Recently over on Instagram, I have been doing listing walkthroughs, letting everybody submit a niche, walking through the entire process, how I find keywords, what keywords I would use, how I would create a design, what the final product would look like, truly the entire process. So, I thought it'd be fun to bring that concept to today's video. Today, I'm going to walk you through step by step how I would research demand, gather design inspiration, create a strategic design, and optimize listings to actually sell.
If you are new to my channel, hello. My name is Taylor. I am a Etsy print on demand entrepreneur.
I've been selling printon-demand products on Etsy for the last 2 and a half years. And to date, I have sold over $500,000 across my two print on demand shops. So, here on my channel, I talk about all things, of course, print on demand, passive income streams, and just entrepreneurship in general.
So, if any of that interests you, be sure to boop the subscribe button down below. Step number one, the most important step is researching demand. This first step is all about finding the right keywords.
A very quick and easy way to find keywords is simply using the Etsy search bar. It is something that I think is very beginner friendly and a great way to get introduced to SEO, how it works, what types of keywords to use, and you can do it, of course, for free. Now, how I even discover what I'm going to type into the search bar, I have a niche building guide, and it's kind of the reverse engineered structure of how I create niches or come up with niche ideas.
Really the main gist of it is that I'm identifying people, their passions, their hobbies, their interests, and that big brainstorm leads me to a huge evergreen niche bank that I can pull from and start to plug in some of those different people, passions, hobbies, interests into the search bar and see what I find. Another tip to consider in combination with what you're brainstorming for people, passions, hobbies, interests, you also want to try to match those to the time of year that they make the most sense. At the time that I'm recording this, it is March.
And I want to be thinking about what is going to be selling in the next 2 to 3 months. That immediately has my mind thinking about May and June. With May, the main thing that stands out to me is Mother's Day as well as graduation season.
But we do still have to get a little bit more specific even if we're targeting one of those categories so that we have a better opportunity. So thinking about Mother's Day because I think that's a really good one. I want to start to think about what would mom mothers be interested in.
I'm going to just use myself as an example to make this simple. One of my hobbies that I picked up in the last year is making sourdough bread and like sourdough products. I have a sourdough starter.
If you know, you know. If you're into the whole sourdough, I don't know what you want to call it. I kind of want to call it like a cult, but obviously it's not a cult.
Nonetheless, I'm going to start with that kind of as my broad keyword to start diving into the opportunity that might exist with that as a niche. Just typing in the word sourdough. I can see a couple different keywords that are autopop populated here by Etsy.
There's sourdough starter, sourdough shirt, sourdough SVG, sourdough dealer, and then sourdough PNG. Just seeing what is autopop populating right here. That is going to give you insight as to what people are searching for.
Now, off to the right here, these monthly searches are coming from Everbe, which is a research tool that is going to give a little bit more insight as to what the search volume actually looks like for these terms. But if you aren't using Everbe, simply just looking at what is autopop populating is still a really great place to start. The one keyword that stands out the most to me here is sourdough shirt because I do personally sell printon-demand apparel.
So, I'm going to click sourdough shirt. Let's take a look at what is currently selling. Because we are focused on keywords, I'm going to start by looking at some of these organically ranked listings.
What I mean by that is they are listings that are showing on this first page of search that aren't ads. Going into this first listing, I can repeat the same process that I did to find sourdough shirt with what this individual is using in their title. I can start to get an idea of which of these keywords might be best by plugging them into the search bar and seeing what populates as well as I might also see other inspiration by doing so.
I'm going to just type in funny sourdough and see what pops up. They're using funny sourdough shirt in their title. However, I also can see that their search volume for funny sourdough gifts.
This is autopop populating. And then of course with Everbe to kind of supplement the research that I'm doing, I can see that this does have 127 monthly searches. That's something that I would want to make a note of.
If I continue on, they also have bakers and then they have t-shirt, but let me see what pops up. We can see baker's gift. That's something that I could potentially include.
I'm going to type in t-shirt kind of like they have. Now, when I start typing that in, you see how it now says find shop names containing baker's t-shirt. it's not populating any suggested search terms.
If this is the case, this is an indicator that it's not the best or strongest keyword and probably doesn't have a ton of search volume for it. So, instead, I'm going to go back and let's see if maybe just baker shirts has something. This looks a lot more promising.
So, where they're using baker's t-shirt, I might want to change the verbiage and maybe use something like baker's shirts because this has a lot more proven search volume and it's something that's autopop populating in the Etsy search bar. I like to repeat this process through multiple listings and create a huge bank of keywords that are related to the niche that I'm looking to pursue. Now, another thing that we can do to just kind of take this to the next level, if I want to use Everbe, I know many of you watching this use Everbe, love ever.
If you don't yet have Everbe, I will have a discount link in the description box below that gets you half off your first two months. Kind of like a buy one get one free if it's something that you're wanting to try. But when we analyze the listing, something that we are able to do is also examine their tags.
And I like to go and look at the keyword score. This is going to essentially start comparing the search volume also to the competition that is in this niche which is important so that we are using keywords that aren't as competitive that are being searched for and adding those into our titles and tags to better our chance at seeing results with our listing. These keywords at the top have the highest score of 20.
Baker shirt, bread shirt, funny bread shirts, sourdough shirt. Another thing that I want to point out that's actually a new feature of Everbe that I've been really liking is this trends section. This actually allows us to see more so the seasonality of the niche.
Even with those evergreen type niches that have the ability to sell all year round, I still notice that there are often times where they have stronger spikes. For example, a lot of evergreen niches have stronger spikes around the holidays for gift giving, maybe around Mother's Day. combining things like this with a holiday.
So, in this listing right here, we can see the last 30 days kind of what the sales history has looked like. We can see on average they're seeing about one to two sales a day. Some days they have upwards of three sales a day.
It looks like it's pretty consistent and overall it's estimating to have about 42 sales in the last 30 days. But what we can do is actually extend this time frame to however long we want. We can look at the alltime lifetime of the listing.
Of course, you need a longer aged listing to be able to see more information. For example, this listing is only 5 months old, so we would only see 5 months worth of information. This can be really helpful in creating your listings before those spikes happen.
Step number two, we are going to jump into design research. There's a quote that I love to share with my community, and it is that it is easier to create a design for SEO than it is to create SEO for a design. What I mean by that is if you create your design first where you're just kind of guessing, you're just creating something that you like that you think will sell, it is not backed on research.
It is not backed by keywords with proven demand and ultimately you end up kind of getting a little bit desperate for the keywords that you're using. You're scraping the barrel just trying to find something to work with your design because you already spent the time creating that design and you don't really want it to go to waste. instead how we found our keywords first in step one that is going to inspire how we create our design.
Now the second layer to this is doing that design research. Just like we research keywords, we have to research designs. What current elements are trending?
Are there specific font styles that are really performing well? Is there specific color combinations, layouts to designs? All of those different components are things that we can analyze and interpret to bring to our own unique design for the niche and the keywords that we've already found proven demand for.
When it comes to design research, there's two main ways that I like to go about it. One, I like to do an analysis of what is already working in the niche that I'm pursuing. So, it's important to see what is currently selling.
Just like we've looked at the keywords already for this niche, I also want to be aware of what types of designs are currently working. I did notice in the search results, they're using more earthy tones for their mockups, there's a lot of ivory, sand, brown, greens. That's something I definitely want to be aware of because when I create my listing, I want to make sure that I'm standing out and I don't want to just blend in with the rest of the results here.
And that brings us to the second component of this design research, doing design research in areas other than where you're looking to pursue selling products. That can be looking at other niches entirely. It also can be when you are just out and about running errands.
For example, I was at Target this morning. I took a video and some pictures of some of the different components that I was seeing in current selling products at Target. I was looking at their notebooks.
I saw a bunch of different color combinations that were a little bit more unique that I think would be fun to bring into some of my own designs. I also like looking at the mugs in Target. Even if I'm not creating for mugs, I like to see what types of fonts they're using, what color combinations, if there's any funny phrases or anything like that that I can get inspiration from.
I have a whole video on my channel of how to effectively do design research that I'm going to link up above here for you to check out after this one. For the actual design creation process for this, I have jumped into KD and I am going to start with this template. I like these color combinations.
It kind of gives the same vibe that I was seeing in the notebooks that I saw in Target. And I've really been enjoying creating designs that have this rectangular format to them. It is something that I've been seeing in tons of other niches and a lot of bestsellers with this format.
I want to see if I can maybe modify this and tweak this so that it makes sense for the sourdough bread niche. I'm going to start by taking a screenshot and I'm going to actually go to chat GPT. I want to use KD's AI to help me generate some images.
I've been getting a little bit more friendly with using AI recently and testing different things. And something that's been really helpful for me is getting an idea of how I can prompt AI. I don't even know if that's the right way of wording it, but helping me with my prompt to actually create what I'm imagining in my head.
I want to utilize AI to create an image in this same style. My goal is for the flower portion to be replaced by sourdough bread and I'll add my own text for a fun phrase with the design. But my main goal is having sourdough bread loaves in this funky format and keeping the rectangular structure overall.
I don't know if this completely makes sense, but this is just how I do it. I just genuinely brain dump to chat GPT and I find that it works for the most part. Okay, now it actually created a image for me.
I don't want to use this image. Can you provide a prompt for the style that I can plug into my own AI design software? I also don't want flowers as part of the design.
Just the sour dough red. I am going to go ahead and copy that. Let's go back to KD.
I'll also upload in this screenshot that I took so that I can use that as one of the saved styles just to give a little bit more of a visual for what I'm looking for. So, we're going to select that and let's go ahead and generate our image. A few minutes later, here we are.
I played around a little bit more with the prompt. I felt like it was just looking too cartoony and I feel like it was getting progressively more not like bread and more like bacteria under a microscope. So on off to the left here, this is what was populated.
I I don't hate this, but then I actually went into the advanced image generator in KD and I think this actually is perfect. I like the colors. It actually looks like sourdough bread, but it still feels feminine and fun, which I feel like speaks to the type of people that want something like this and want this product.
So, I'm going to go ahead and just delete these for now. And I'm going to keep this here for a second. I'm going to use this off to the left as my inspiration.
And a lot of times when I'm designing, I kind of like to keep a inspiration board of maybe designs that inspired me or templates that inspired me and then pull my ideas from that. I find just having that visual is really helpful. With this design, what I want is just the design itself.
So, I'm going to go ahead and remove the background. KD's background remover is by far the best background remover I have ever found. I truly love it.
I'm going to use this text. I like this font. That's kind of what drew me into the design.
And I think what I'm going to do is still follow this very same format and just use my graphic in the middle. Something I saw on a shirt in this niche, they had the phrase in crust we trust. When I looked on uspto.
gov, it wasn't trademarked. Now, this blue obviously is very different. I think what I want to do, I might change the colors here.
If you ever have an image that's generated or just a graphic you like but you want to change the colors. Another thing that you can do with KD is vectorize the image which essentially you're going to pull out colors from the image and be able to change them. I'm going to make this six colors.
I don't need a ton of variation. I kind of want to go back to the original that we had here. So for this blue, I did really like the color inspiration here.
It reminded me a lot of what I was seeing on the notebooks that I was finding inspiration from in Target. So, let's go like this. [Music] One last thing that I'm going to do because this graphic here in the middle kind of has this like slightly grainy textured look.
I'm going to go ahead and add a texture to this entire design. This is another one of my favorite things to do in KD, have more of like a grunge look to my designs. How I do so is going into textures.
I always use this very first grunge texture right here. And there's a couple little settings that I want to add in. So my personal favorite, I do this drop down.
Go to the bottom and click alpha mask. The transparency I think looks really good on apparel. It kind of gives that distressed graphic tea look.
I've ordered a lot of samples with this effect to test it out and it always looks amazing every single time. The other thing that I want to do is mask the texture. This is going to clip it to my design, to my text, and not so that the background has all of these random little flakes in it.
Now, this is a little heavy in terms of how grungy it is. So, I'm going to just reduce it a little bit. Let's see what 70 looks like.
Let's see. 60. Okay, perfect.
I like 60. Let me know in the comments down below if you want to see more walkthroughs like this. And be sure to follow me on Instagram where I do little walkthroughs like this on my stories.
If you want more practical tips, more strategy, then I want to invite you to my community, the POD connection. All members inside of my community get full access to my program plan scale profit that walks you through step by step the strategy to get you from zero to 10,000 plus sales. I do have a bonus master class that if you liked this video, I think would also be incredibly helpful for you.
And it's basically taking everything that we walked through today and making it into a four-step process that you can actually apply to the listings that you've already created. So, you might have been watching this video and thinking, "Ooh, I didn't really do that step in my process for listings that I've already created. " And that master class is designed for you to be able to look back at your listings and make some little fine-tune adjustments to make sure that they are optimized for you to see success in sales with them.
This just makes it easier so that you don't feel like you are completely starting from scratch. So, I will leave the link to join us in the community in the description box below. Don't forget to boop the subscribe button.
If you've made it to this point in the video and you haven't already subscribed, what are you doing? As always, I hope that you are having a wonderful morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you are in the world. And I will see you in the next one.
Bye.
