No this is not a real estate episode! Today we're talking about the dangers of building your business on the backs of other businesses - namely social media platforms and marketplaces - like Etsy. These are platforms where the customers and users are not yours, where you can be removed at any time and where algorithms are created to support the platform's goals - not yours.
So what can you do to build your business on solid footing. It's time to take ownership of your business and build assets that are yours. Here's how!
This is a great episode for anyone who:
This episode is brought to you by our Premium Subscriber Community on Patreon and Buzzsprout
For a summary of this episode and all the links mentioned please visit:
Episode156: Rent or Own: The Dangers of Building a Creative Business on Rented Land
You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.
You can connect with the podcast on:
For a list of all available episodes, please visit:
And She Looked Up Creative Hour Podcast
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
No this is not a real estate episode! Today we're talking about the dangers of building your business on the backs of other businesses - namely social media platforms and marketplaces - like Etsy. These are platforms where the customers and users are not yours, where you can be removed at any time and where algorithms are created to support the platform's goals - not yours.
So what can you do to build your business on solid footing. It's time to take ownership of your business and build assets that are yours. Here's how!
This is a great episode for anyone who:
This episode is brought to you by our Premium Subscriber Community on Patreon and Buzzsprout
For a summary of this episode and all the links mentioned please visit:
Episode156: Rent or Own: The Dangers of Building a Creative Business on Rented Land
You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.
You can connect with the podcast on:
For a list of all available episodes, please visit:
And She Looked Up Creative Hour Podcast
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
This week's episode of the and she Looked Up podcast is brought to you by our premium subscriber community on Patreon and Buzzsprout. Their ongoing financial support of the show ensures I can continue to bring the podcast to you. Want to help out? Head over to patreoncom. Forward slash, and she looked up. That's patreon p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com. Forward slash, and she looked up. That's Patreon P-A-T-R-E-O-Ncom. Forward slash and she looked up. There you can join the community for free or you can choose to be a premium supporter for $4.50 a month, and that's in Canadian dollars. Paid supporters get access to a monthly exclusive podcast episode only available to premium subscribers. You can also click the support the show link in the episode notes on your podcast player to support us via Buzzsprout, where you will also get access to each month's exclusive premium supporter episode. I can't tell you how much I appreciate all our monthly supporters. They are the engine that keeps the podcast running and they're a pretty cool bunch too. And now let's get on with the show.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Angie Looked Up Podcast. Each week we sit down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. I'm your host, melissa Hartfield, and, after leaving a 20-year career in corporate retail, I've been happily self-employed for 12 years. I'm a graphic designer, an illustrator and a multi-six-figure-a-year entrepreneur in the digital content space. This podcast is for the artists, the makers and the creatives who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Speaker 1:Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the and she Looked Up podcast. As always, I am your host, melissa, and this week's episode is a solo episode, so it's just going to be me chatting with you all, and I wanted to talk today about the difference between building your business on rented land or land that you own, and the inspiration for this episode came out of some time that I spent last week on Threads, which is Instagram's new offshoot social media platform. That's basically a refreshed version of Twitter, and one of the things I've noticed is that Instagram is getting really good at marketing it. They show you threads they think you might be interested in in your Instagram feed, so you can't avoid the platform, even if you wanted to, and for whatever reason. A lot of the threads that I get shown are other creatives, other creators, which is great. I'm always looking for new creatives to follow, but all the threads that they show me are creatives complaining specifically about social media algorithms or the platforms that they sell on, or, honestly, it's just a lot of complaining and it's a little bit much. To be honest, I wind up muting a lot of them because that's just not why I'm on social media. When I'm scrolling social media for to relax or whatever I just want to see paintings and drawings and cool art and people doing cool creative things, and I'm just not in the mood to listen to people grumble about their business, because I own a business. I grumble about it all the time, so when I'm taking a break, I don't want to hear other people grumble about theirs. Anyway, it was really shocking to me that this because Heather and I talk about this all the time. We talk about, uh, the importance of, of multiple streams of revenue, of getting outside and meeting new people, of of marketing yourself off of social media and we have lots of episodes about that and I will link to a bunch of them in the show notes. Um, but for whatever reason there's, there still seems to be a lot of people out there who feel that somehow Instagram is doing them a dirty. And I'm not saying I disagree, but I am saying that Instagram is not a platform that you own and and I feel like there's still a lot of people out there who don't understand the difference between renting real estate and owning real estate when it comes to your business. And I'm not talking about going out and buying a bricks and mortar store. That's not where we're going with this.
Speaker 1:If you think about renting a home, you rent a home. Think about renting a home. You rent a home. It's an apartment, a townhouse, a house, whatever it may be. You get to live in that home, you can build a life there, you get to know your neighbors, you start going to spin classes at the local rec center, you know where all the local coffee shops are that you can work in, you start using the library and you start to build a life around this space that you are renting. It's your home, and if something happens to the home let's say your oven dies or you have a plumbing emergency somebody else is responsible for it. If your oven dies, your landlord or the property management company gets you a new one. If there's a plumbing emergency, a plumber is called and they come and fix the problem, and it doesn't cost you a dime and you don't have to deal with insurance or any of that stuff. It's somebody else's problem. You just get to live there and live your life and do what you do, and it's great.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of benefits to renting. Don't get me wrong, I'm not. There's some really good things about it. But at any point your landlord can come to you and say hey, melissa, we are going to be dramatically renovating this property in the next year and you aren't going to be able to live here. While we do that, we're giving you three months notice. Or we've decided to move family into the property, or we are selling the property and the new owners do not want tenants or whatever the case may be, and everybody's rental laws are different around the country. I know that.
Speaker 1:And so all of a sudden, you find yourself looking for a new apartment or a new townhouse or whatever the case may be, and you have to start over again. You move into a new space. You have to find a new spin class. You have to find new coffee shops, you have to the same spin class, and maybe you have a new sushi place on the corner that's closer to you, but you still have to make new friends, meet new neighbors. It's different people and you might carry people over from the old life you had at the old rental property. You may still stay friends with some of your neighbors and go see them for a coffee and that kind of thing, but you have to uproot yourself and start over somewhere else and lay new roots.
Speaker 1:When you own your own property you can lay down roots without worrying that somebody is going to come along and tell you you have to leave. I mean, I suppose they could, but it would be for very different big reasons. So you can start to really put down roots. You know that this is going to be the place that you're going to occupy for a long time and you can start to build the life you want without worrying about your lease being ended. And so you start to do things that maybe you wouldn't have done in your rental, like you get to plant a garden or you're allowed to have more than three pots on the patio or whatever the case may be. You can meet your neighbors, they become friends, you get to know all the people in your community and you start to build connections and roots and you don't have to worry about them going away unless you choose to leave or unless they choose to leave, which, frankly, can happen when you rent as well.
Speaker 1:However, when you own a home, all of a sudden there's all these other things you need to worry about. If your stove breaks, you have to go out and buy a new stove. You have to arrange delivery. You have to arrange for somebody to get rid of your broken stove. If there's a plumbing emergency, you're the one who has to call your insurance broker. You're the one who has to find a plumber. You're the one that has to deal with the mess, depending on how big it is. That's all on you. When you own your own home, there's a lot of maintenance that needs to be taken care of. That you don't have to worry about when you rent and you're the one who has to go out and find the quotes, find the contractors, find the handy people to come help you. You have to mow the lawn. You have to do all the things when you own your own space, but there's security there in knowing that nobody can take that space away from you. So this is what I'm talking about when I'm saying renting or owning your own space.
Speaker 1:When you have a business. If you are operating on platforms like social media Instagram, tiktok threads, whatever the case may be or you build your business on a marketplace like Etsy or maybe eBay or Society6 or other platforms like that, again, you don't own those platforms. You are renting space on them. When you have your own website, you own it. You own the domain name. It's yours as long as you keep paying for it. So in a way, I guess you're leasing the domain name, but nobody else can have it unless you decide to give it up. When you own your own real estate on the internet, you are responsible for the back end of it, for all the maintenance, for doing all the work, unless you work with a third-party platform like Shopify or Wix or Squarespace and, yes, things can happen to those third-party platforms but you still own the capital in your business. You own your brand identity. You own your domain name. You have your customer data. Even if Shopify were to go away tomorrow, you still have your customer information. You can move to another platform and build again. Those are things that are harder to do on social media, where you do not own the space.
Speaker 1:I think a really good way to think of it is when you're on Etsy, your customers are Etsy's customers first and your customers second. When you are on Instagram, your followers are Instagram users first and your followers second. When you have your own website, your customers are your customers first, not somebody else's your customers first, not somebody else's, and that is a very different kind of mindset when you approach it from that perspective. The other difference, when I'm talking about renting and owning and comparing it to social media when you rent or own a property, you pay for it. When you rent, you pay a monthly rental fee to live there. When you own a property, you paid to buy it or you are making a mortgage payment every month on your way to owning it outright. When you are on social media, you're not paying a dime. Basically, you're basically you're squatting on land that you don't own, you don't, it's not yours and you're not even paying to be there. Somebody is just saying, yeah, come on in, you can sit down. Same with Etsy. You're really not paying to be on Etsy until you sell something and yes, I know there's a 20 cent listing fee, but honestly, that is really not paying to play. That's just to make you think before you upload anything and everything, and it's a completely reasonable fee, but you're not paying the actual bulk of your fees until you sell an item on Etsy, so you're not paying rent to be there.
Speaker 1:You don't have any say in how things are run on any of these platforms. You do not have the ability to access your customers or your followers outside of the platform, and the reason for that is because they are Etsy customers, not yours, or they're Instagram users, not your website users. This is a really important distinction that you have to come to terms with and you have to think about in every, every time you make a decision in your business, because what can happen on Etsy or Instagram or TikTok or any of these platforms is at any moment they can say your lease is over, you're out and there's nothing you can do about it because you weren't even paying rent in the first place. They don't owe you an explanation because you're not paying rent and they get to just tell you to leave. At least, when you rent an apartment, the landlord has to give you notice that they won't be renewing your lease or that they need you to leave and you have time to get your things together and move out, find a new place and make other arrangements. When Etsy or Instagram says you're done, you're done, that's it, there's an there's, there's an appeal process, but, um, it's not guaranteed you'll get an answer or that you'll be in reinstated or that you'll even know what you did wrong. Very often we don't. We don't know what we did wrong. Sometimes Etsy's nice and we'll tell you it's a copyright infringement strike or something like that, and they give you the opportunity to clear it up. Um, and carry on. But actually, just yesterday I was watching a YouTube video. I don't know if those of you who sell on Etsy you may be familiar with Star L'Amour. She runs a very useful YouTube channel. She is a manager at E-Rank, which is an Etsy SEO tool that a lot of you are probably familiar with and she has, I think she does some Etsy coaching. But her YouTube channel is extremely useful and she often runs lives along with her husband where they talk about things going on in the Etsy universe.
Speaker 1:And recently Etsy just had their most recent investor call. This is what happens when companies who are publicly traded. They have quarterly investment calls where they sit down with their investors, tell them what's happening, explain results, investors get to ask questions etc. And so they were discussing what had happened at the most recent Etsy investor call, and one of the things that they revealed on this call is that Etsy now has 9 million sellers on the platform. Three months ago, it had seven and a half million sellers. It's increased by one and a half million sellers in three months, and Etsy is finally admitting that there is an issue here, that there are too many sellers on the platform. It is making it very difficult for people to shop on the platform and find what they're looking for, and so they are starting to crack down on the rules that they're able to crack down on, and she explained some of the things that Etsy can't crack down on on their own and the things that they can. And because there is such a glut of sellers on the platform, they just don't have the ability to necessarily give you a reason why you're being shut down. You broke a rule, and they talked a lot about how they're doing this using AI tools which are not human, and so, yes, some mistakes are being made, but in a lot of cases, there is a legitimate reason that people are being shut down, and she talks about how they know that and everything was really interesting. But the bottom line was this is that Etsy is shutting people down who make mistakes and they're not giving them a reason because they need to call the number of sellers that are on the platform. They need to get it down to a level that makes sense for the number of buyers on the platform.
Speaker 1:It's a really interesting YouTube episode. It's very long, it's almost two hours. I think it was an hour and 50 minutes and I haven't listened to the whole thing. I'm about two thirds of the way through. I was so tired last night I just I had to stop, but it was super interesting. It held my attention the whole way through and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But if you're on Etsy and you have been struggling with a lot of things that are happening on Etsy right now, I highly recommend giving it a listen. So I'll put that in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Anyway, the point being that Etsy is a marketplace and it is its own business. It's a publicly traded business with shareholders and they need to make money for those shareholders and they are going to make the decisions that are best for Etsy, not for Melissa's shop, not for your shop, not for your friend's shop, for Etsy. And you may not agree that those are the best moves for Etsy, but that's not your decision because it's not your business. Those are the best moves for Etsy, but that's not your decision because it's not your business. So we need to come to terms with this and accept it and decide if we're willing to pay play by those rules or if we want to make changes into how we run our own businesses. And for some of you, that might mean it's time for you to start your own website or for you to keep your options open. For others, it might mean having both, and for some of you, you might be just fine. You know what If Etsy shuts you down? Oh well, you'll worry about that when it happens.
Speaker 1:All three are completely legitimate strategies. It's up to you and what works for you, but I would suggest that if this is your business and it's a business that you want to continue to have, then you need to either diversify or you need to move off of platforms like that. If you're not willing to take those risks, for me, I choose to diversify. I have Etsy, I have my own website, I have a few other things, because each of them has different pros and cons for me, and I like to have a mix. I like to know that if something isn't going well in one place, it might be going well in another place. I have options. I'm not putting all of my eggs in one basket. So if you are willing to just take your chances with Etsy, that's totally fine, and maybe for you this is more of a hobby than a business. Maybe you don't rely on this to pay all your bills and so you're willing to take a bigger risk.
Speaker 1:The same thing with social media. It's not as drastic. We don't sell directly on social media in the same way that we might on Etsy. Absolutely, you can link your Instagram account to your Etsy shop or to your Shopify store or you know those types of things, so that people can purchase from you directly more easily. But you're not running a full scale shop on these platforms. You're using the platform more as a marketing tool to get in front of people, and that's one of the benefits of Etsy too. When these platforms have millions and in some cases, billions of users, you have access to them in a way that you do not have when you run your own shop. You can eventually have access to that many people, but it's going to take you a lot of work to get there and these platforms give you a jumpstart to getting in front of people. That would take you a lot longer if you just had your own website.
Speaker 1:So pros and cons, but you need to understand. If you're getting to a point where you've got a thousand followers on on Instagram or 10,000, or a hundred thousand or half a million and that's the only way you're able to communicate with those people, you are putting yourself in a very risky situation. You don't have any customer data on them. Situation. You don't have any customer data on them. If Etsy were to disappear tomorrow, or if your shop were to be hacked, or if your account were to be hacked or if Etsy decided you were done, you would lose access to all those people. The same with TikTok.
Speaker 1:Recently, there's a lot of stuff in the news about the US and a bill that they're passing where they want TikTok to potentially divest themselves of their Chinese ownership and require them to be purchased by an American company. Why it has to be an American company, I don't know. I find the whole thing mind boggling. But it hasn't happened yet. But the steps to make it happen are moving forward, and so that's something to consider. Even if you're not a US person using TikTok, you're a Canadian using TikTok to speak to people.
Speaker 1:There's a potential that you could lose a lot of your US followers, or people in the US who look at your content and you have no control over that. So if I were you and you were on TikTok right now, I would be making steps to get those people into your universe, the real estate that you own. Get them onto your email list, Let them know that you have your own website, give them options of where they can find you, and start doing it now, before everyone else is scrambling. If it comes to that and I don't know if it will come to that, but it appears that that is the direction things are going in, so it's definitely something you want to be aware of.
Speaker 1:When these things happen, when the algorithm doesn't go your way or, if heaven forbid you get booted or something happens to your account, you're basically losing something that was given to you for free, that you were never guaranteed would be there forever, that you don't own and that's not yours, and you need to be fully aware of that it's no good complaining about the algorithm, because that's how algorithms work they change, they adapt. Things happen. If the company that owns the platform you're on decides that their goals are going, they change. They adapt. Things happen. If the company that owns the platform you're on decides that their goals are going to change, then the algorithm is going to change to help them meet those goals, and it's very easy for us to sit there and say, well, these platforms would be nothing without us. Yes and no. I mean there's still lots of great content creators on Instagram. If you were to be booted off next week, would it make a big difference to the platform as a whole? Not really. I mean, I would love to say that it would, but for the vast majority of us, it wouldn't even make a blip on Instagram's radar, or probably the people who use Instagram, and so you know, we have to be really realistic about where we fit into the bigger picture and plan accordingly.
Speaker 1:There's also this whole thing of complaining about the algorithm very publicly on your business accounts. It gets a bit tiresome for your users. It's like we all have that one friend who just never seems to be happy or is always complaining about something, and after a while, it just gets to be a downer to hang out with them, and so you start to limit the amount of time you spend with them until eventually, maybe they're not even in your life anymore, because it's just a bit much. You don't want to be that person on Instagram. You don't want to be that business who's constantly begging their followers to save them from the algorithm or to help them boost their following or their ranking or whatever the case may be. That's not why people are there.
Speaker 1:Think about what your brand identity is. If your brand identity is to bring joy to the people who shop from you and there's many different types of brand identities you can have but let's take that as an example. And all you're doing is being a downer. You're not bringing your user, your followers, joy. You're bumming them out. And that's not to say that our followers aren't rooting for us and don't want us to be successful. They do, but there's a limit to how much they can take. And when they're on a platform where they go to relax and de-stress from the day and it's just listening to complaining, it's not great. So you got to kind of pull back on that.
Speaker 1:I think it's not to say you can never talk about it, but it shouldn't be every day and it really does feel like there's some creators out there where it's just pretty constant. So if that's you, you might want to just reconsider. Start creating some art and putting it out there. Start creating something and putting it out there and focus on the people who are there for you and start making steps to bring people into your own ecosystem. Because, yeah, you're paying your rent fee. It's free marketing and free marketing Most marketing activities are not free.
Speaker 1:Social media is really one of the only free marketing activities and even there, a lot of us have realized that to get seen, we need to pay to play, because it's a marketing platform. That's the reason we're on it. There's a lot of us out there. If we didn't have to market, our businesses wouldn't go anywhere near social media. It feels like it's a necessary thing that we need to do and we're starting to realize that. I need to have a marketing budget, I need to run ads, I need to get seen. Then you are paying some rent, I guess, when you buy ads on these platforms.
Speaker 1:So how do you get people into your own ecosystem? First of all, you need to have a place that's yours, and so for most of us, that is our own website, and that could be through Shopify or Wix or Squarespace I listed them all earlier. It could be a bricks and mortar store, keeping in mind that, unless you own the real estate that your bricks and mortar store is on, you're still on rented land. You probably have a lease, so there is some renting going on there. But it's a little different. It's a little more secure than social media. Again, your landlord isn't just going to boot you out overnight unless you do something egregious that breaks the terms of your lease. You may have a very long-term lease, but things happen. So, for most of us, a very long-term lease, but things happen. So for most of us, it's a website, or it could be an email list, or both.
Speaker 1:And, yes, you can have an email list without having a website. This is something I think a lot of people don't know, but you can set up a free account on MailChimp, flowdesk, mail Actually, flowdesk, I don't think, has a free account but MailerLite, convertkit, I think almost all of them have a free account. You don't need a website, you just need an email address. Most of them will no longer use a Gmail address. You will need to have a com address based on your own domain. This is a new thing that has come into effect in the last little bit, so you can start up your own email list.
Speaker 1:Most of these platforms will give you the tools to create a landing page where people can sign up. So you don't need a website. You can use the free landing page, set it up with a little box on it and there's. All these platforms have templates that you can use. So it's very simple. You set it up, people sign up, you get access to their email address. That list becomes yours. You might store it on your platform on MailChimp or ConvertKit or whatever you're using but you can download that list into a spreadsheet at any time and keep it. But you can download that list into a spreadsheet at any time and keep it.
Speaker 1:I do this regularly so that I make sure I always have, because things happen. But you can do that and then you can start communicating directly with your people. You can start sending them emails regularly. You can talk to them in those emails. You can sell to them in those emails. You can encourage them to engage with you through those emails. There's a lot you can do with those emails and you don't need a website to do it. And then, if something happens to your Etsy shop or your social media channels, you can still talk to your people. It's great. You can encourage people to sign up because you'll have a link for that landing page. You can share that link on your social media platforms. You don't need to do it every day, but you need to do it more than once every six months. So it could be one of those things that you do weekly, just reminding people hey, I have an email newsletter If you want to sign up. This is where you get inside access to sales and coupon codes.
Speaker 1:But I also show you really cool stuff that's going on behind the scenes. You'll get to see glimpses. I do a little thing where I show glimpses of what's going on in my sketchbook or works in progress or things they can expect to see coming out in the days, weeks, months ahead. I'm starting a new thing that I'm calling the sketchbook diaries, where I'm showing them stuff from my sketchbook that has never been shown on social media or anywhere else. So it's like little peeks into like the very raw side of my creative brain and you can do things like that.
Speaker 1:You can tell them what's going on in your life, but you have a way to build relationships with those people, and that's really important, because when you're on Etsy, you're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to communicate with people outside of the Etsy platform, and you can encourage people to sign up for your mailing list on Etsy, but they have very specific rules about how you can do that. So it's really important that you read the Etsy handbook and make sure that you're doing that in a way that works for them. But what you can do is, when you send out an Etsy order, drop a little card in there that encourages people to sign up for your email list. Offer them a 15% off coupon for their next purchase. If you don't have your own website, the coupon can just be for Etsy. If you have your own website and Etsy, you can make the coupon code work for both and give them the choice, or you can just make it work for your own website and try and push them in that direction. So you can do things like that.
Speaker 1:I was talking to somebody recently who puts a little magnet in. It's a very cute magnet. People put it on their fridge and then they're always looking at the magnet. It's got her website and other information so that they can always find her. So you could do that with a sticker. There's so many different ways you could do that in your Etsy packaging. And then, of course, on social media you can promote these things.
Speaker 1:You can talk about your newsletter. You can let people know. You can even give people access to back issues. Very often of your newsletter there's usually a browser view and browser link that you can share newsletter. There's usually a browser view and browser link that you can share. I use MailChimp where I can. I actually have a link that will give people access to all my past newsletters and I can share that with them. I do that in my services business because I do a monthly newsletter that is a very detailed info on how the customers in the niche that I serve can use the services I provide, and so it's kind of almost like a little mini course If they get access to all the emails. There's a lot of things you can do with email and we've done a few episodes on email. I'll put links to those in the show notes, but if you would like more help with email, please let me know, because this is actually what I do in the services side of my business. I spend I do a lot of work on email marketing and digital marketing for the food niche, so it's something I have a lot of experience with and I'm happy to talk more about it if that's something people think would be helpful.
Speaker 1:If you want to go the route of starting your own website, you'll need to get a domain name. If you already have a domain name, you're halfway there, and then you'll need to set up your own site. You can build a site from scratch. It's very tedious, very time consuming, very difficult, and you're probably gonna have to hire somebody to do it for you and that's going to cost you a lot of money. Or you can use a number of e-commerce platforms out there that are designed to make it a lot easier. Those are platforms like Shopify, squarespace, woocommerce, wix. Those are kind of the four most popular ones that creatives tend to use. I use Shopify, I have experience with Squarespace and I have experience with WooCommerce. Shopify for me is currently the easiest one to use and it's a Canadian company, so I like to support other Canadian companies, even though sometimes they really irritate me. But that's going to happen with any platform that you use. So these are third-party platforms that manage your backend for you. So they make it very easy for you to accept payments, they make it easy for you to incorporate your shipping, they make it easy for you to upload your products and run sales, and they offer you a lot of functionality that would be very expensive to code if you were to build an e-commerce site from scratch. So you will have to pay to use these platforms.
Speaker 1:I just paid my Shopify bill for the year. I think it was $453 or something like that. They all have different levels, plans that you can purchase, with different features. So I don't have the top tier features. I don't need that. I don't have a busy shop, I don't have a bricks and mortar store, and that is one of the nice things is, a lot of these platforms also give you the ability to connect a bricks and mortar store or even wholesale orders to your own website, so that's great. So I'm able to use my Shopify POS when I do markets, so I'm able to go to a market, and when people purchase from me at markets, it automatically deducts it from my Shopify inventory so that people who are shopping on my site as well. Everybody's seeing a real-time inventory. It manages all my sales, so when it comes tax time, I don't have to worry about my market sales being somewhere separate. They're all already in Shopify. It just makes life easier, anyway. So you're going to have to set up a platform like that.
Speaker 1:There's lots of themes out there that you can change. There's some great YouTube channels out there that will help you create the shop of your dreams. Again, you can hire somebody to make it look the way you want it to look. Lots of options. You don't need all the bells and whistles when you're starting out. I've had my Shopify store for almost two years now and I still don't need all the bells and whistles, and I probably never will, unless I dramatically change something within my business. But once you have your own real estate, it gives you a lot more control and independence over how you run your business.
Speaker 1:If you were to lose your Etsy site tomorrow, it's not as big of a deal. Yes, it's still going to be stressful and it's going to be upsetting and really frustrating, but at least you have your own website and hopefully you've got that email list and you can let people know. You can even email your list and say, hey, I've had my Etsy shop shut down, I'm not going to be able to sell on there anymore, but I want to let you know that my own website is still up and running and all my products are there and I really look forward to serving you and hopefully people will come this way. If something changes in the Instagram algorithm or the TikTok algorithm, you can still talk to your people. Okay, if you're not getting in front of them when they're scrolling on Instagram, you can still get in front of them by sending them an email. Okay, so build those lists while you can.
Speaker 1:I think one of the other pros to having your own website to your own real estate, is you have a stronger brand identity. One of the things and I think if you sell on Etsy, you probably have had this happen to you but very often people there are people who shop on Etsy who don't realize that all the places they're picking items from are separate shops. It's really hard to stand out as a branded shop on Etsy, whereas when you have your own website, people understand that this brand is you, this is your shop, and it gives you a lot more control. It makes it easier to market yourself when you have a really strong brand identity, and there's a lot of benefits to that. So that is something to consider if especially if you want to start doing wholesale, where you're selling to retailers and things like that you want to have that really strong brand identity, and that's harder to build on a marketplace than it is when you have your own platform. You can use social media as a way to reinforce your brand identity, but your brand identity should not solely be on social media. That's a very dangerous position to put yourself into.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned before, audience ownership when you've got that email list, you have the ability to talk directly to your people. When people purchase from you on your own website, you have access to all that purchase data and it's far more in depth than it is on Etsy. You have access to so much more information. You can also tie it into Google Analytics and gather even more data, and data is extremely valuable. That's why so many companies have loyalty apps. It's not to reward you for being a loyal customer, it's to give you something so that they can get your data, and I don't think people realize that, but that's actually what I used to do when I worked in IT and retail is I used to take all this data and do stuff with it so that the higher ups could make decisions. Okay, so when you own your audience, you have direct access to that data and it's worth a lot of money, so keep that in mind.
Speaker 1:When you have your own real estate, you have more access to, you have access to more money, and you have to be very careful here, because you know, when you sell on Etsy, etsy takes a lot of different fees. There's a listing fee, there's the payment processing fee and then there's just the fee for selling something on Etsy, and you have to make sure that you price your products well so that you are actually making money on Etsy. A lot of people do not price themselves properly and actually lose money on Etsy. You also want to leave some room so that you can run ads on Etsy, if that's something you decide you want to do. When you sell on your own website, you have to pay a payment processing fee. That's it. However, like I said, I just paid $453 for the use of the Shopify platform for another year, so there are other fees, but when you make an action, when somebody makes an actual purchase, you see more of that money coming to you directly. So you do need to factor in those things and you'll probably still want to run ads when you have your own website. You might want to run them on Google or do meta ads or Pinterest ads there's lots of different places you can run ads, so pricing is really key in your business, regardless of which platform you are selling on, but you do get to keep a little bit more of your own money when you sell on your own website.
Speaker 1:The next thing I want to mention is thinking long term. Etsy is a great place to start out, but if this is something you want to do for years to come, if this is a business you want to build and grow, then you need to think strategically and just having an Etsy shop may not be sustainable in the long term. This is why I'm a big believer in multiple streams of revenue and having different places that people can buy from you, because you just you never know what's going to happen and, as I mentioned in the YouTube video I was watching last night, they talked about how Etsy is a bit of a mess right now and Etsy is even admitting things are a bit of a mess right now and if you talk to a lot of Etsy sellers, they're having trouble getting sales right now and there's a lot of reasons for this. Some of it's Etsy, some of it's the economy just it's life. It's also a more traditionally slower period for a lot of creative businesses Most of us. Our busy period is fourth quarter, so there's a lot of things going on there.
Speaker 1:But again, when you have your own real estate, when you have access to those people, you can run a sale on your own website. You can email your audience and let them know that you're running a sale on your website or on Etsy or wherever you sell. And that's something you can't do if you're just renting and you don't have access to their contact information or being able to contact your customers as a group. There's no way on Etsy, to send a message to everyone who's ever bought from you and let them know that you're running a 10% discount in your Etsy shop. You can't do that. When you have your own mailing list, you can do that. So that's something to think about.
Speaker 1:When it comes to community building, you can build a much stronger community through your own site than you can on social media Because, again, on social media, you always run the risk of having your account shut down or of an algorithm change or something that impacts your ability to be seen even by the people who've chosen to follow you, and that can be very frustrating. But again, when you build your own community elsewhere, on your own real estate, through your email list in person, we've done whole episodes on how you can build your community off of social media. I'll put links to those in the show notes so you can read up on those. But you want to look at social media as a supplement to what you're doing in your business. It is a supplement to the community that you're building on your own space. It is a supplement to your own website. It's not your business. Just don't fall into that trap. I've been doing this for so many years now it's almost 15 years, for so many years now. It's almost 15 years and I can't tell you how many people I have seen lose access to their entire business because they never diversified off of social media. Everything was built on social media. Their entire customer base was their social media following and once that was gone, they had no way to get it back and it's really hard to regrow an account. I have a client who's doing it right now for Facebook and it's really rough.
Speaker 1:Having your own website is also. There's a credibility and a trust factor there. This is particularly important if you do decide that you want to do wholesale, which is where you would be maybe selling your product into small boutiques in your neighborhood or even in your country, or even globally you never know. It depends on how big you want to get. It's great for growing within your own physical community where you live. If you're participating in markets, it's really nice to be able to give people a card that has your website where they can find you and purchase from you after the market. It just adds a little bit more to your credibility, and I think one of the biggest points I want to make before I wrap this all up is that one of the things that's really key for us as small business owners and as creatives and remember we are creatives, we're good at coming up with creative ideas and creative solutions and creative ways of doing things when you are able to sell on multiple platforms, it gives you a lot more flexibility and adaptability.
Speaker 1:When you have your own website, you are able to experiment in ways that you can't necessarily on Etsy. How many of us have a bestseller on Etsy that we don't dare touch because we're terrified it will drop in the rankings, and so it becomes a little difficult to experiment and try new things. And when you have your own website, you have a little bit more leeway. That way you can try out products, you can try different ways of marketing, you can try different types of sales. Etsy's a little bit limited in the kinds of sales that you can run on the platform, and I know I'm speaking just of Etsy because that is the platform that most of us who create a physical thing use. But there are other platforms out there and I'm guessing that the rules are very similar for them. You're playing by their rules. It's their business, their platform, their rules. You follow the rules or you're out.
Speaker 1:So I think it's really important and I think you know a lot of people realized during COVID how important it was to have other streams of revenue and other ways that they could make income or other ways that people could find them, and that's one of the reasons that Etsy exploded over the last few years is a lot of people started to look for another place to make a few dollars, and they opened Etsy shops and so, because it was very easy, it's a very low barrier to entry, and having your own website is a little bit more time consuming and a little bit more work, and so people shy away from that. Now I do just want to caution you. When you own your own site Shopify, woocommerce, whatever you have your own domain and you sell your own stuff. One of the benefits of being on places like social media or Etsy is that, as I mentioned before, there are already people there looking for you. When you have your own site, it is on you to draw people to you, and so you're going to have to market yourself differently, and that is something that you really need to think about, and I think we've done an episode on that. If we haven't, we probably should. But anyway, I just want to caution you.
Speaker 1:This is why I think, for a lot of people start on Etsy. I certainly started on Etsy. Once I kind of understood how this whole online world worked and got better acquainted with how to ship things and what people were looking for and what people were looking for. I opened my own site. I also started doing markets, and now I have multiple ways to sell, and so it makes things a little bit more flexible for me. But I didn't start out doing all the things and you don't need to start out doing all the things either.
Speaker 1:If you're on Etsy now, maybe now's the time to try a website of your own. Same with if you're on social media. Maybe now is the time to start laying that groundwork so that when you're ready to go all in, you've done the groundwork and you've got your site and you're ready to go. And, like I said, you don't even need a website. You can just start with an email list. If you don't have an email list, that should be. Your job this week is to investigate what it would take to get an email list set up and, as I mentioned earlier in the show, it's not that much, so you can do it for free. That is it for this week.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoyed this solo episode and if you have suggestions for other episodes you'd like me to do, or if you would like me to talk a little bit more about email and you have specific questions about email, please get in touch. You can reach me at andshelookedup, at gmailcom, or you can DM me on Instagram, at, andshe looked up. We're also on TikTok, also at, and she looked up. We're all over the place. We're even on YouTube. So because you got to diversify and we have our own website where you can also find us there and leave us a message. So, yes, if we would love to hear from you, I would love to hear from you If you have suggestions for other episodes. That would help you grow your creative business. So that's it for this week. I'll be back in two weeks with another brand new episode.
Speaker 1:Oh, and, by the way, our new episode air date is Mondays, so I would love to hear what you think about this. I had a lot of people who have said over the years that Friday is a weird day. That's kind of why I picked it, because it's a weird day and nobody else releases podcasts on Fridays, but we decided to give Mondays a try. This also gives me a little bit more wiggle room to do editing and things over the weekend if I've had a really busy week in my businesses. So, yes, the new day is Monday and I'd love to hear what you think about that. So please get in touch. And yeah, that's it for this week. We'll be back in a couple more weeks with another brand new episode.
Speaker 1:Bye everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for the Anshi Looked Up Creative Hour. If you're looking for links or resources mentioned in this episode, you can find detailed show notes on our website at andshelookedupcom. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter for more business tips, profiles of inspiring Canadian creative women and so much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the show via your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode. We always love to hear from you, so we'd love it if you'd leave us a review through iTunes or Apple podcasts. Drop us a note via our website at and she looked upcom, or come say hi on Instagram at and she looked up. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.