Etsy is so crowded these days. With around 9 million sellers on the marketplace, it can be tricky to stand out and get your products seen by the right people (or sometimes, any people).

That’s why just listing your products on Etsy is no longer enough.

But the good news is that there are things that Etsy shop owners can do to help things along a bit, drive traffic straight to their shop and stand out from the crowd.

If you want to be a successful Etsy seller, you should be doing these 5 things.

1- Create a Brand Identity

Brand Identity is a great way to create a cohesive look that makes you recognisable. You can read more on brand identity and how to create it here.

2- Optimise Your Listings

Here’s a little Etsy checklist for you. Does each listing have the following?

A clear title that was written for humans, not algorithms

10 good quality photographs

A video

13 tags

Keywords (tags) in the description

All relevant information in the description, including dimensions, variations and materials.

If so, perfect! However, if not, then you’ve got work to do!

3- Set Up Business Social Media Accounts

The best thing about building your social media following is that the Etsy commission is lower when customers follow your direct link to your shop. That means you get more money for selling to customers you’ve sent to Etsy. Share your Etsy shop link on your social media accounts often.

4- Get on Pinterest.

Pinterest is basically a giant picture-based search engine full of people looking for inspiration for their next purchase. It makes sense to get your products on there quick-smart.

5- Learn Etsy SEO.

This deserves more than a couple of sentences. It’s not a quick process, so I will visit it in much more detail and add some links here shortly. In a nutshell, this is keywords, tags, titles, item attributes and image alt text.

6- Show Up Consistently

Add new listings regularly, answer enquiries swiftly, keep your content up to date and make changes when relevant. Got product photography with last year’s date on that journal or greetings card? Update it to show one with the current year.