How I made $7500 income in less than 10 months from a digital planners spending less than 2 hrs a week!

In this blog I am going to share a breakdown of expenses and profits from etsy, what got me started, lessons learnt If I were to start all of it again today, spending two hours a week and finally how you can start something like this yourself.

I also have another screenshot for my paypal but struggling to attach both images.

The Breakdown

Etsy
Here is the expense and summary from digital planners
Starting Nov 2019

Revenue

Etsy sales - 494 orders & 738 planners sold
Etsy revenue - £3453.21
Outside etsy sales -1000
Outside revenue - £2353.12
Total revenue - £5806.12 ($7479.53)

Costs

Etsy costs - £1146.55 ($1477)
Software Tools cost - £502.25 ($647)
Planner Resource cost - £2000 $3864.65 (estimate)
Total cost - £3648.8 ($4699.41)

Profit

Net profit - £2157.32 ($2779.09)
Monthly Average net profit: £205.55 ($264)

So in all honesty my first year was at a breakeven but a huge order from university for 1000 students put me in place of profit. Now you can’t factor in this kind of luck in your business but even If I reached break even at the end of first year anything from second year would have been straight profit. Also I have learnt to be more efficient with resourcing and tools. So for the next year I can cut down my resource cost by one third, focus on more university customised planners in bulk. Of Course if you yourself are a designer it just becomes a no brainer for you! If you yourself need help with any of the aspects from creating planners, listing, SEO, setting up your store I will be more than happy to help you with it don't hesitate to contact me at [email protected] Secondly just use your etsy success planner to get the basics planned for you! I will share everything towards the end of this article.

What got me started?

Creating a side hustle is something most of us often think about and have our own way of achieving it. Most traditional means of creating a side income is through investing in mutual funds, shares or buying an additional rental property. These are all great ways to invest which would return anywhere between 5-15% a year on average, unless you have bought some tesla shares!
However if you look at the same investment but work on something you truly enjoy or believe in, the return on investment could be significantly higher as you provide an added value or insight.

Why digital planners?

Planning is something I started in my teens, my dad initially set some parameters and goals I should track along with a couple of books he recommended. It was the right age that influenced me heavily and since I have been keeping a diary, trello boards on personal goals. The way I see planning is simple as having a navigation compass to know which direction to go in to get there quicker by simply focusing.

Having done planning for over 10 years and come up with loads of personal planners I thought it would be good to share it with others. Looking around and doing some google search I came across people who were making good side income creating and selling digital planners.

The big revelation with doing some etsy search was that the file could be simple as a pdf. Huge benefit with it is there is no postage, printing or any physical presence required.

So it is simple as creating a planner using a tool like Canva or Indesign in pdf format putting it up in etsy and can be downloaded unlimited times each time earning an extra income

I will break down what you need to do to achieve it the simplest way possible but before that it's important to share some of the lessons learnt!

Lessons learnt and knowledge of hindsight

Here are some of the things I would have done differently looking back
Not create too many planners, at most 40 - Initially I got over 135+ designs made only to realise that the best selling planners where only under 10, rest just brought in traffic. I would suggest starting with no more than 40 products and whatever works double down on it! Stick to the 80-20 rule.

Prepare page by page planner before giving it to a designer
Don’t rush into it you can do it anytime you want just make sure you are well prepared beforehand. This is what cost me the most in resourcing. Of Course you yourself are a designer that won't be an issue!

Don’t take search engine optimisation (SEO) and listing description lightly
I personally am not the best writer(yet) and this meant writing description took a back seat and affected the sales heavily. Use something like etsy rank (erank.com) to do listing audit and seo research, you can also hire someone on fiverr.

Update product templates

You need to do A/B testing for product templates as more than title this is what will change your conversion rate. My initial click through rate was less than 1% and the buy rate was even lower. With just updating and playing around with main product templates my click through rates increased to over 6% on average and conversion rate to over 2%! I know it's still not the best but it's much much better than before.

Hire freelance experts

Don’t try and do everything yourself or hire inexperienced resources. Hiring inexperienced permanent resources was probably the biggest mistake and cost. While keeping a day job you don't want that to be affected. So the best thing is to hire the experts to use it as an investment. Good site to get some resources is fiverr, which I often used for seo, description and audit.

Adjusting Etsy ads and store sales

I set a daily budget anywhere between 3-5$ but an important thing to note is you need ads or coupons but you also need to adjust it on a monthly basis. Every month is different so make sure you keep updating the budget each month and listings you want to advertise based on the month. Don't focus on how much you sell it for focus on reaching your monthly revenue!

Platform based marketing

This is actually one aspect I would say we completely failed. We did a batch job on just posting things we sell. Not adding any character, personality into our posts. Most importantly not catering to an audience based on platform and no call to actions on posts was our biggest mistake, it becomes a complete waste if you don't do these two things.

On Instagram people are looking for a personal touch, using something like later.com with linkin.bio which pults links on actual photos to store which would have made an impact.

Pinterest: When doing my research and courses for etsy a lot of people suggested growing on etsy for long time growth. However just putting some planner templates or mockups wont do the trick also the frequency of posting needs to be much higher as well as type of graphics. Best option is to use canva templates based on the platform to customise!

Social media is something I would be re-evaluating going forward.
Focus on Students, finance, home, small business planners Cater to the audience you are in etsy has 81% female buyers majority between 25-40. Pinterest has 71% female users with staggering 80% of US mothers who use the internet using pinterest. Instagram has 75% population between 18-24, with 52% female compared to only 42% male. Finally more 95% of my sales came from females. Just a simple look at this number should help you understand the kind of planners one needs to make on etsy.

High value bundles

My initial start was with single page planners and ended up making loads of them however overtime they sold for less price not making it viable to advertise or get decent return on it. So I pretty much slowly reduced them and just focused on bigger bundles. I am slowly letting single planners expire and focus on high value, high margin products.

Find a niche specific to you.

It could be any of the digital products like planners, posters, CVs, SVGs, invitation gift cards, anything you like but need to make sure that you focus on your niche. I tried selling posters and CVs but didn't really succeed as I couldn't add my personal value to the project. It just became a simple copy, so try and avoid it or hire an expert for it!

Don’t be afraid to get inspired or not be first.

Biggest companies steal whether it's apple, Microsoft, facebook. The word copy or stealing is taken negatively and it is if you just take everything as is and don't add your own twist or value into it. Don't worry about competition or how many people are doing, stick to your guns, believe in it, learn from others and get the output you want.

Encourage users to buy more using coupons.

I have a growing discount coupon on my store where the percentage discount increases based on the number of products you buy. This led to users buying anywhere between 2-3 products instead of just one. I am also not trying to hide the coupons, it's listed in each product as well as my store cover page! You want people to buy more, so it helps the algorithm and also pushes up the buying amount.

Create backlinks

Make sure you are linking similar planners or bundles in the individual listing’s description. This will lead to bigger sales value as well as get more views. Another good idea which I implemented is add a link for customers to sign up to your newsletter so you can keep them posted on new products.
Customise home page Finally just try and put your top sellers or new products in front of the store as you know they have higher conversion rates, it will lead to better sales.

Digital download file When starting the store

I had put actual files on etsy to download. This created issues when I wanted to create bundles or re-use the same file in different places as all of them would need to be downloaded. So I created a simple download file which google drive link through which users can access the folder. So if there are any changes I just need to update the file with a link and everything else remains the same.

Focus on two digital planner sizes

I had many variations initially with colour as well as sizes. I had 5 colours and 4 sizes for everything, imagine the waste that it created. In hindsight just focus on two sizes A4 and US letter use something like Sejda.com to resize and if anyone wants any customisation feel free to offer it at a cost. How do I know this? On my download file I created tracked links to see which file size there were actually downloading and overwhelmingly it was the iPad/A4 version or the US letter size, that was predominantly 90% of the downloads. So going forward I am just going to focus on those sizes.

Currently weekly workload, less than 2 hours?

• Adjusting marketing ads, coupons and its budgets
• I have fixed a low cost design resource. So weekly I would check new product templates or minor planner changes based on customer feedbacks
• The Design resource also creates and schedules to social media schedule and publishing tool, hence only thing I have to do is approve the designs
• Some research on store stats along with any product I want to build in future.
• This often doesn't even take me more than 2 hours a week, of course initially there was additional workload but it drops down pretty fast.

How to get started?

• Do an etsy course using udemy, I am also planning to create my own if you are interested please register your interest here. (https://forms.gle/p1QbuovExtu1StzM8)
• Sign Up on etsy using link here, It will give you 40 free listing credits (https://etsy.me/3fBD7Oj )
• Use Canva to design your first digital planner
• Create your listing following the steps and directions in etsy success planner (https://www.etsy.com/listing/779715631/etsy-success-planner-etsy-planner) or if you want it for free sign up for my newsletter! (https://link.startuprouter.com/startuprouter )
• Turn on etsy ads and see the money roll in! Be patient with things and adjust every detail!
• Here is full set of resources with its explanation for your reference https://link.startuprouter.com/etsykit

I will be more than happy to help you with any aspect of it don't hesitate to contact me at [email protected]

Hope you enjoyed this one, finally if you want more insights like this on regular basis whether it be becoming a blogger, starting podcast, e-commerce store or even a SaaS product please sign up to the newsletter for more exclusives https://link.startuprouter.com/startuprouter

Please share feedback on what to keep or remove before posting it on other platforms!