggregate it's like not per month I forgot what it is but it is not the same as search volume okay and

then this one is the everbee and then this one loading here is sales Samurai every single time that I get a new market research tool I kind of just like take a look at what's inside so with Etsy hunt here I'm just looking at what things I can do oh I haven't upgraded yet so I signed up for the free plan then I actually upgraded my Etsy hunt this is ever B I was looking at sorority resume template then I was looking at e-rank I was comparing the everbee and e-rank results for the same search

term so with ever be the average searches per month was three thousand you can see this is three thousand and then the Etsy competition it was like two thousand so the search data from everbee um and e-rank is not the same because if you go back and look at the ever B one it's 157 for the search volume competition is like the same but I don't know if why ever be an e-rank this stuff is not the same but I think all market research tools there's going to be different numbers yeah and I think it's

just because of the way that their algorithm works or how they collect the data I don't know I think it is useful to use multiple market research tools don't just use one of them okay okay just to give you like perspective if you don't want to spend money to buy market research tools the market research to do at the very beginning the one you do at the very very beginning when you are deciding your Niche like I spent a good five hours deciding on my Niche for you like like I think finding your Niche is

the most important thing that you're gonna do at the start of starting your Etsy shop and so I think it it is so worth it to invest in market research tools like Etsy hunt was like I think it was 399 e-rank was 5.99 I think everbe might be the most expensive 30 a month and then I think sales Samurai might be ten dollars or something so if you add everything in total like obviously you don't have to get four market research tools like I did but even having at least two of them I think is

really useful you could sign up for all of these and there's also other market research tools like marmalade and maybe there's one more but the only other one I can think of is marmalade which I haven't tried but I know that's another one I would like get all the market research tools they always have like some kind of a free version and then you can see what you like and then you can upgrade the ones that you want to try out but even if you get all of them so that's like 30 plus 10 to

40 let's say around 50 is gonna spend fifty dollars in this one month on Market Research tools and maybe let's say you get marmalade to I have no idea how much marmalade is but maybe it's let's say it's ten dollars you can spend let's say 60 on Market Research tools and because there's nothing else you need to really invest into for your Etsy shop at the beginning like this this 60 is actually really really worth it because after this one month you don't need four market research tools anymore if you're just going to use the

market research tools to do your keyword research to for SEO purposes I think you you might not even need any of them but maybe like keep one or two of them you don't need all four or all five so at the beginning I think it does really make sense to invest in market research tools because you're gonna spend sixty dollars right and potentially in one year how much do you want to make in your one year on Etsy okay let's say ten thousand dollars twenty thousand dollars thirty thousand dollars sixty dollars is really nothing when

it comes to a business expense so I don't understand when people don't want to pay for market research tools like have confidence in yourself okay that you can make it back you will make the sixty dollars back so anyways what I started to do was I kept researching the sorority resume templates with all the market research tools I started looking at like different kinds of products and I'm just gonna skip forward a bit and take a look at yeah so I was looking at here I'm looking at e-rank so when you start using a new

market research tool you don't obviously you don't know how to use it right so that's why when I have a question let's let's say for e-rank I wasn't even sure what the what some of the numbers meant like average click so then I would search like what is that in e-rank so I found average searches is the average monthly searches it's based on Etsy data the average clicks it's based on Etsy I would have to like Google things to learn how to use market research tools or I would like watch YouTube videos on how to

use the market research tools Yeah so basically I was looking at the sorority resume template and I figured that this is actually a really really good Niche every single market research will I mean they are they do similar things but like e-rank has the has Google's and I think Etsy hunt has Google stuff too maybe sales Samurai does too I was like browsing e-rank because I didn't really know what it could do okay so then I was looking at the same thing on Etsy hunt so we're already resume template oh yeah what what is the

views there total number of views for the top 100 listings ranking for this keyword based on real data from Etsy yeah so this number is not the same as like the search volume per month it's like another uh metric that Etsy Hunt is using just total number of views for the top 100 listing so I don't know to be honest this number is kind of hard for me to grasp I would have to take a look at a lot of other listings and probably probably look at the Search terms for my first Etsy shop to

see what does this number actually mean like I have no idea what this 34 million means but the good thing is you can see right away that the competition is low for this search term and this is interesting you can see the like Trend result which is really interesting because for sororities I know there's like a recruitment period it should Trend up and down like throughout the year oh yeah I searched how to use Etsy hat yeah because like I just don't really have don't know how to use it and then here I'm going back

searching for resume stuff because I could make a sorority Rosemary template but then I also want to Branch out right into the resume Niche and here I'm just seeing what else can I create oh yeah did you see what I did there this is the trick I can't remember where I learned this it was in somebody somebody's YouTube video but basically if you want to see the best sellers on the Etsy website you go to all filters you click for Star seller click star seller apply then the link here you would change the star seller

part to best so change that to instead of star put best seller and then now you can see like the best-selling listing so then I was looking at this listings open it it in ever be and I just keep doing it and keep doing it keep looking for ideas and trying to validate this Niche and see if it is realistic for me to do it and then a lot of the times I'm just thinking like these look so amazing like this resume template I would buy this and use it as my own resume it's really

pretty and I was so I was thinking yes maybe I did find a good Niche like I could start off with sorority resumes but the resume Niche is really like there's a lot of really good products out there already and look at the mock-ups okay this is like beautiful okay I was thinking can I actually make something that is competitive with this these kinds of products oh yeah this part is Etsy hunt so it is useful you can see with the tags I believe everybody can see tags as well uh with sales Samurai you can

can see it takes as well but you have to go into like their back end do not quote me on this like if you guys use market research tools everything I'm saying about these market research tools take it with a grain of salt I have not used these for very long so I'm not familiar with these market research tools at all but I do think in general it is very helpful okay so another thing I was looking at in general is like for resumes this listing had you have the Google Doc template then you have

the Microsoft Word template and you have to do a US letter and A4 and this person had like a lot of bonuses so I'm like oh my gosh with resumes a lot of the resumes on Etsy you have to do a lot you have to make Microsoft Word Google Docs you know so I was like oh my God it's it's going to be a lot of work so I was like thinking about those things but I was specifically thinking about doing canva templates for resumes so the good part about resumes is just like one or

two pages it's not like 60 Pages uh like the Etsy listings photos I did find and some Niche things and I also have experience writing good resumes and cover letters then there are less canva resume templates so I saw a lot of like word google doc ones but not a lot of canva ones so I think that is an opportunity for me in this Niche and a lot of the resume templates they have like lorem ipsum which I hate I hate lorem ipsum so I feel like I could make some resume templates with actual sample

text the bad things there is a lot of competition in general and a lot of the competition they have like bonus stuff and some of the competition they have canva and Google Docs and word which I cannot do like I'm not making three things okay and I'm not doing us learn A4 is too much work another good thing is like the career Niche is really big for example there's other stuff in the curvier niche like there was like job tracker and stuff like that and job description template so if I find that later on resume

templates are not a good Niche then I could Branch out more into career related stuff yeah so I did find like job trackers there's like job estimate template a flight attendant I was looking at flight attendant resumes okay this part okay so I I think this is like at the end of the five hours like I finally felt like okay I have a couple of options this is sometimes like what you have to do in the end where you have to make a decision on what to do you can't keep doing market research right you

can't keep doing market research for months and not starting your Etsy Shop you've got to start somewhere you can always pivot later but for me I was like okay I think I've done enough market research in these five hours this is enough for me to get a good sense of some potential things that I could do and so I jotted down like how do I really feel so what I wrote was the Etsy listing templates it's too many too much work too many pages funeral templates I just don't want to make those the product labels

I just have no experience and the resume templates I actually concluded that this was the best choice for me it's realistic it's only like one or two pages I have experience doing this I thought it would be fun I could like live vicariously through my research on different careers that I wanted to do or like these careers seem fun but I didn't do it like like I've always wanted to work at a coffee shop but I've never done that so maybe I'll make a barista resume like it's kind of fun and then I've always wanted

to be a flight attendant but I just never did it other things like creative stuff oh wouldn't it be fun to be a chef why don't I make a chef resume that's what I decided to do I decided to stick with resume templates for my next Etsy shop and this is my plan so I need to open it make the shop Banner logo do the policies and everything and then make the first product which is sorority resume templates okay and then I want to share with you some real thoughts that I had after I came

up with my plan and after I decided on the sorority resume template idea so like I was resting you're eating some fruit and I had like all these thoughts in my head like oh no can I really do it so competitive will people buy it will they be confused it's gonna be a lot of work now I have two shops to run like what am I gonna do I know for a lot of you when you start an Etsy Shop you're also gonna have a lot of thoughts like this like I'm the same as you

like when I'm starting anything I'm gonna have a lot of doubts and hesitations and then my conclusion was I'm just gonna do it even if it is just for this demo tutorial for YouTube I'm just going to make one resume template just make one resume template open the shop put it in the shop and even if I don't continue the shop if I get too burnt out or if I don't feel like continuing the shop or I don't know for whatever reason at least I will have made this demo video for all of you to

see and maybe this will help you start your Etsy Shop yeah if it doesn't sell whatever just move on I will have learned a lot of things so better canva skills better resume skills I can give resume advice to friends because I've looked at hundreds of resumes right at this point and I can research like interesting careers and help people on YouTube just to see my process if it doesn't go well maybe I can try something in the career Niche and see how it goes so at this point I am on day five of working

on this Etsy shop so the first four days I spent on Market Research day five I started to finally design the template oh my god I've been talking for so long I've been talking for more than an hour to film this video give this video a thumbs up because my throat is really dry I'm doing this for all of you please give this a thumbs up the thumbs up if this is helpful okay so now I'm going to show you how I started to design the template so I made a plan of what I'm gonna

do so the first thing I did was research existing templates make a list of what to include this is just general read some blogs of houses were already higher use existing canva template as a base to make my own template if you're curious about my process for designing an entirely new template from scratch I'm actually going to create another video showing you how to do this because this current video is so long already and I don't want to spend like one more hour explaining how I'm designing everything and at this point I'm pretty happy with

it I decided to finally start my Etsy shop I created a new Gmail account for my new Etsy shop but if you currently don't have an Etsy Shop you can just use your own Gmail because right now my email is tied to my other Etsy count you cannot use the same email so I had to create a new email I came up with the name it's Lulu like my name is Dina Lou the thing is a lot of people who watch my videos on YouTube try to find my first Etsy shop so they'll search Dina

Lou Etsy shop in Etsy so that's why I am using Lulu so people will not find my shop and be like Dina you were lying why do you only have one listing how are you making three thousand dollars you are a liar that's why I'm using Lulu you might not know but you can get 40 free Etsy listings I'm not going to provide my link because for my first Shop I actually already have enough like when you get 40 free listings I also get 40 free listings I was getting way too many emails about it

so what you can do so if you all go to because I want you guys to all help each other and get 40 free listings you can give somebody for a free 40 free listings you can get 40 free listings so actually if you just search Etsy get 40 free listings then click the one from Etsy open in your shop and list your first 40 items for free then this is going to be your link okay this is your link for 40 free items that you can give to anybody when somebody uses your their link

to create the shop oh by the way you can create your account but don't open the shop yet it's better if you don't even I don't know I don't know if you need an account first but anyways if you do not have an Etsy account click somebody's link so you can get 40 free listings to help out everybody here what you can do is you actually cannot comment a link in a YouTube comment so instead you can just put this code everybody go look in my YouTube comments below copy paste the code from somebody else

and then put https colon slash Etsy dot me slash and then somebody else's code so you can get 40 free listings somebody else can get 40 free listings okay so put that in the comments we can help out everybody because right now I already have I already have like 300 free listings in my first shop so I don't need any more free listings so here I clicked and got 40 free listings and Etsy makes you just click a bunch of stuff so I clicked the stuff finally started my shop so before I came up with

Lulu creative house I actually had other ideas like Lulu creative shop or like Lulu designs like Lulu creative designs I came up with a bunch of things but in the end I Googled those names but they were there were already existing businesses that have that name nobody has Lulu creative house so that's why I decided to name my shop Lulu creative house okay and then Etsy makes you upload a listing so I just uploaded I try to get out of it but I couldn't I uploaded random things I just like put in random stuff they

just kind of make you make a listing so I had to put in random stuff the funny thing is it it was actually posted you cannot save it as a draft so I posted my first listing which was like a random thing later on I had to go back and unlist that listing and then Etsy also asks you like other things like are you an individual are you a business for me I am a business I have a Canadian Corporation I I did fill out all of these things off screen and then for your shop

there's like a bunch of things you need to add like logo cover photo policies and stuff like that so I was like okay mental note I will do that but I'll do that later I first wanted to create the shop also when you create your shop Etsy is going to ask you to upload documents to verify your business so make sure you upload those documents right away I did not upload those documents right away and then my shop was suspended and then I actually uploaded the wrong document I added something that did not meet the

requirements of proof of my business in the meantime I was like okay let me actually make the template and make the listing photos and stuff like that so I made a copy of my workspace then I named it template then usually what I do for the actual template that the customer gets I will delete the photos and just change the name to your name but I'll keep everything else inside so they have like a sample I delete the photo just so it looks more like a template and for all my templates I always make another

color scheme mostly because for in the like listing photos it's just nice to for customers to see another color scheme so you can see oh hey you can change the color on canva and you can make it fit your own branding you can put your own photo in so that's why I create two color schemes I came up with another name Sarah Jamison I put in another photo yeah duplicate it so now I have four pages in my template I have the resume for Terry Jamison cover letter Terry Jamison and I have the Sarah one

that is purple so this is the template that the customer will actually get when they buy my listing I'm just changing it to your name so it just looks like a template the next thing I'm doing I'm making a PDF document because when your customer buys something from you on Etsy and you're selling a digital product you can add up to I think I think it's five files but the thing is you're selling a freaking canva template you cannot add a canva template to your Etsy it's not a file right it's a link to a

website so you need to create a PDF that has the link to the canva okay this is like not what I'm actually selling on my first Etsy shop I made another demo video on how to upload Etsy listings so this is the demo PDF that I made so I literally just took my own demo PDF for a YouTube tutorial and then now I am changing it up for the sorority resume template so when I was working on this like I think this PDF is actually okay but also I don't have like a bonus video I

don't have another A4 template so then it was like looking pretty bare so I thought I do not like the look of this I'm just gonna come up with another look for this PDF I'm done except for adding the photos on this side of it now I'm like okay I'm gonna make listing photos this is also something that you can get access to so I have like a listing photos template that I made for my YouTube subscribers I will put a link in the description where you can download it this is also another tutorial that

I made on how to make listing photos so this is not what my actual listing photos look like in my first shop but I decided I already have this template that I made for my YouTube subscribers I'm gonna use it for this resume thing so I start to plug in things for the sorority resume oh yeah before I did that I downloaded all those images the images for the template with no photos and your name and the images from this workspace the ones with the photos because I'm going to use both of these in the

listing photo photos so I am just formatting everything let me explain something so I started doing this I started I added like a title and stuff I put the cover letter and the resume there but then I went to look at how other people format their listing photos and for most of them I noticed that they don't really write resume on it like they literally just have a photo of the resume and it's most of them are not like a full page resume they only put two-thirds of the resume and I think this looks pretty

good I thought okay I'm gonna do that too so then I thought I'm gonna scrap this I am not going to put a title anymore I'm actually going to just put the resume itself okay so then I thought okay let me just put the resume but what should I do with the cover letter so I just like move things around do that this is pretty much what I came up with to make the cover letter smaller and to highlight the actual resume that is in the end what I came up with and I thought um

add a squiggly line maybe the background looks kind of empty I'm just gonna see if I can make the background look nicer like your product could be really good but if you're listing photos suck then you're not going to get sales so I thought okay this is like pretty much what it looks like okay then I start making the other listing photos after this video if you want to learn more about how I make listing photos watch my listing photos tutorial I also show you how I make the video you can see this is why

I have like another color scheme because I want to show people that yes you can customize it to fit what you want so your customer can be like oh yeah I can imagine me changing it so it looks like it's my resume and I think a highlight of mine is there's no lorem ipsum like I actually have all the sample text there so I made a page called No lorm ipsum resume cover letter and then I was looking at the mock-ups that are already in canva I was just because I think canva recently updated their

image editor thingy so there's like a lot of new things that I'm not familiar with right now so I was just experimenting so I'm taking things from My Demo template the listing photos and then just like using it in this one get into your dream sorority so here's a marketing trick when you're selling something you're not selling the product what do people actually want when they're buying this resume template they want to get into a sorority that I want to get into so that is the goal that is what I'm doing with my marketing get

into your dream sorority it's not this resume template is the Best Buy it it is do you want to get into your dream sorority right now I'm making the how it works page this is how it looks like in the end so here in the what's included I put the the image with the blank photo that's why I had to make one with the photos and one without the photos Okay so at this point I'm pretty much done um the listing photos I'm deleting the ones that aren't the ones I'm gonna use I thought it

would be nice to just put one more mock-up because you have 10 yeah 10 photos and yes it is 10 photos in total um but I think for this mock-up I had eight something useful I want to show you is how I organize my canva so for each new Etsy listing that I create I have a project which is basically a folder so project is a folder in each folder I have four documents the four documents are my workspace template marketing and access and that is the order that I work on the documents the first

one is workspace workspace is a place where I brain dump everything so even before I start working on the template I have brain dumping like ideas of other canva templates that I like and I can take inspiration from these so you can see that the one I took inspiration from is this one and that's how I designed this template here the second document that I have in my canva is called the template this is similar to the workspace but this is what the customer actually gets when they buy the listing so the template is the

template without the photos so without the sample photos and then I also changed the um the name part to your name and I leave everything else right here the next thing that I work on is the marketing listing photos so here are the marketing photos that I made for this template and the last thing I have is the access document this is the PDF that the customer gets when they buy the template so they have a link to the template and I have a tiny URL link just in case the link doesn't work and they

can't click this for whatever reason making the video for the listing photo so I downloaded the template then so now this is like a PDF of the sample template then what I did was I screen I started to screen record me going down the template downloading one marketing photo because I'm going to use cap cut and I'm going to put in the marketing photo just to so I have the right size for the video okay I think one thing I missed explaining was what I screen recorded in the video and it was actually me um

show you it's like me working on the canva template and adding in the photos for the video I believe it has to be longer than five seconds so mine are always between like six to nine seconds in cap cut there is a place where you can change the speed I actually don't use cap cut to do it I usually use DaVinci Resolve for you cap cut is totally good you can change the speed and everything okay then I export the video then I'm making the cover Banner now and I just Googled what size should the

Etsy Banner be and I believe there are two Banner sizes so I just picked one and then I made a custom size in canva and to make the banner I just look at existing banners what is on canva what looks good to me select a couple so those are ones that I liked I wanted to use the same font so I was copying from my marketing photos okay and this is what my final Banner looked like in the end so the banner the logo and updating some settings in my Etsy took 35 minutes I think

probably the banner took 8 minutes 10 minutes something like that so now I'm making the shop icon which is like the shop logo photo I basically do the same thing and in the end this is what the shop logo looked like you can always go back and change it I'm not super duper satisfied with this but it's like whatever it's good enough just put a photo there probably took me like five minutes so I'm adding it to my shop I'm also just like filling out some of the stuff and you'll see that my shop is

suspended because it's still Etsy is still verifying my company documents that's why my shop is currently suspended and then I also added a picture of myself I live in Vancouver Canada but for my two Etsy shops I'm putting a location in the US because most of my customers will be from the US so I want to just put that I'm in the US I put Seattle because Seattle's like right south of Vancouver I've been there before I like it I put Seattle it's also the same time zone so I have good news for you after

five business days my shop finally got unsuspended because they double checked my documents and everything was good so now we're into day nine of me working on this Etsy shop and I'll show you exactly what I did the next step I did was I updated my Etsy policies returns and exchanges cancellations and then I'll show you how I uploaded my first listing so the first one I did was returns and exchanges get started with a simple policy I clicked use Simple policy then I just said no returns no exchanges because we're selling digital products so

we don't want any returns or exchanges then it was the cancellation so I created a policy where I don't accept cancellations now is the privacy policy so Etsy actually has a sample privacy policy that you can work off of and they tell you yes you can work off of this but you have to revise it so it fits what you are doing in your shop so I basically read through the whole thing and then I copy pasted so I just read through everything and delete the stuff that I don't need or I just change the

stuff to fit what I am doing oh yeah and then when I copy paste it there's I noticed that there were no bullet points and no spaces so I added spaces in between the bullet points I had to like Google for a bullet point you can see I'm like copying a bullet point over and then I'm putting in those bullet points and then adding space in between and then for the last part I'm just changing the name to Lulu creative house and then when we're done I just was reading through the whole thing next thing

I did was to add a banner so remember I already made a banner I just have to upload it so I couldn't remember if it was the big banner or the mini Banner so I chose the mini Banner size and it it was obviously not working out so I chose the big banner size and then like totally made sense and everything looked good then I went to options and I just like double checked everything and made sure that I'm okay with everything one thing I did change here is I don't want Shoppers to be able

to see what my sold listings are because also competitors can also see what exactly you are selling and so I click no hide them so doing that took about 15 minutes and then for another 35 minutes I upload my new listing so I'll show you my process for doing that so I go into my canva and get the template link for the template I created for the customer then I also create a new link with tinyurl because I want to put one link here and then I want to put a tiny URL link here just

just in case the link doesn't work or the customer there's some problem with clicking the hyperlink so I want to have the link here as well I put in the images of what the template looks like and then I save this whole thing as a PDF so this is the PDF that the customer is going to be able to download and then once the customer downloads this PDF they can click this link and get access to the template so now I'm just like adding in the photos and then I'm working on the actual listing so

remember when we did market research like I took notes on what other people are using for their keywords and stuff so I took a bit of notes on that and then I'm just like working off of that for when I actually do my keywords here yeah so Rush resume cover letter make sure I have the word canva in there I am just doing what I think makes sense you should be using market research tools to work on your SEO but for this sorority resume cover letter I'm pretty confident in my keywords and what people are

going to be searching for so I'm just like typing it out right now so that then I did do a little bit of research in Etsy just to take a look at what people are doing so I noticed that when I searched sorority resume template there is one result that says sorority resume template with photo so then I decided to go back to mine and add the with photo part I also took a look at a couple of other Etsy listings just to see what keywords they use and then I made some changes in mine

so I'm just going to skip this part so I took a look at what other people are doing and then and then I made some changes with mine I decided not to put in the pink okay so then with the photos once I uploaded them they're like always in the wrong order which is super super annoying so I have to like go back and check what is the order that I want them in and then I just like drag it to like the one two three or four placing so I'm just like rearranging the photos

here oh yeah and I also uploaded the video here you can see the video okay so then I decided to put in the price so I looked at what other people were charging I could see somewhere twenty dollars fifteen through three dollars eight dollars eleven so I thought okay between three dollars and twenty dollars I should probably pick a price and so I decided to put ten dollars because I thought okay that is kind of like the average of those prices and I'm this is like a new shop so I don't want to charge too

high because right now I don't have any reviews so I just put ten dollars you can always go back and change the price later so now I am working on the description and for the first paragraph of the description I always try to write something that sounds natural but then has the keywords in it so I said get into your dream sorority with this sorority resume template and matching cover letter canva template so I said the word sorority like two times and then template I think I said two times as well I also look at

what other people are doing and adjust it based on what I think is going to work so at first I put get into your dream sorority but I thought it would be better to actually put editable sorority resume template in the first like four words that is probably probably going to have a better result and then I did add the get into your dream sorority part so I just put what I think makes sense and then for the other parts of the description I basically copy over what I have in the marketing photos so I'm

copying over like because in the marketing photos my features are that I have like no lorem ipsum it's fully customizable on a free canva account so I basically just copy over what I have in the marketing photos and this is like the how it works section so I also put that in as well and then at the end I always like to put something about if they have any questions then they can like send me a message yeah so this is the part where it has all the features so basically I have an introduction with

my keywords and I have my features then I have how it works and then at the bottom I have how to contact me if you have any questions so for details I'm adding core details it's digital files I made it it's a finished product and then switch to digital listing yes for category I just searched resume and there was a category worry for a resume template so I just selected that one and then I skipped like the color stuff and then now I'm working on the tags so you should probably be using market research tools

but for this one it's super Niche and I'm pretty confident in my tag so I just put in these tags and it's really annoying because you can only have like 20 characters so I can't write something like sorority resume template that's why I put sorority resume and like sorority template I can't put sorority resume template so you have to kind of work around with your wording because you can only have 20 characters really annoying shop section so that's like the category so I made a new section called sorority resume and then feature this listing yeah

why not I only have one I'm only gonna have one listing oh I think I just like go back and double check everything checking the video and everything and you know what I realized so for the thumbnail I actually didn't like how this canva circle is cut out and so what I decided to do was to actually change it and move it so that it isn't cut cut out so I just like moved it to the other side and then I just re-uploaded that cover image for the cover image I always pay a lot more

attention to it because that's like the first impression you're going to give to your potential customer right so I always want to make sure that the thumbnail of the first photo is good and nothing's like cut out so I changed it and then I'm just like moving it around so now the canva is in the middle here and you can see everything so this is the final cover image I think that looks pretty good I can't remember if I showed you this part but obviously you have to upload that PDF document that has the link

to the canva template so I uploaded that one and just checking everything and then I publish it so this is the actual listing yes you can go on Etsy and look for my shop you can find this listing and you can see everything that I've done oh yeah if you're getting a lot of value out of this tutorial because I have been spending hours and hours and hours making this for you click the Thumbs Up And subscribe if you want to see more like this oh yeah and also let me know in the comments what

you found the most useful about this tutorial so now what I'm doing is actually creating daily sales for my Etsy shop so every day I came up with like a percentage usually I do like 10 50 15 20 sometimes I'll do 30 or 40 percent and then I'll just name it like for example for this one I named it it's a sale for July 1st to July 1st so I just do like a sale every single day because okay and the reason why I do this is is when I first started my Etsy shop I

would see that my competitors were offering a sale every single day and it would be like a different percentage and I thought that was so smart if you just go to any search result you'll see that if people have a sale it's going to be there's going to be like a green thing so for example this one doesn't have a sale going on it's just like it looks it's just black but then this one has a sale going and it ends in five hours so if it's within I think it's if it's within 24 hours

or maybe 12 hours then it's going to say sale ends in blah blah blah so if you're just scrolling doesn't this one just pop out more to you and you're more likely to click on it because it says it's like green and it says sale ends in five hours also it creates urgency for the customer so if we look and keep scrolling you'll see that most of them don't have the green thingy like this is not but this one does so if it's green to me it seems more clickable and it's like oh it's like

on sale that's why for my first Etsy shop and also the second one that I'm creating I um usually I do like a sale every day I did try to do a sale every other day but I just think it make sense to have a sale going on every single day even if it's like 10 or 15 off and if you think oh I just don't want to have a sale every day because it signals to the customer that oh I always have a sale I actually don't think that customers are on Etsy every single

day looking for um templates and they're like waiting for you to have a sale like for me if I'm on Etsy wanting to buy something I mean the the stuff people sell on Etsy it's like ten dollars or twenty dollars right at least in this Niche so I don't think they're checking Etsy every single day to see like oh my God I hope this shop can give me 40 off today like I think if they just see like 10 15 off they're just gonna buy it or they there might not even be a sale and

they're just gonna buy because it's such like a low ticket offer it's not like 100 or 200 right okay and then what you can see here so now I am making like abandoned cart promo codes favorited item and like thank you promo codes okay and then now you can see all the sales that I have oh yeah and then like because because I do sales every single day right at the start I would do them like every single week now I do them every single month so every single month I'll create 30 different sales it

takes me like 10 minutes but you can start doing it every week or you can do it every month so I just like created a reminder in my calendar to create new Etsy sales for my new shop okay next thing I'm doing is to write a shop announcement because they can see that in your shop let me show you so this shop announcement that I am creating right here is the announcement that I wrote I could have written a bit more but I just put this for now I can always go back and change it

so this entire process of creating this new shop doing the market research creating the template and everything this took me 15 days from the start to finish and I actually worked on it nine days out of the 15 days that's because I had rest days in between the total time that I spent from starting this from scratch to having my shop published and with one listing it took 12 hours so I think 12 hours is actually pretty short for somebody starting a new shop I think for my first ever shop that I start it probably

took three times as long because like designing the first template like here it says I did it for two hours and 30 minutes I already have 40 something listings in my other shop right so I've designed 40 things but the thing is when I was creating my first ever template I think it probably took me like 20 hours maybe even 30 hours to create the first one and then the marketing photos so here it says I took one hour 35 minutes to create my marketing photos for my first ever shop and for the first listing

I think it probably took at least 10 hours to do it because I was starting from scratch right right like right here I am using a template that I created for myself which you can all get access to so that's why I only took an hour and a half so if you're looking at this and thinking wow Dina spent 12 hours making a new shop it's actually not that much time but I think if this is your first time doing this for the very very first time you need to take this number this number this

12 hours and multiply it by three or four or five I think that is realistically how much time is you're going to spend on starting a new shop and like coming up with the idea doing the market research and then having your first listing published and everything in the shop setup I think it's going to take 30 hours oh and I did make this into like a Google doc so if you do want to use this for reference as like a checklist for you starting your Etsy Shop you can get access to this in the

video description I'll put a link there this video has honestly taken me so long to do it took me 12 hours to start the new shop and then it probably took me 10 hours to put this video together so please give this video a thumbs up because I spent so much time working on this and leave a comment and let me know what was the most useful thing about this video I know for the design part I skipped over a lot of it and that's because I actually want to create a completely new video on

how to design a new template from scratch so subscribe to my channel because I'm going to come out with that very soon foreign [Music]