Could you really grow your handmade shop by doing less than what you’re doing now? 🤯 I know it doesn’t really make sense, but let’s think about it for a second. It’s not even about staying focused or only working on one thing at a time – although that does count.
It’s really about working on the right thing at the right time and not worrying about anything else. Building a successful handmade business is not really an art – it’s a process. Successful sellers aren’t lucky. They’re not better than you. They just know to work on what’s important for where they’re at on this journey. They really just put blinders on and they’re not looking at the next step until they get there.
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I’m really passionate about sharing this message is because I see a lot of makers burn out really quickly, often so because they’ve skipped really foundational, important steps at the beginning when they started their shop. Then they opened their shop and they’re not really getting the momentum, the traffic and the sales they want. And then what happens? They start googling and looking for strategies to help with their marketing.
This is going to look like being on Instagram and being on Pinterest and being on Facebook and all of this stuff. This is NOT the solution if you skipped some important steps when you got started. If you skip steps, like for example:
✖️settle for average product photography,
✖️guesstimate what your prices should be,
✖️don’t do a minimum of market research to make sure people are actually interested in buying what you’re selling,
✖️skip understanding branding and perceived value,
✖️etc.
and instead you just kind of open your shop and then dive into those shiny strategies straight away, they’re not really working because you don’t have the foundation right so you’re trying to do more of them. So you’re on Instagram, you’re on Facebook, you’re on Pinterest, you’re trying to catch up with all the Etsy algorithm changes if you’re on Etsy.
You’re starting to feel very overwhelmed very quickly by all these marketing strategies that you’re trying to make work, but they’re not actually going to work if you skipped those early stages. And I know that’s not what you want to hear because those early stages, they’re not the most fun. Being on Instagram is fun. Understanding what perceived value and your pricing strategy should be isn’t fun, but it really, really is the key. If you skip that to do the shiny strategy, it’s not going to work.
I’m not saying that those marketing strategies aren’t important because they are – in fact, I teach them. But there is an order in which you need to get things done so that you can get traffic, sales, and profit.
You can bring all the traffic you want to your shop, but if your photos and descriptions aren’t great, you’re not going to get sales. You’re going to spin your wheels and you’re going to burn out. On the other side of that, you can get as many sales as you want, but if your pricing strategies aren’t right, you’re not actually going to make a profit and you’re going to be stuck on the “I’m getting orders but I’m not making money” hamster wheel – and that’s not really a nice place to be.
What I’d love for you to do is really ask yourself: “what is important for me to do right now?” Do you know what your focus should be and what’s currently distracting you from working on that? Stop doing those things and focus back on the one thing that’s really going to be important.
This isn’t a trick question. It’s totally fine if right now you’re like, “well I don’t know what is the thing I should be focusing on”. If you don’t know, I do have a free guide called The Maker’s Roadmap that I recommend you download so that you can figure out what stage of your handmade business journey you’re on. It’s going to guide you through the four stages of growth for your handmade shop so that you can figure out which stage you’re in and what you should be focusing on accordingly. Once you know that you can stop doing everything else because it doesn’t matter for now. That means that you’re doing less, but you’re actually working much more efficiently.
I’d love to take the conversation in the comments below! Let me know what is your number one focus at the moment and what do you know deep down is distracting you that you’re going to stop doing?
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Are you feeling a bit panicked because the sales for one (or more) of your products have stopped? Maybe your best seller isn’t selling anymore?
So you’ve opened your shop, you’ve got products in it that you launched with, and you’re starting to work on marketing to sell those products.
Are you getting a lot of Etsy favorites, but no sales? Or very few sales? If so, this is the article for you. This is
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[…] How to grow your handmade or Etsy shop faster by doing less (seriously!) – making REAL progress with your handmade shop will happen when you start DOING LESS, NOT MORE. Yes, seriously. Let’s dive in! […]