This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Thanksgiving is coming up next week, at least in the United States. And we have a listener with an urgent question. She wants to talk about selling printables. Now, what do you need to know about selling printables? Well, first of all, what are they?
Printables are pieces of artwork, drawings, or other digital files that you can download online and print yourself. So as a seller, there's no need to ship anything. And as a buyer, you can access the work immediately. A lot of printables are freely available on sites like Pinterest, but a lot of them are also for sale on sites like Etsy. So again, as a seller, it's attractive because there's nothing to ship.
And as a buyer, it's attractive because you can get that work immediately. Now this presents a number of pros and cons. Some of them are pretty obvious. You might've thought of them yourself. It's very easy to get started selling printables.
All you have to do is upload a digital file, create a listing, that's it. It also has a very high profit margin, 'cause if you're selling a digital file, it doesn't really cost you much to deliver that file. So those things are good, but directly connected to those things are the cons, which, you know, it's very easy to get started, so therefore anyone can do it. So a lot of people do, a lot of competition. And because it has a very high profit margin, you know, it's a digital file, it's a downloadable file, you also can't charge that much because there's a lot of competition.
And buyers are like, "Why do I wanna pay a whole lot of money "for a very simple image file "or a Word document or whatever it is?" There are, of course, pros and cons to everything. I know today's listener wants to sell these printables, digital artwork for download, and it needs a quick marketing plan to profit before Thanksgiving weekend. That's right, she is on a tight deadline. So we decided to rush this question, move it up in the calendar in hopes of being helpful. So how to market and Etsy store printables without paid ads.
Let's talk about it after this quick message from our sponsor. [Music]
Hi Chris, this is Yvonne from the DC Metro area. I love listening to your podcast and being a part of the side hustle school community. My side hustle is creating printables on Etsy, and right now I'm creating holiday themed printables. So my question is, I'm not sure what's the best way to market my Etsy shop besides Etsy ads, which I don't wanna pay for upfront.
I'm already pen into Pinterest and post on Instagram, but I'm not sure what else I can be doing. I wanna know what's the best way to market this shop and I know that creating a plan before Thanksgiving weekend is key. Thanks for the advance. - Yvonne, thank you so much for listening and for the question. I love the challenge of a tight deadline.
Now listeners, first of all, go and check out Yvonne's shop. It is etsy.com/shop/mompoweredlife. Mom powered life where you can just search for that on Etsy if you already use that site. Okay, so I mentioned a few of the pros and cons to this in the introduction. Like I don't think a lot of people are gonna get rich on printables just because they are so easy to copy.
You know, if one seller starts to do well, you know, other people are gonna notice. They're gonna say, well, I wonder if I can do something like that. And then they will. And so then like the market of suppliers essentially expands. And this also keeps prices low, which among other things means that you don't have any profit margin to spend on ads.
If you were making $20 per printable, let's say, it would be very easy to say, well, let's spend, you know, $10 to $15 on ads because I'm coming out ahead no matter what there. But it's really difficult to do that. So prices are low, you know, supply is high. But that said, what can be done? Like, is there anything that can be done?
And I think so. So again, mom powered life on Etsy. I was taking a look at this. Most of Yvonne's products, at least the one she has so far, are selling for the low price of $2. Now $2 I think is gonna be really tough.
They have to be low prices, but I think you also really need to find a way to sell at the $5 to $10 price point, which is also low, but you know, $5 to $10 is a lot more than $2. Trying to profit in the long term on $2 of sale is gonna be quite challenging, right? You could have a lot of sales and you're still not doing that well because you have to pay Etsy listing fees and, you know, there's gonna be some degree of customer service, people emailing questions and such. So if nothing else, the $5 to $10 price point is better. And I also think this is the kind of thing where it is a numbers game to a certain degree.
Like you want to list a lot of items, a lot of items with a lot of different keywords because you want to be as visible as possible without spending money on ads. I also think this is key and also maybe related to how to increase the price point. You really want to encourage multiple purchases. And Yvonne is starting to do this a bit with a couple of bundles that she has, but I think you can do this a lot more. Like you really don't want somebody to check out of their shopping cart with a $2 purchase.
Maybe they can add that $2 purchase to their cart, but then they see, oh, you know, if I spend $5 more, if I spend $7 more, if I spend $12 more, I can get all these other things as well. So for me, one big goal here would be increasing the average checkout price. So that nobody is checking out with a $2 transaction. They're actually spending more and getting more. So those are a few things that can be done.
As I said, it's probably not a get rich quick plan or get rich at all plan, but still it's kind of fun to like make a downloadable file and put it up for sale. And then, you know, you kind of go away or you look back a couple of days later and you've had a bunch of sales, that is good. That is empowering. Might give you the vision to do something different in the future. So good luck you find anybody else who's doing printables.
Definitely get those holiday listings up. All right, listeners, if you've got a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. I love hearing what you're up to, your questions, your challenges, your reports, successes, setbacks, whatever it is, we try to deal with all of it here. So keep listening. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
