Side Hustles: Art, Online - Etsy, the Big Online Platform for Artists

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Hi all, I hope everyone is having a nice weekend. It's a holiday weekend here in the US, so I have an extra day to work on--you guessed it--side hustles!!! Okay, so there are lots of sites that let you sell your art online. One of the best known is Etsy, at www.etsy.com. Etsy is a lot like eBay, in that it's a selling platform where you just create an account and make listings and hope your thing sells. It doesn't have an auction format, though - you just set a price, so it's kind of like eBay with just "Buy it Now" listings. You can list handmade items and "vintage" items (like antique jewery and toys and whatnot), and you can also sell supplies for other makers. Each listing costs 20 cents, but it stays up for four months, which is a decent amount of time. If you make a sale, Etsy takes a percentage of the sale, like eBay. I have a shop on Etsy called All Sorts of Art, and I've had that shop for a loooooooong time, making sales here and there. I was selling my knitted things and my artwork, and also cards and stationery with my printed designs (it's okay to sell reproductions of your work - it doesn't all have to be an original, one-off piece). Because of my goal to work full-time as an artist, though, I decided to up my game on Etsy. YouTubers who are Etsy power sellers advise a few different tips, like having a LOT of listings (some of the most successful Etsy stores are gigantic, with almost a thousand listings or more), making sure that you take good photos, write good descriptions, and utilize tags to help your listings be more searchable. They also advise to make it easier on yourself by using production partners to create passive income (more on that later). My goal is to list at least 100 items on Etsy, and really a whole lot more eventually, but 100 will be my first goal. I currently have 48 active listings on Etsy, so I'm almost halfway. I have several inactive listings that need to be updated with new pictures (and some seasonal things, like Christmas cards, that are okay to not be active right now), but I definitely need to create some new listings. I have quite a few things that I could actually sell, but I just need to take pictures and write descriptions. So, lots of work ahead of me, but I will let you know how it's going! The picture on this post is the banner art for my Etsy shop. I wanted to emphasize that I like to do all different kinds of artwork. I know that a lot of people advise artists to find a "niche" or specialization, but that would bore me. I like to make all sorts of art!