Side Hustle From Home 2023 – First Month

We are starting a side hustle from home in 2023. As stated in my previous post, I will be conducting a 52 week-long experiment. The premise of the experiment is rather simple, we are going to be running two (2) online stores concurrently. The idea is to figure out which online store/marketplace is more effective in terms of marketing and ultimately selling your products.

Side Hustle From Home – The Platforms

I’m a WordPress developer, so it made perfect sense to go with WooCommerce as one of the chosen platforms. Now, for the second part of this year-long A/B test, I settled on Etsy. It didn’t make much sense to me to pit two e-commerce platforms against each other (i.e. WooCoomerce vs Shopify). However, a full scale e-commerce solution vs an online marketplace, made for a more interesting comparison.

Online Side Hustle For The Masses

We are going to take a look at both platforms for several factors, including SEO, marketing and cost. In my previous post regarding online selling, we already went over ease of use, where Etsy came out on top. Therefore, the evaluation will be done from the point of view of someone who is comfortable working in both environments.

Initially, I thought I’d be posting weekly progress reports but then I realized a 7-day period wouldn’t provide very meaningful data. Therefore, I settled on a monthly report.

Key Metrics For The Online Side Hustle Comparison

The side hustle from home premise implies that all your marketing efforts will be limited to your online efforts. In-person networking won’t be evaluated, but you are more than welcome to try that approach for yourself, as it’s the oldest trick in the book. We’ll be looking at number of visits, number of sales and organic search results (no paid ads). However, halfway through the test, I might change my mind about using online ads.

Tools Of The Side Hustle

I will be perfectly honest here, as a WordPress, WooCommerce developer, I have access to a few tools that your average Etsy seller might not have. Here’s my current tech stack, which I will be using to take the fight to Etsy with my WooCommerce shop:

• SEO – Semrush: Semrush is an all-in-one suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights.
• Email Marketing – ActiveCampaign: The BEST all-in-one email marketing, marketing automation & CRM for small businesses. Trust me when I say this, you are wasting your time with the Chimp.
• Social Media – Semrush: While social media is not Semrush’s core feature, their implementation is quite impressive, enough to have me considering ending my Hootsuite subscription.
• Content Marketing – ChatGPT: Because we all need a little help from A.I. I am and will continue to use A.I to generate SEO-friendly product descriptions & social media posts.

Number of Visit – First 4 Weeks

In the first 30 days, from January 18 to February 16 of 2023, my Etsy store had 96 visits, where most of the traffic was generated by me. I peddled those first two listings hard! I leveraged my personal social media profiles, as well as the business’ to promote those items. The traffic from the marketplace was negligible compared to my efforts. In other words, I was working hard for Etsy, not the other way around.

As you can see in the areas highlighted in red, I was the main instigator of the traffic that came to the store. Thanks for nothing Etsy! Above all, Etsy is a business and as such, they get their revenue from several avenues: your product listings, ads and transaction fees. In other words, while your success helps to further increase their revenue, helping you achieve that level of success is not their main objective. Now that we have established that, it’s crystal clear that it’s entirely up to you to generate the necessary traffic to start seeing sales. You can fall into the trap of buying ads, but once you do that, you’ll quickly realize you’ll be operating at a loss. Therefore, it’s up to you whether or not you want to start your business in the red and how long you can withstand doing that.

I don’t have to point out the obvious differences in traffic, but just in case, 344 visitors beats 96 any day of the week! However, my SEO strategy for the store is not limited to a “marketplace”. On that note, let’s take a look at the organic search results for both.

Organic Search Results – First 4 Weeks

I ran into some interesting results here, which can be easily explained by looking at the screen shots and the keywords targeted for the products. Let’s start with WooCommerce.

I don’t want to mislead you here, the fact that the product name ranks on the 1st page of Google for that long tail keyword is by design. If someone simply typed in kitten t-shirts, that product would completely disappear from 1st page results. However, if you only entered the keywords “angry kitten t-shirts”, you’d still find my t-shirt on the 1st page.

How did I manage to do that? As I mentioned before, I have an advantage when it comes to SEO, as I’ve been doing this kind of work for other companies for the past 10 years. All I had to do was look for keywords that had little difficulty to rank for and that’s where Semrush came in handy. In other words, I’m starting with easy pickings and will work my way up to the top.

I can tell you I was disappointed with these results, but not surprised. As I stated previously, Etsy is a business and part of their revenue model is ads. In other words, if I want to play ball with the “Star Sellers”, I have to come out of the gate willing to spend in order to market my products.

It should be noted that the product NOT displaying in the results was my first product listed on Etsy. In addition, the Etsy store was opened a full week before I started the WooCommerce shop.

Conclusion After The First 4 Weeks

We can see from the results shown so far, that we are better off starting own shop. Above all, knowing how to promote your product, researching your audience and spotting trends outside the “marketplace” will pay dividends in the long run.

If you have any questions regarding this experiment or the techniques I used, feel free to leave a comment or reach out directly in the Contact page. Make that hustle from home a reality in 2023.