If you're familiar with the idiom "look before you leap," then you're in the right territory for my take on it: "research before you act." Fore example, I won't purchase anything new online without doing at least an hour of research on the product, cross referencing reviews and technical aspects. So when it came to opening an Etsy shop, I poured myself into research to try and have everything set up according to advice, rather than having to go back later and seek out advice if my handmade products weren't selling. Here are the best bits I've learned from those videos and from my own experience.

1. First thing to do is see what competition is out there for your shop idea. And even if there are a lot of other sellers, if you can make a space for yourself by being niche, go for it (one highly viewed video talks about selling vegan bath bombs and standing out in the market by pushing the vegan aspects.) A way to determine this would be to sign up for a free trial of eRank and put in keywords you would use to sell your product/s and both note the information that comes as well as go search Etsy using those terms! I thought there were only 2-3 sellers on Etsy selling fabric button earrings....until I searched using some of these niche keywords and found many many more shops. Bam - way more competition than I thought I had. But my niche is using rescued fabrics and recycled materials, so on I went!
2. Have a well thought out plan for the visuals of your shop. Will you add videos to your products? How will the photos look uniform and appealing while also providing information that buyers may want to know? (apparently you need to find a way to get your most important facts from your product detail written section into your product photos.) How will the shop banner tie into your shop aesthetic and also include helpful information for buyers? For me, this piece has been the most fun and most challenging. I've been using a yoga block made out of cork for my product photoshoots, but the lighting and angle are too difficult to keep uniform (even with batch editing in Lightroom) so I'm now waiting on a small, foldable light box I purchased to come in so I can reshoot all of my product photos. It also took a lot of fiddling around to decide how to show the sizing of my product in comparison to real-life objects and the other size I offer. I settled on using the same three black and white photos for all of my listings.
3. Have a plan for shipping before you begin. This one took me a bit to figure out. Etsy offers shipping labels which are on par with Pirate Ship/Shippo. (However, if you're going to run a Shopify shop as well and want to keep organized, some sellers swear by using a third party shipping option to run both shops from.) If you choose Etsy shipping labels, you then have to choose how to show your shipping costs: either leave it on USPS charging your customers extra or show the Etsy prices. From there, you also need to have a plan for whether or not you'll offer free shipping or just free shipping on orders over $35. Also, it seems essential to have a personal printer and a uniform shipping container for size/weight. 

Those were my top three takeaways for deciding whether or not to start, and then how to start. Please be in touch with your own tips or questions. I'm sure I'll be writing in a few months to update on how it's going. Cheers!

Shall I list the ways - that I keep my presence active online? Honestly, it feels like it'd be simpler to tell you what I don't do. But for clarity's sake, I'd like to go into more detail. For the last few years, it's gone as follows:

• a personal email and a business email
• a personal webpage that I run through Weebly, domain through Namecheap
• a personal FB (and a business FB page that I do nothing with)
• a personal Instagram account (and a few "business" accounts that I don't use)
• a normally-dormant Pinterest account that sees bursts of activity
• a solidly average LinkedIn account
• a decent Twitter account that documents my time teaching art
• a TeachersPayTeachers store

In the last few months I have added:

• an Etsy shop
• a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) author account
• a Barnes & Nobles Press author account 

The purposes for being on all of these platforms is for the furthering of my teaching career and, now, for side gigs. As an international school teacher, I find obtaining the next high-quality post to be an extremely competitive situation. Running a website and teacher twitter account seem to be the new "having a masters degree," as in something that used to be considered extra and now feels expected. Fortunately, I find keeping a portfolio and teaching account very rewarding and am grateful for the documentation of the projects I've completed over the years. As for some of these other platforms, they're either experiments or necessary means to ends. But more on that in future blog posts...

Please let me know if you have questions about getting started on any of these platforms. Cheers!