How To Create And Sell Etsy Digital Products (How To Sell Digital Products On Etsy For Beginners)
you may have heard of the amazing potential for passive income that comes with selling digital products online but beyond the initial idea and excitement of selling digital products often comes a lot of tech overwhelm and stress especially if you're new to it all i want to simplify the process of creating and listing your etsy digital products so that you can feel completely confident opening up shop i'm talking digital file types sizing resolution programs all the things so definitely stick around if you want to learn how to sell digital products on etsy [Music] welcome back to the channel friends if we haven't met yet i'm kate i'm a wife mom etsy seller and business coach and i'm here to help you start and scale your online business so that you can make a full-time income doing what you love i've been on etsy now for seven years and i can say from first-hand experience that there are so many different areas of selling on etsy especially if you're trying to tackle digital products that are just super overwhelming and confusing in the beginning so i really want to come alongside you and help explain things in a way that's easy to understand and that will bring you success in today's video i'm going to be covering everything from the industry standard for sizing and resolution of digital products to the different file types and which types of digital products each file extension is best suited for as well as the different programs that you can use from beginner level to expert level when you're starting to create your digital products i'm also going to walk you through actually listing your digital product on your etsy shop so make sure to watch all the way to the end to get all the juicy info that is in this video i might also have an amazing free download for you in just a minute so just saying okay so the first thing we're going to dive into is explaining the different file types because you're going to need to know which types of files and file extensions to actually offer to the buyer on your listing but before i get into the different file types it's important to know what the industry standard for resolution is so resolution is the quality of your image or your file that you're offering and the industry standard for a really high quality resolution is 300 ppi or dpi so that's pixels per inch or dots per inch either way you don't want it to be anything under 300 300 is the minimum industry standard for really quality products so the first thing you need to understand is that there is a difference between what's called a raster file and a vector file so let's talk about raster first raster files work on a pixel grid which means that there is a certain number of pixels in the image and each little pixel is assigned a color which then when you zoom out and you see the full picture it creates whatever image you're going for but if you zoom in you can actually see the color of each separate pixel this is really great for images that are really complicated in coloring or shadowing but it can cause a little bit of trouble if you're trying to scale it to a really large size because the more you scale it larger the more quality it loses and the more distorted and pixelated it appears because of this people tend to use raster files more for photographic images or images that have a lot of intense complicated coloring it's not as great with sharp edges or curved lines that are in non-photographic icons so some of the most commonly used file types for raster files would be png jpeg tiff gif and psd we'll go over each of those in more depth in just a minute but now we're going to talk about vector files vector files work on a mathematical point based system which means they can be scaled to any size without losing the quality they're not as good as raster files for photographs but they're actually better for non-photographic images like icons or graphic elements or anything that would need to be scaled even to a really large size like a billboard this also makes vector files great for cutting images if people are going to be cutting using a laser cutter or a silhouette or a cricut they're going to need a size that they can scale up or down how they want some of the most commonly used vector file types would be pdf svg eps and ai okay let's talk about jpeg first so this is the file extension jpg this is probably the most commonly used raster file type on etsy because it's raster and it's great with coloring and it has those pixels that we talked about people love jpegs for photographs or anything to do with a photographic image one of the best things about a jpeg is that you can compress it to a really small file size to save space but like i mentioned before it's not going to be easily scalable and it's not going to be great for any kind of icon that has sharp edges or curves okay next is png a png is also a raster image but the difference is that pngs can actually have a transparent background whereas jpegs cannot have a transparent background so a png would be used for any kind of icon or digital element that might need to be layered on top of a different background or on top of a photograph or something that's going on top as a layer it is generally a larger file size than a jpeg so you just need to keep that in mind when you're creating your files okay third on our list is a pdf a pdf is actually a vector document file that allows for multi-page documents pdfs are generally really high quality good file types for scaling for offering documents such as contracts or anything with multiple pages that you're going to need to give to your buyer even though pdfs are vector files they can contain raster images so pdf files are really versatile they can be opened by virtually any operating system which makes it really easy for any buyer anywhere to use it's great for printing and great for any type of printable like a calendar or planners or an ebook something with multiple pages that would need to be printed now because pdfs are generally higher quality files they are going to have a larger file size which means that they may exceed that maximum 20 megabyte limit that etsy puts on the file listings a lot of times what etsy sellers will do if they want to offer a pdf file but it's too large is they'll either use dropbox or google drive to upload the file to and then they'll give the buyer a link to that dropbox folder or google drive folder for them to be able to download okay next let's talk about svg files svg is a vector file which of course like we talked about means that it can be scaled as large as you want without losing any quality and this is what makes it really great for cutting projects so like i mentioned before if people are looking for something to cut on their cricut machine or their silhouette machine or even a laser cutter svg is going to be the first type of file type that they're looking for now i'm about to throw in three additional pro tips for things that y