If your a veteran Etsy shop owner looking for some new ideas or a Etsy newbie navigating your way to selling your handmade goods online, I'm here to help. Today I'm sharing the 5 tools I use on the daily to help me run my handmade business. 

1 - TRELLO

I'm pretty sure you could organize your entire life on Trello. As a person with highly disorganized habits and a tendency to go on tangents it is the one tool that I've been disciplined to create an intentional habit of using. It is the central hub for tasks, ideas and projects so it's open all day, every day on my laptop.

Trello is also how I put “processes” into place rather than re-creating the wheel each time i repeat a task or an event. For example, we do a live sale once a month. We have a Trello board template created that includes every single step involved with a live sale from making the product, to marketing the event and finally shipping the products to the customers that purchased after the sale. I literally have created scripts for each social media post we do leading up to the event and it has saved me HOURS. 

If you need a way to organize orders or your priorities each day, give Trello a shot.

2 - LIGHTROOM APP

This handy dandy app for your phone is from the same folks that created Photoshop but no design skills are required. For the past six months Lightroom is the only app I use to edit photos. It's free and you can create your own presets to get a cohesive look for all your images when you use that setting to edit each of your photos. This has been a game changer for up-leveling my Instagram feed and quickly batching light and bright product photos for Etsy.

3 - TAILWIND

You probably know as an Etsy shop owner you should be using Pinterest, but I know it can be time consuming to make sure you're pinning the recommended 50 pins a day! But Tailwind makes it possible. With Tailwind you can schedule a ton of pins in just a couple of clicks.  You can decide how many pins per day you want to post and space them out to pin at peak times too.

I use Tailwind to schedule all my pins to Pinterest.  I don’t have time to spend hours manually pinning and remembering which  boards I’ve already added my pins to because Tailwind keeps track of that for me! It seriously makes my life so much easier. (If you sign up with this link, you’ll get your first TWO months for free, a $30 value!)

Also, the secret weapon that Tailwind recently came out with is SmartLoop. Pin looping may sound fancy and complicated but it's really not and it has made it simple for me to pin my own products on the regular and consistently sends shoppers to my Etsy shop. Currently, 1/3 of our Etsy traffic now comes from Pinterest thanks for Tailwind and the SmartLoop feature. 

I could go on about Tailwind tribes too but I won't... Just sign up for the free trial today, you cannot afford not to.

4  - CANVA

From social media posts to headers for Etsy and Pinterest to our blog graphics, you can use Canva to design cohesive branded images for every platform. This simplified graphic design platform caters to us NON professional designers with drag and drop options and pre-designed & pre-sized templates for nearly everything you can imagine. Genius and also FREE! 

 5 - MAILCHIMP

I'll be 100% real on this. Writing and sending email is not among my top favorite things to do in my business. I dread the task but LOVE the reward. Every single time I send an email it equals dollars in my bank account. Nearly everyone has email on their phones so it's still a valid form of marketing and reaches your customers directly.

Mailchimp works really well for us, so I haven't been encouraged to try any other service provides but that doesn't mean MailerLite or Constant Contact aren't valid options as well. The point is really EMAIL as a tool for your business and the power of being able to pop into your customers inbox on the reg.