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recently I set up a website not to replace my Etsy shop but to work alongside my Etsy shop and I have been putting all of my energy into that I guess fairly naturally a lot of people have been asking me how I'm finding sales and traffic on the website in comparison to Etsy and I've been saying that I'm going to do a video on it for a while I want to go into it in a bit more depth and be able to show you behind the scenes at some point but I haven't been on the website for very long and I haven't been actively promoting it for very long so I'm waiting to build up some more data however oh my cat just jumped on the window so you want to come in okay right where was I website an Etsy comparison as I say I'm going to take you in behind the scenes in more detail at some point but for now I just wanted to say something about the comparison because I think we're in danger of some people thinking that a website is a nice easy fix to getting traffic and sales it's not I personally am finding there to be very little difference but there's a very big reason why that is but I did talk about this at some point last year in another video which I'll link at the end of this one in case you're interested in watching it and I'll put a link in the description too basically explaining how I use Etsy which I think is different to how the majority of people use Etsy now we all know that you need to um you have to promote your shop and try and drive as much traffic as possible and not just rely on organic traffic or paid traffic from ads and what have you however not many people take action on that knowledge whereas I went to the complete opposite extreme and I basically just imagined that you could not get organic anything on Etsy and you couldn't pay for it I basically used it as a holding page for my items it was essentially a cart to hire and I imagine that I had to do all of the marketing and all of the promotion and all of the generating traffic myself obviously it doesn't work that way and if you do all of that the idea is in theory that the Etsy algorithm will pick up on the fact that you're bringing traffic in to your shop it hopefully you're making sales because that's King and then it kind of it adds on to that because it wants to highlight more of what sells it didn't always work out that way though that's how it should work in theory but I often found that the sales that I got on Etsy were sales that came from the stuff that I was doing off of the site and the moment I stopped putting all of my attention and effort onto Etsy and then I started moving it to my website Etsy didn't just slow down and then come to a gradual halt my sales and my traffic came to a sudden halt it was instant and and that kind that surprised me I'm not gonna lie I thought it was going to be a bit more gradual but no so um the only traffic that I'm bringing across to my Etsy Shop currently at the time of filming um come from my link on my other channel because I'm still selling my digital patterns my embroidery patterns on my Etsy shop but I'm not promoting them so occasionally people will come across Etsy is still claiming to be sending organic traffic my way but when you break it down and you look at the search phrases that people have used to find my shop it's usually the actual shop name which of course they'll only know from my work again off the site so is that mine or is that etsy's you you decide it's mine and so because I knew that I was the one who was bringing customers onto my shop and therefore getting those sales I kind of had it in the back of my mind that when I moved that across to the website it would be more or less the same and it is I'm making more or less the same amount of sales on my website as I was on my Etsy shop I'm getting fewer visits to my website but this is what I find really interesting because I'd always suspected that the visits or the views on my Etsy Shop didn't necessarily matter and I I don't trust the Etsy stats very much I think Etsy are probably very creative so even though I'm getting fewer visits to my website I'm getting about the same amount of sales and that's important because visits views whatever you want to count it means nothing if they're not converting into sales and this is the thing that I've been mentioning over and over again because people get so stuck on the visits and on bringing people to their shop but they they don't think about the next step which is are those the right kind of visits are they people just viewing your shot because you're shouting about it or are you actually attracting buyers and customers and people who actually want your thing that's the most important part and people get so hung up on SEO and focusing on what gets them views um they forget the next bit which is as equally important if not perhaps a little bit more now this won't be the case for everyone because granted I have spent the last few years really focusing on building a community around my business because I do think Community is key and also I've spoken in the past about the importance of a mailing list my mailing list is tiny but it's really engaged and it's really strong because I am so I am so possessive isn't the right word but I I don't try and just collect people for uh numbers sake periodically I will send out emails to everyone who haven't been opening my emails over a certain period of time and I will let them know that if they if they want to stay on the mailing list they have to click a button and say so otherwise if I don't hear back from someone they get removed but it's because I want my mailing list to be a really strong high quality place for people who are interested in my work and if they're not interested in my work they don't need to be on there and again people get too hung up on the numbers which is ridiculous because nobody sees your numbers nobody cares it's about attracting people who are interested in your work and the video that I referred to earlier basically talked about the three things that I think are so important to build up the foundations to your business and that's a mailing list a website and a community and this year I've been focusing on the website but for the last few years mailing list and Community those are the two things and this is why my sales haven't changed a huge amount after moving from Etsy to a website it does take a website time to build up organic traffic if you're going for Google Traffic but I knew from the bat that I was going to be bringing a lot over myself and I was going to be doing the promotion so I wasn't too concerned with the organic traffic this this way of doing things isn't for everyone but it works for me and my business and that's why I thought I would make this video because I thought it might be of use to some people put it this way you can take what you find useful from this video and leave the rest but if you are on Etsy and you don't have much of a community and you don't have a mailing list and you're not getting the sales that you want start working on these things you don't have to jump straight to a website in fact I think there are there are reasons why some people shouldn't I've been working for myself for 10 years and I've only just started my own website granted I do think I should have started a bit earlier than that but I'm just saying you don't have to have a website off the bat obviously the sooner the better but if your budget isn't there for example don't worry about it you can you can build up to that but Community is so freaking important and so is a mailing list I know a mailing list seems like an old way of doing things but it's it's the one thing that you can take around with you wherever you go wherever you move around on the internet Tick Tock YouTube Instagram Facebook whatever a mailing list is something that you can move around with you and take wherever you go so it's worth so to anybody who has been asking and anybody else who has simply been wondering I hope that helps a little bit the website is working really well for me I suspected it would but there was an awful lot of work that went on before the website that has helped it be the success that it currently is and that would be what I would say to you it's it's not an easy fix it's not a quick thing to build a mailing list or to build a community it takes time and effort a lot of effort but it's worth it okay it's actually freezing cold in here and I cannot feel my fingers so I'm that's why I'm like this is the video that I was talking about earlier um where I go into more detail about those three things that you can do to Super proof future proof your business so yeah go give that a watch and um go start a mailing list if you haven't already