Wednesday, February 9, 2011

My thoughts on the Etsy Success Symposium

Etsy's new photo booth is fun!

So yesterday was an absolutely amazing day at the Etsy Headquarters, for the Symposium.  I met some awesome people, heard some crazy-great talks, got some great swag, and had an abundance of information thrown my way.  Lots of things to process! I was really super-inspired by the talks by April Bowles and Michelle Ward, but all the speakers were pretty amazing.  They have some of the talks up online, if any other Etsy sellers out there are interested!

Some things that I took away from it:

-I need to put in some time making my shop more SEO-friendly
-Put internal links in product descriptions
-I need to take more photos of my work in their environment (i.e. framed on a wall or shelf, "story" photos, more photo styling)
-I need to create a pretty mailing list
-I need to practice my "elevator pitch" in response to the "What do you do?" question.  Get better at talking about my work out loud, in general.
-Really concentrate on my specific target market and cater my product descriptions to them. Take away their hesitations.
-The theme of the day was how to separate your shop from others and to show it's uniqueness. Tell your "story" What's your story and why should people care? What is it about your shop that is unique?
-Take more studio photos, and in-progress photos, that can be "magazine-ready"
-More custom options
-What do I want to be known for? What difference do I want to make?

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing all this wonderful information! I've be receiving the "etsy success" emails for a while and found this blog post much more helpful than years of those - straight and to the point! Looks like I've got a lot of work to do on my shop too! Thanks!

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  2. Awesome synopsis! So inspired and so much to do!

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  3. Love the etsy booth and your synopsis. Listened to the live stream yesterday while putting V-day orders together. Great speakers!

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  4. agreed! it's so overwhelming, there is so much to do, so much that I STILL weeks later haven't done.

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