In the public January Q&A video, I had a lot of questions about Etsy pop up.

One of the issues that arose was the issue of renewing.

This is a marketing strategy that I have used right from the very beginning – when I opened my Etsy shop in 2008.

In my own personal experience? The more consistently I renew, the more sales I get. I personally see this as an advertising/marketing cost – and it’s got the biggest ROI of anything else I’ve tried.

If you’re not familiar with it, this is the process of going in and renewing products that are already active in your store (they have NOT expired). You basically ‘reset’ the timeline on them. This does not change the listing in any way – it just refreshes it so it has a brand-new four month life.

The theory behind this is that by renewing products, you get a ‘bump’ in the Etsy search results, as recency of listing is one of the factors their search algorithm takes into account when deciding where to rank you items. And, when this happens, people are therefore more likely to see – and click on – your listings.

During the video, I proposed the possibility of doing a project here in the Circle whereby those of us with Etsy shops would spend 1 month consistently renewing items, to see what effect it has on our traffic and sales.

So – now’s the time!

If you don’t yet have an Etsy shop (but would like to) remember – you can still take this opportunity to see what happens with the other members of the experiment. I think having a cohort of people all doing this at the same time will be a super-interesting exercise!

I’m publishing this well before the beginning of Feb so you have time to get organised and planned if you want to take part in this project.

If you’d like to participate, here’s the plan:

1. Go to the FB group and leave a comment under the #EtsyRenewalProject post so we know you are taking part. (I’ll be doing this in my own shop – Epheriell – as I have been a bit haphazard in my renewals of late.)

2. Choose a set number of products to renew every single day in February. I recommend at least 5 (which is $1 a day). But if you want to do more or less, that’s fine – the key is to do the SAME amount every single day.

3. Aim to do your renewals at the same time of day each day, just to give a more consistent result. Put an alert on your phone/in your calendar to remind you!

4. The brilliant thing about Etsy is that the stats are all there, easy to find. So, you can keep an eye on them as the month progresses. The aim is to see if your sales and traffic in February are significantly higher than January.

5. On Feb 1st, I’ll post a ‘starting stats’ thread in the FB group. If you are taking part, you are welcome to share your January numbers (views/visits/orders/revenue) if you choose. You are MORE than welcome to keep any or all of these numbers private, of course. The only thing I ask is that at the end of Feb, you do at least share some sort of data – even if it’s as simple as ‘yes, it increased my views and sales’ or ‘no, it did nothing’. The more of us that can share our results, the more data we’ll have to decide if this is a good strategy going forward!

Of course, there are always other factors at play. If you have been on Etsy a while, you can also use your past stats (Jan/Feb last year or earlier) to help you gague how much impact the renewal project has on your traffic and sales compared to the same period in past years.

A few suggestions on item choice.

I tend to renew my ‘mid-range’ products – that is, the ones that sell sometimes.

I generally don’t renew my best-sellers (because they are already selling and auto-renewing regularly). And, I’ll occasionally throw in some rarely-selling items to mix things up. Now, I have over 170 listings, so I have a lot of choice here. If you have a small amount, you may find you end up renewing basically your whole store during the month.

Obviously, the better your listings are to start with (photos, titles, descriptions, tags, etc.) the more effective this will be. I encourage you to use the time between now and Feb 1st to use EtsyRank and get your listings in tip-top condition.

Yes, I know this might skew the results slightly, so if you want to be super-scientific about them, you’ll actually leave your listings as they are now – but that choice is yours.

If you want to ask questions, share observations, etc. about this project during Feb and beyond, please make sure to use the hashtag #EtsyRenewalProject in your posts over on Facebook so we can easily find them!

Finally – like any project we do, participation is of course totally voluntary. Especially seeing as this project will have a monetary cost, please don’t feel any pressure to take part if it is not right for you at this time.

Okay, let’s do this!

Jess 🙂