How To Get Your First 1,000 Sales on Etsy in 2024

I've helped thousands of etsy sellers get their first few thousand sales at this point and how do I do that I take real corporate e-commerce principles and I apply them to Etsy and that is why we see very strong consistent results today I'm going to give you actionable and practical steps that you can apply immediately in your shop to see the next thousand sales as quickly as possible my name is Dylan jarus and I'm an Etsy seller of 7 years I've made over a million dollars in profit on the platform and and my whole background

is actually corporate e-commerce so I worked for big companies like zapo and Zulily and now I have a company of about 25 people where we have taught thousands of etsy sellers how to scale their businesses with the ultimate Etsy blueprint and one-on-one coaching which is all based in real e-commerce principles so the strategies I'm teaching you today are not something that worked for me once and now I'm showing you what I did but these are skills and strategies that I learned from working for some big e-commerce Giants so on Etsy your first 100 sales are

the hardest to get usually after 100 sales it becomes a little bit easier the exception to this is if those 100 sales take you a really long time and they're very drawn out and to the point where you don't actually pick up any momentum then that time period from going from 100 sales to 1,000 sales can sometimes be just as arduous so today I'm going to lay out five steps actionable steps to get your next thousand sales as quickly as possible and these steps have helped people get to their first 100 sales within 34 days

of opening their shop and these also have helped people get to the point where they're getting 250 sales per day about 10 months in to having their shop the key is to not skip any of these steps and to implement them each 100% on every listing number one this is the foundation of everything I teach it is about having the right customers to sell to who will give you a consistent order frequency this approach it is customer first product SE second because if you're not selling to people with consistent spending your income will not be

consistent so we are absolutely not going to ever be finding some best sellers that allegedly make $10,000 a month and then thinking we will also make $10,000 a month if we sell that exact same thing that is a business model of chasing success and chasing success when you have little to no track record is typically fruitless so whether you have an Etsy Shop already or you're just starting a shop we want to choose our customers and if you feel like you're not selling to profitable customers right now is the time to fix that so we

look to customers who shop on Etsy consistently even when inflation is up when the stock market is down the resiliency of your customer is essential for any e-commerce business so we want to sell to people who value their time more than money maybe they're involved in expensive Hobbies or activities and their spending habits are very consistent and what we are also not doing is just picking a niche we are not niching down that is not the secret to success because a niche does not guarantee that there are any profitable customers behind that Niche and a

niche doesn't guarantee anything about the consistency of the sales for that Niche for example you could say I'm going to sell in the pet category Niche maybe even Niche down right to dog owners or cat owners well picking a niche or niching down doesn't mean anything about the consistency of your income because if you look at pet owners there's some people who will buy the cheapest dog food whatever is on sale that week at their local Walmart and then there's people who will get that premium fresh dog food that is delivered weekly to their front

doorstep right very very different customers even though you feel like you picked a niche the spending habits of these customers very different the reliability and consistency of their spending also very different number one is repackaging your listings if you have them already for profitable customers and if you're starting from scratch build your product mix with customers in mind first and this leads me to step number two this is about building a dynamic product mix now if you already have products in your shop great but it might be time to rebalance what you have and if

you don't have products then this is the time to start out on the right foot so we are not having a shop filled with all mugs or all digital planners or all t-shirts the key to getting to 1,000 orders as quickly as possible is by having a dynamic product mix so you will not get to 1,000 orders the fastest by having 100 listings of the same product I have a framework called the seven types of products to have in your shop and it's designed to have different listings that have different purposes so that you are

scaling your order number that number under your shop name and your Revenue at the same time we want both order number and revenue going up together one of these seven types of products that is key to scaling your order number quickly is a loss leader so a loss leader is a listing it's not a variation within another listing and a loss leader is going to be a listing that is a lower price point item it's lower margin it has Mass Appeal and it is high quality so that you get great reviews on this so we

want your loss leaders to get at least 20 orders per day to drive up your order number quickly your loss leaders should also be products that are Evergreen and sell consistently year round it needs to be high quality because you're getting so many sales on this we want your review rate on this listing to be very high as well and that will increase the visibility and Order velocity on your other listings the goal with our loss leader is to get this listing to become a best seller ranking at the top of the search results as

quickly as possible so remember loss leaders they need to have Mass Appeal so instead of being like maybe a cleaning checklist for hair salons we might just have a Monday through Friday cleaning checklist that's going to have more Mass Appeal instead of being like editable social media templates for cosmetic dentistry we would want to have something that has more Mass Appeal such as social media templates for small business owners so B2B items that could appeal to a variety of businesses are a great loss leader other ideas for loss leaders could be supplies so whatever supplies

you use to make those handmade items put those as loss leader listings another idea for a loss leader might be something like a mama's sweatshirt instead of having like a triplet Mom sweatshir that's very specific and you know very Niche maybe a more General Mass Appeal Mama sweatshirt another idea could be a plain wooden frame instead of an engraved frame because one important thing with lost leaders is that we do not want these to be customizable we want to be cranking these things out we don't want to do anything that takes much labor from you

and with print on demand I like to just pick a whole category as my lost leader category so keep in mind loss leaders are not going to be customizable they should should not be highly breakable cuz remember we want to get really strong reviews on these we also want to make sure these are items that cannot sell out items that you can always find again and again that's why digital products are great for this we also don't want our loss leaders to be holiday specific or only to sell During certain times of the year so

I do not recommend doing an ornament as a loss leader unless it is something that is gifted throughout the year like maybe a realator client gift and lastly this is probably the biggest mistake I see people doing with L leaders It Is by having a variation that they call a loss leader within another listing that is deceptive this is when you see you know a sweatshirt listing where the price point in search results looks like it's $9.99 you click into the listing and there's a little toddler t-shirt in there that is sold out and it's

hiding in the variations so loss leaders are not a tool for deception to get people to click into your listings loss leaders are Standalone listings and we've helped thousands of students use these l C leaders to get their first thousand sales very quickly the third step to getting your next thousand sales as quickly as possible is by optimizing for organic traffic now that might sound like a lot of fluff right if you don't have an e-commerce background optimize organic traffic like what does that really mean well it's about getting people who will buy your products

to see your products so that they can buy them it's very simple and it's by doing it without paying for ads so we are not going to be paying to get our first thousand orders or the next thousand orders so we are not using Etsy ads to do this I'm going to show you how much more efficient and profitable it can be to optimize your listings to get that organic traffic if you are using Etsy ads on unoptimized listings so listings that aren't optimized it's like putting a Band-Aid on something that needs stitches okay it's

not a sufficient fix for the real problem so what we want to do is build our listings correctly so that we can get that built-in traffic because Etsy it is a search engine and it pulls in traffic from Google search as well so why not take advantage of all that free traffic it's really a missed opportunity if you're choosing not to optimize your listings so to optimize your listing this means your SEO must be on point and the listing must be optimized for mobile and desktop to increase your conversion rate when your SEO is on

point you really don't need ads and a lot of people think well what what does that mean like my title like titles have to be good titles are like 10% of your SEO yes your titles do have to be correct but that's only a small piece of it most people don't have extensive SEO experience and they usually get SEO wrong the first time so they're publishing listings that don't really have a fighting chance now the goal with SEO is not to have a pretty title SEO isn't supposed to be pretty it's supposed to be functional

so SEO is both having the right keywords but also structuring them in the right way and the goal is to show up under as many search results as possible for those relevant keywords so we want to fit in as many longtail keywords as we can now we are not keyword stuffing we are not just packing in a bunch of words as many words as we can we are having as many complete sets of longtail keywords longtail keywords are three to five words the way we include more longtail keywords is by having them overlap and I'm

going to show you how we do that this process has helped thousands of my students see increases over 1,000% in their organic traffic so here's an example in this listing you will see the title says 70 musician post musician social media canva editable template Instagram social media template wouldn't quite do that instead I would do something like musician Instagram template music social media post editable IG template for artist press kit bundle for content creator in the first one there's like five different sets of keywords right now they are longtail but huge missed opportunity so instead

of showing up under four longtail keywords we are showing up under eight sets of longtail keywords because you can break it down into musician Instagram template Instagram template music music social media post social media post editable editable Instagram template Instagram template for Artist Artist press kit bundle and bundle for content creator so you are showing up under many more sets of longtail keywords here by having the longtail keywords overlap step number four to getting your next thousand orders as quickly as possible is with your pricing strategies if you currently have no sales there is no

reason you should be pricing at full price right now in fact I probably wouldn't recommend having anything at full price until after your first th000 orders the goal right now is rapid acceleration of your shop we need to rip off the Band-Aid and we do not need to be worried about training our customers to only shop when things are on sale as a shop with no sales you have nowhere to go but up right you don't have a reputation to protect at this point you have no track record and it is not very convincing for

someone to purchase from you when you have no sales so don't worry about offering discounts you know tainting the perception of your shop at this point we need to get you the shell of a shop that has a orders that's priority number one here there is no reason to be pricing at full price until you have 1,000 sales now this this recommendation is for people who want to grow quickly if you're like me you might be a little impatient and you want to see rocket ship level growth you could leave things at full price and

maybe in 6 months you'll get 60 sales or you could get really aggressive with some Dynamic pricing strategies that could get you 600 sales in 6 months or even 6,000 sales in 6 months 6 months from now what do you want your shop to look like what order count do you want to be sitting under your shop name that is a goal that I would stay focused on so remember in terms of pricing you want to have different pricing strategies for different stages of your business and different stages of a listings life cycle so for

example on the listing level I recommend having a specific pricing strategy until that listing has X number of sales because right now we need you to just rank higher a lot of people have heard things like it takes 6 months to get traction on Etsy just be patient I beg to disagree I think that you know your first 6 months you should be hitting the ground running pedal to the metal do not take your foot off the gas this is the time to not be too patient because if you're too patient with the wrong strategies

6 months from now you're not going to magically start getting hundreds of orders you've really got to be aggressive and quick and rip the Band-Aid off to get that first thousand orders or if your shop is at a point where it's kind of kind of stagnant or plateauing you need to really ramp things up and get that order velocity going again with these strategies so if your shop is stagnant treat your pricing strategies like you would for your first thousand sales you just need to get those in and under your belt quickly the fifth step

to get your next thousand sales as quickly as possible is aggressive social media strategies now we are not paying for social media ads and we are not asking our friends and family to help us they don't even need to know what you're doing if you don't want them to we're going to focus on Facebook Pinterest Instagram and Tik Tok now if you want to only focus on one of them that's okay but I would choose Facebook I have countless students whose shops blow up with our Facebook strategies now Facebook has it's a three-prong approach so

it's not just you know building up a Facebook business page actually that's not even one of the three one of our strongest Facebook strategies is really about being a solution to problems people oftentimes go to Facebook with problems they're looking for Solutions and what I love about Facebook is that it is a search engine as well so your links will stick around for a long long time the Facebook strategy was actually the only thing I did with social media when I started on Etsy and it is the thing that got me to 10K per month

by my fourth month on the platform all right now Pinterest Pinterest is the long game you're not going to see results tomorrow from what you do on Pinterest today but you're going to definitely want to have Pinterest at some point working for you so you might as well get started now because it might take 6 months for for Pinterest to really pick up and make a difference in your stats for me by year 4 Pinterest had built up so nicely that I was seeing over 100,000 visits to my Etsy Shop per year with Pinterest it

was driving over 90% of my social media traffic and in that year four I wasn't even doing anything on Pinterest that traffic was from things that I had done in year 1 and year two so while Pinterest is the long game I see it as the thing that can get you the most consistent highest traffic over time and the best part is that it's free and with the Google Chrome extension you can do this really really fast now moving on to Instagram Instagram is really a place that we focus on nurturing our current customers yes

you can do some lead generation on Instagram for your Etsy shop but I find that it is really a place to build trust and Community with your current customers to get that cult-like following building up Tik Tok is a wild one it is a little bit like shooting in the dark but there is a big upside so big upside potential but it's a lot less calculated to reach that so if you are willing to spend your time on these platforms even 20 minutes a day it can be so valuable and I've seen with our thousands

of students that is 100 times more valuable than dumping money into ads for unoptimized listings so if you don't have a th000 sales yet or if you are at the point where your sales have slowed down or they're plateauing go hard with social media for the next thousand orders you won't regret it now this leads me to my free giveaway if you want to see some sneak peeks of the strategies that our company used to help thousands of etsy sellers achieve over $10 million last year definitely grab our free checklist our free weekly checklist is

filled with Revenue generating activities split out per day and these will help you stop spinning your wheels and finally start to see the results that you're looking for if you would like one-on-one coaching for your shop or if you'd like to see our full in-depth connected strategy you can also reach out to me on Instagram at Dyan Jaris or just email team Dillan jar.com we've worked with people who are just starting shops and people who are already doing over $8 million a year so if you'd like our help just reach out to us and we

would be happy to chat with you more about your Etsy shop I hope you enjoyed these strategies to get your next thousand sales and I hope to connect with you soon