How to ACTUALLY Make Daily Sales on Etsy 2026 (NO Paid Ads)

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Today, I want to show you a hack, one weird trick that got me my very first few Etsy sales. I don't think I've seen anybody talk about this before, but this is important because once you have sales history, the algorithm actually boost that listing and all your other listings in search. So, you rank higher, more customers see you, and also customers can see your number of sales and reviews, right? And then the snowball starts rolling. But how do you actually make those first few sales if you are at zero or a very small number? How do you get that momentum going, especially if you're not using paid ads? Well, I used this one weird trick. And you might be asking, "What is this one weird trick?"

[00:00:41]Well, let me show you this website. And don't worry, I will show you what the URL is, but let me explain what this is.

[00:00:49]So, this is a website which shows you what people are typing in on a marketplace called Redbubble. Now, you might be like, "Wait a minute. Why are you showing me a website that has basically tanked into the ground in the past few years?" Well, let me explain.

[00:01:05]The story will come back around. It will make sense, and you will understand how to get sales on Etsy. So, Redbubble was the very first print-on-demand marketplace that I tried to sell on. I uploaded a bunch of stuff on here, made zero sales, and it was a pretty typical story until I realized that you can actually see what people are typing into the search bar by typing a letter into the search bar and just seeing what results came up, right? And you can do this with any letter, A B C. You can do combinations of letters to get more suggestions. It actually shows you what people are searching for. And nowadays, we have all these SEO tools and stuff, but back then, I was in high school. I felt very clever, and I spent ages typing in every single letter of the alphabet and loads of combinations. I remember making a big long list every day and seeing what results came up. I would uh search for something and then sort by best-selling, see what the bestsellers were for those trending keywords, and then I would design loads of similar things to those bestsellers.

[00:02:08]And a week after I started doing that, I made my very first Redbubble sale and then a few more. And at the time, I couldn't quite believe it. I thought this was some sort of money-making hack.

[00:02:17]But now that I've been selling for a while across multiple different websites, it obviously makes sense. Like if you create stuff that people are literally typing into the search bar that is similar to stuff that is already selling, then you can't really not make money, you know what I mean? And to make life even easier, I found out about this website that makes that list for you automatically. So, I was like, "Okay, cool. I'll just use this." Now, obviously if we look through this, there's a lot of very generic and intellectual property violations and stuff that you want to avoid on here, but the ones that I looked for are the more niche things like um stuff that makes you think, "Okay, that is interesting. I wonder why people are typing that into the search bar." And then you actually have to go and research it. So, stuff like this, right?

[00:03:02]And I found that these were the types of keywords that sold the best. And this site has loads and loads of history.

[00:03:08]It's collected trending keywords on Redbubble for the past few years every single day. So, plenty of these to look through. From then on, I kind of just made a list um for the past few days, I designed for stuff exclusively on that list, and I uploaded as many things as possible, made a couple thousand on Redbubble. And a lot of those designs still sell for me to this day. Now, fast forward to when I started selling on Etsy, I started at zero sales. I mean, obviously, you know, watching YouTube videos about how to make your first sale on Etsy. And at the time, Etsy SEO was the hot topic, okay? Like nowadays, it's Claude AI or whatever. There always seems to be a trending topic in this YouTube space. Everyone was saying to look for stuff that is similar to best sellers on Etsy and then use their titles and tags. So, for my very first batch of Etsy uploads, I was doing print on demand, had a lot of listings with keywords from other best sellers on Etsy, right? However, I decided to throw in a few of my Redbubble best sellers into the mix just cuz I thought, you know, why not? I mean, I didn't think they would sell. I thought the stuff that I designed for Etsy specifically would sell the best. But, I was just like, "Okay, let me upload anything and see what happens, right?" And to my surprise, when I made my first sale on Etsy, it wasn't the stuff that I designed for Etsy taking the keywords from other best sellers that sold the first. It was one of my previous Redbubble best sellers. And then the next day it sold, and then it sold again, and after a while, my other listings started to get a boost. My first few Etsy sales that actually got the momentum in this shop going was those best sellers from Redbubble coming back full circle, which I found using this free website. You know, in hindsight, this makes sense because Redbubble is a lot more competitive than Etsy, right? It only gets a couple of million visits per month. I'm not exactly sure how many, but that's compared to Etsy's 400 million. But, because it's a free website, anyone can make an account on here, and for a lot of products like stickers and t-shirts, it is a lot more competitive than Etsy.

[00:05:17]Now, Etsy and Redbubble both get traffic from Google as well as direct visits.

[00:05:21]So, it does make sense that if you are able to get sales on a site like Redbubble, it should be easier for you to get sales on a site like Etsy, but not the other way around. And that is exactly what I experienced. When I started selling on Amazon with Seller Central, again with zero advertising, cuz I got rejected from Merch, um I uploaded the things that had sold the best for me on Etsy, which included a lot of things that sold for me on Redbubble. And I also did some Amazon-specific research and uploaded few things with that. I'm not going to get into that now. The point is it was a similar process to when I started out on Etsy, right? And I made my first Amazon sale a few weeks later. But guess what that product was? That's right, it was a design that had sold for me on both Etsy and Redbubble before. And then when I started running a meta ads to my Shopify store, guess what sold for me first there? That's right, my top selling product on Etsy. So back to Etsy then, can we do something similar for Etsy to what this site does for Redbubble? Well, yes, we can. Etsy has a tool called Marketplace Insights in your shop manager under stats, that shows you what customers are typing in. And you just have to search for keywords to generate any related keywords, right? And it shows you all the data, how many people are searching for in the past 30 days, and how many results are on the marketplace right now. Well, I've actually collected over 37,000 search terms from here in my database, generated by the most searched terms on Etsy. So let's you filter by keyword, by numbers, monthly searches, and results.

[00:06:58]It also lets you sort by searches, results, competition, and saturation as well. So this is my personal database.

[00:07:06]It's what I use. Any research I collect, I just put into this database. I also have this tool which lets you make your own keyword database by copying and pasting data from Marketplace Insights that you can search and filter your own keywords with. If you're interested in those, link is in the description. But my point is you can't make money until you get views. But if you're just starting out on Etsy, you haven't made any money yet, you may not want to pay for tools. So I mean, I didn't use any paid tools to make my first few sales.

[00:07:36]As I told you, they kind of came from this website, which is completely free.

[00:07:39]It's called Bubble Trends, by the way.

[00:07:41]So this is something else that you can consider. You can do research for Etsy using different marketplaces like Redbubble. Most websites have a best-selling section. It's just good e-commerce practice, so you can take advantage of that, and you can look at what's selling on other places on the internet, because demand usually transfers, plus everything um gets indexed on Google. And if you bring that research over to Etsy, where it's usually less competitive, cuz there's more shoppers, instead of trying to compete directly with other Etsy sellers and copying them, because they have more sales than you, so the algorithm and the customers favor them more. Don't forget that Etsy also gets traffic from Google, so if people are searching for stuff on another place, they're probably searching for it on Google a lot as well. And that is how you can get found.

[00:08:27]So, cross market research is a method that is completely free most of the time, and people are not using it. It should be used more, I think, especially when you're just starting out, because the reality is that you are just grasping at straws to make those first few sales. Like, a lot of people telling you to make better mockups, when the real problem is that nobody is even seeing your mockups, because you're on page 20.

[00:08:51]So, the real solution, at least if you're going the organic route and you have zero sales, and you want to start getting momentum, is do keyword and product research, then just upload a lot of listings based on that. Then, once you get those few sales and your listings start to rank, you get a bit more traffic, may or may not want to reinvest back into paid ads. But, then you can look at your data and be like, "Okay, let's compare the conversion rate between mockup A, mockup B, white background images, whatever, right?"

[00:09:19]But, you don't even have any views, so you have nothing really to compare to at the beginning. You just need to keep uploading based on research. It seems like a bit of a scatter gun approach, but it is just a numbers game, at least at the very beginning. Once you have zero data, you were just throwing stuff out there. I'll tell you the way the Etsy algorithm works. So, I have stuff up here that has not sold for like 3 years just cuz I forgot to turn auto renewal off. And then one day the listing randomly makes a sale.

[00:09:49]And then the next day it sells again, and then a few days later it sells again, and it keeps selling repeatedly until one day it stops selling, and then another listing kind of starts selling out of nowhere. This thing that hasn't sold for 3 years after sitting there on the marketplace, it randomly makes a sale, and then the next day it just all of a sudden makes a sale again.

[00:10:10]So, that literally tells you how the algorithm works, which is sales equals more sales.

[00:10:16]Shocking, but not very helpful if you're just starting out, right? So, if you're wondering why you're not getting sales when your listings are better than your competitors, at least you think, then you're probably right. It's just that yours are on page 20, and nobody is even seeing how good your listing is. So, you have to be targeting those keywords that will actually get you views. Now, with this new update, Etsy is actually also using AI to look at your listing images and see how well it matches the title and the keywords in your tags. So, that is something to be aware of. You don't want to put irrelevant keywords in your listing just cuz they have good stats and will get you loads of eyeballs because that could hurt your search ranking and your conversion as well.

[00:11:03]Even more so with this AI update. As upload with relevant keywords that people are typing in on Etsy, on Google, on other marketplaces, then you just need to keep uploading until you get those first few sales, and then you have data to look at. Because then you can be like, "Okay, this got a favorite. This got a sale. So, let me upload three more designs in that style or like in that niche of the thing that sold." Because people clearly like this design. So, yeah, I I noticed that it takes for me about 3 to 4 months before a new listing sells, if it ever does. That's sort of the average time frame. So, it does take time as well. You do have to be patient with this. Like, obviously there are outliers. So, things that sell after 3 years and sometimes I make a sale within 48 hours, which is rare, but it does happen. 3 to 4 months is usually the time frame that you're looking at for new listings. Link down below to my own database of over 37,000 keywords from Marketplace Insights in the most searched keywords. I'm constantly updating this and using it to do my own research. And again, you can also create and save your own database using my keyword sniper tool if you have Marketplace Insights. Hopefully, this video clears up a bit of confusion about how you get sales on Etsy. Drop a like if you found it helpful and I'll see you guys in the next video.