One of my recent scopes was about 3 limiting beliefs that nearly all handmade shop owners have. Seriously, you are probably holding on to at least one of these.
“It’s not worth/ no one will pay that much for this item.”
Derp. No no no. You NEED to charge the right price, otherwise you are just playing business.
“I can’t go out on my own with a standalone site because I’ll need a ton of traffic in order to make good money.”
Nope. Not true. You just need the RIGHT traffic. And you’ll get the right traffic if you start directing people to YOUR site rather than your marketplace site. All that hustling you do to get visitors into your Etsy shop — switch it over to your site.
“I’ll annoy people if I post/ email/ promote too much.”
Hmm… no. Nope. You won’t. And hey if you do? They can UNFOLLOW. Let them go, too. Here’s the deal: it’s actually MORE annoying as a consumer to NOT hear from a brand you love about something they are doing/ selling/ working on etc because if you want to get their updates, then you WANT to get their updates. I get so annoyed when I miss a sale or a new product release from a brand I love if they don’t send me an email about it or they on;y post about it once or twice and I miss it. No one sees every post everywhere. You’re not annoying, you’re informing.
Wow – I’ve thought about those three things many many times – I’ve just started my own stand alone website shop on shopify and it is difficult – but I just made my first sale while writing this!
I think I have to get over ‘annoying people too much’ – but also that people WILL be able to pay what I am asking because a lot of effort and hard work has gone into my pieces :)