How To Make $5K Selling Simple Digital Products on Etsy: There are lots of ways to make money online, but not all of them are this easy. I’m talking about selling digital products on Etsy, and as you’ll see – it’s something that anyone can do. I will show you how you can make over $5,000 in just a couple months by selling simple digital downloads on Etsy. Once you have your digital products uploaded, you can make money passively through regular sales.
Selling Digital Products on Etsy
Etsy is a marketplace like Amazon. The main difference is that they focus more on craft and handmade items. People that buy on Etsy are more likely to pay a bit more for products because they expect high quality. Etsy has now become one of the best places to buy digital products. These digital products are things like PDF digital planners, worksheets, patterns and digital prints. A certain level of quality is still expected, so don’t expect to just throw anything on there.
Finding Unsaturated Products
In order to be profitable on Etsy, you’ll need to hunt down an unsaturated product. You want to find. I use a few tools such as EverBee to help with this. You can use the free trial of EverBee to easily find some unsaturated products/niches, but I will also show you how you can do it directly in Etsy.
For example, digital planners are one of the most sold digital products on Etsy. But with over 450,000 results for digital planners, the market is oversaturated. To find a niche with less competition, you need to narrow down your search. If you type in “ADHD digital planner,” the results go down to 11,000. By creating an ADHD digital planner, you’re cutting out a significant portion of the competition. Essentially, you want to niche down as much as possible to target very specific groups of people.
Competitor Research in Etsy
Competitor research in Etsy will help you to understand which niches are selling best. If you focus all your efforts on a niche that doesn’t make sales, you’ll have a dead store. By looking at others in the space, you can see what’s working and try to replicate it with your own unique spin. You will also get a good idea of what keywords the bestsellers are using. These keywords could help you to rank higher in Etsy’s organic search results. You can also get a good idea on the best types of photos to use in your listing by looking at your competitors.
I do all of my competitor research on Etsy in incognito mode. Etsy does vary your results according to your previous clicks, so it’s best to use an incognito tab to get more accurate results.
Finding Best Sellers on Etsy
To find the best sellers on Etsy, you can use a little trick. While Etsy used to have a filter for best sellers, it’s now hidden. However, you can still access it by going to ‘All Filters’, selecting ‘Star Seller’, and then changing ‘star‘ to ‘best‘ in the URL. This will show you the best sellers, with the top sellers appearing first.
Finding Popular Niches
As you scroll through the best sellers, take note of the niches that are popular. You’ll want to stay far away from any copyrighted brands. Try to focus on general themes or ideas. For example, you might notice that ‘vintage year’ sweatshirts or ‘dog lover’ products are popular. Those might be good niches to drill deeper down into.
Also, pay attention to the design styles that are popular. You might notice that a certain font or design placement is common among the best sellers. If it works for them, it could work for you.
Finding the Right Keywords
Once you’ve found a niche and a design style, it’s time to find the right keywords. You can do this by looking at the titles and tags of the best sellers.
To find a seller’s tags, scroll to the bottom of their listing and look under ‘Explore related searches’. These are actually the exact tags that the seller is using. Write down any tags that could work for your product. You will add your own later. Make sure that you use all available slots.
To find more tags, search for your product (e.g., ‘1990 sweatshirt’) and apply the ‘best seller’ filter. Then, look at the titles and tags of the top results.
Studying Your Competitors’ Photos
Finally, take a look at the photos your competitors are using. If they’re using mockups, then you might want to find some better quality mockups. They might also be using stock photos of have taken their own. You shouldn’t replicate everything your competitors or doing. You just want to see what they offer, and how you can surpass them. If you can provide better photos for your listing, people will be more likely to purchase from your store instead.
5 Best Untapped Digital Products
I won’t lie, Etsy has A LOT of digital products on it. While it might look saturated, there’s always someone thinking out of the box that can make money on it. There are lots of untapped markets that are still waiting to be discovered. You just need to put in the time to find them.
Try to think of a problem that needs solving, then create a product that will do just that. The bigger the problem, the more profitable it could be. For instance, there are exam planners that you print out for your kids. Planning out studying times is a very common problem with kids. There are also a lot of people trying to solve that problem with exam planner digital downloads.
Here are 5 markets that you should look into:
1. Digital Courses
While it may seem like everyone is selling a course online, it’s really not as saturated as you might think. For instance, people often make courses for a specific piece of software, but as soon as a newer release comes out – the older course becomes useless. If there’s anything that you’re knowledgeable about, you could make a course on it. And if you’re current on the latest techniques, you could upstage another similar course that has become outdated.
Topics can range between almost anything – gardening, running, raising chickens, fitness, finance, communications, video editing, dating, etc. There are countless courses that you could create simply from your life experience. The possibilities really are endless. That’s why digital courses are number one on our list.
2. Printable Templates
Printable templates such as wedding invitations, birthday cards, and business cards, are a really good business to get into. They are fairly easy to make and can be quickly customized to fit a variety of problems. A fishing logbook template can be easily converted into a running logbook template, by simply editing the headings.
3. Website Templates
If you know anything about website design – website templates could be for you. Not everyone has the technical knowledge or time to build a website, so being able to quickly upload a complete website would save them a lot of hassle. You can provide website template for specific jobs such as for dentists or accountants. You could also offer a personalized service where you add their information to the website beforehand, or upload it for them. Even someone with basic HTML editing and good starting template would be able to do this.
4. Digital Assets
Digital assets are any files that you could use on your website or to print out. The most common types of digital assets are SVGs that customers can use in their projects. SVGs are simply files that can be scaled as large as you like, and will never lose their quality. Normal images can only be stretched so far before they start to look pixelated. You can think of an SVG as the shadow of an image. It can resized indefinitely and always look crisp. The most popular vectors are SVG files that are used in Cricut Machines.
5. Email Templates
Email templates are another untapped market. These are items such as welcome emails, warming emails, onboarding emails, thank you emails, abandoned cart emails, etc. Companies might need very specific email templates for their business use. Whenever you sign up to an email list – you will start getting emails delivered every day, or sometimes weekly. These emails are designed to warm you up to specific products or to a service. Normally, you’d have a full campaign of emails that stretch out over a year. People would definitely pay for a campaign that they can simply slot their product into. You can even use ChatGPT to help create the content faster.
Market Research
While Etsy is a good starting place for market research, it doesn’t always give you the full picture. I use a Chrome extension called EverBee to get more insights.
EverBee helps me to do product research and revenue analytics to see how much my competitors are earning for their products. This information helps me to narrow down my product ideas and find niches with less competition.
They let you do 10 free searches every month, so you may never need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Creating Digital Products
Once you’ve identified a niche and a product that could sell well, it’s time to start creating. I use Kittl, a design tool with loads of pre-existing templates. If you search for planner, you’ll see a bunch of templates that you can easily edit to fit any product. For instance, if you’re creating a symptom tracker, you can search for similar trackers on Kittl and use them as a base. You can then customize the template to make it unique and relevant to your niche.
Listing Your Product on Etsy
After creating your product, the next step is to list it on Etsy. When uploading your product – you need to optimize your listing to rank high on Etsy. This will help you attract more customers.
When creating your listing, make sure to add multiple photos and a detailed description. Even though there is an area for keywords – you also want to use keywords in your title and description.
The great thing about digital products is that you don’t have to pay for any shipping, and it doesn’t cost you any money to create the product. But that doesn’t mean that you should price too low. If you’ve created a high-quality digital product, set a price that reflects its value.
Making Sales
Don’t expect to start making loads of money right away. This is more of a numbers game. You need to upload lots of different products. Some might take off, and some might not. Spend a lot of time uploading different variations to see which ones start to sell well. Then, you can double down on the niches that are working really well, and expand on them.
How To Make $5K Selling Simple Digital Products on Etsy
Selling digital products on Etsy is one of the best ways to make money online that still works. It doesn’t require a lot of upfront investment, just some of your time. I’ve listed the tools that help me to cut down the time it takes to find ideas and create my products, so you’re already a step ahead. Think outside the box, and test, test, test. Your first 5 products might not make any sales, but your 6th might be the one that starts your new side business.
