Hello and welcome to Launch100 one on one coaching. My name is Helen and I will be your Etsy coach.
1. I am an Etsy expert. I opened my Etsy shop 4 years ago, and have been in the top 1% of all Etsy sellers worldwide every year, including my first year. Currently, there are approximately 7 million Etsy sellers, and I rank 2,656 worldwide. According to Etsy, I have sold more items than 99.9% of all sellers. Therefore, I will only teach topics related to selling on Etsy. I know a little bit about Amazon, but I would be doing you a disservice if I try to answer Questions about Amazon, as I do not sell on Amazon.
2. ABOUT ME: We may have never met before online or otherwise, so I think it’s only fair that I tell you about my background, skills and knowledge. I have worn many hats in my life–from a Walmart clerk to a hospital janitor, to a fast food worker, to a circulation director for a newspaper, to a work comp insurance adjuster, to a student teacher, as well as working as an undercover detective for police departments in sting operations. I have 7 years of college which includes an Administrative Assistant Associate Degree, a Police Science/Police Academy Degree, a Paralegal degree, and an Associate in Claims degree. I also majored in Special Education at Wisconsin Universities. I have been an entrepreneur on and off my whole adult life. I also worked for brick and mortar firms as well as e-commerce companies in the past. I specialized in fraud detection, and trademark and copyright infringement for Hollywood celebrities (like Arnold Schwarzenegger) whom we represented for their T-Shirt charity campaigns. I am a certified tax return preparer and have knowledge about business taxes and all the deductions you are allowed by United States law. I was a private investigator, owned a detective agency for 10 years, and was President of the Wisconsin Association of Private Investigators. As an investigator, I had to do a lot of research to find people’s addresses, etc. My research skills have helped me tremendously as an e-commerce seller. And yes, I do have a lot of war stories as a PI, but that’s for another time and place. I am well versed on Mac and PCs (but more so with Macs) and taught myself Photoshop 8 years ago. I use Photoshop to create my designs and info grams, and build templates so I can edit the same design over and over again, which saves a lot of time personalizing products. I also majored in Journalism in college, so I have excellent spelling and grammar skills. These skills help me a ton when I write descriptions, snippets, and professional emails. This skill further enabled me to write engaging copy for marketing ads and professional emails. I also have been blessed with creativity skills, having written songs, stories, poems and drawing portraits.
3. As a sports enthusiast, I played softball, basketball, football, tennis, and track up until I was age 40 and won several trophies. I also enjoy fishing, creating designs, reading historical fiction, watching old time TV shows, and playing with my fluffy, white doggo Henry.
4. I first started e-commerce in 2014, selling shirts on Teespring, Sunfrog and Represent. I learned how to do Facebook ads and actually create the “creative” with a pic or video that linked to my campaign page. My first month I made $3,000 and my first year of doing e-commerce I made over $30,000 in gross revenue, but a good chunk was used up in Facebook ads. When it got to the point where my ads were costing more than what I was bringing in, I completely quit doing ads. In November 2017, I bought my first e-commerce course ever—Rachel’s LHS course. Up until then, everything I did in e-commerce was self taught. I opened my Etsy shop on January 1, 2018, and 4 months in with barely any sales, I subscribed to Marmalead for 2 months to learn SEO (search engine optimization). After I applied everything I learned in Rachel’s course—as well as applying my SEO skills by changing titles and keywords—I went from a total of 50 sales to over a total of 500 sales in less than 2 months. Sales virtually exploded, and I have made 6 figures every year. Currently, I have 20,136 total orders, have made more than a half million dollars, and that took almost 4 years of very hard work almost 24/7, very little sleep and a total eradication of my social life, including holidays. I started out with mugs only and used one POD only, but have now expanded to over 20 different products, over 1,400 listings and using 5 different PODs to print and ship my products. White mugs are still my best sellers to this day, but T-shirts are a close second.
5. What to expect on coaching calls: I am a thorough, highly detailed and methodical coach. I will share my Etsy shop–exclusive to Launch100 students only–so you can get an idea of what a successful shop looks like, and learn how to fill out everything correctly. My goal for you is to develop a high quality shop and high quality listings so you are on the first page of Etsy searches. I will request a link to your shop before our first call, so I can assess whether your Etsy shop has been set up properly and all of the sections have been completed. If not, then our first call will entail a step by step screen share of each section and how to complete them.
6. Once I’m satisfied that your shop has been set up correctly with all the sections filled in, our 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th meetings will entail teaching you how to create compelling listing titles, descriptions, by giving you tools to thoroughly learn SEO; teach you how to create mockups and give you resources to create mockups; do a review and critique of your shop, and give you recommendations to fix or improve your shop.
7. Additional coaching calls will involve teaching you the basics about ads and marketing, advanced Etsy features (such as creating snippets and custom orders), how to create personalized listings, editing variations, and manually ordering your products. I will also teach you how to add new and different products to your shop and the PODs I recommend you use. I give tons of tips and gold nuggets that I only share with students.
8. I tell it like it is. Please don’t take anything I say personally. I am providing constructive criticism in order for you to become a successful seller. Everyone has a different learning curve and different skill sets when first starting their journey in E-commerce. Don’t compare others to yourself! Take as much time as you need to learn each concept and put those concepts into action. This is not a race. It’s not even a running marathon or a competition to see who can get the most sales. This is about YOU! You go at a pace that is comfortable for you! Heck, I learn something new every single day about e-commerce. I believe learning is a lifelong process. So I urge you not to get frustrated or disappointed! Know that you will get there with proper training and the right tools, not to mention acquiring new skills, like customer service, designing and marketing. I’m with you all the way on this wonderful and exciting journey!
