For years, before I could do proper Etsy SEO, I had to do everything else first. Competitor analysis. Niche research. Positioning. Product research. All of it manual, all of it slow, and SEO was always the last step, not the first.

I tried tool after tool to speed this up, and every one of them failed me in one of two ways.

Some made me do all the real work myself. The tool gave me a place to look, but the actual thinking, is this niche worth entering, is this gap real, was entirely on me. Others did the opposite. They handed me numbers with nothing underneath them. Demand, competition, two figures, and I was supposed to make a real business decision from that. But real research needs more, demand quality, not just demand size, how deep that demand actually goes, how much of it I could realistically capture. And competition isn’t one thing, it’s several gaps hiding under one word, a product gap, a customer gap, an offer gap, and which one is actually open changes whether a market is worth entering at all.

Skip that and you’re not deciding anything. You’re guessing.

So I stopped looking for the right tool and built my own. Something that automated the niche research, competitor research, and market research I was already doing manually, and did keyword research at a level deeper than demand and competition alone.

I built it for myself first. Then I started using it with clients. Then a few people asked if they could use it too.

That’s how Rankazo became a real product, quietly, before I ever wrote a word about it here.

I’ve spent the last several months writing about one idea over and over, that most people fail on Etsy not from lack of effort, but from guessing instead of following a system. This tool is where that idea actually came from. It’s the system I built for myself before I could ever write about needing one.

It’s live now at Rankazo.com, and it already has real users. I haven’t talked about it here until now, mostly because I wanted this account to be about the writing first. But it’s part of the same work, so it’s time to actually introduce it properly.

More on how it works, and how I use it myself, in the coming weeks.

Everyone tells you to validate your niche before you launch on Etsy. Check the demand. Study the bestsellers. Make sure people are already buying something like it.

Nobody tells you there are two different kinds of research, and they carry opposite risks.

The first is proven demand. You search Etsy, see hundreds of listings, some with thousands of sales, and think: proof, people are buying this, it’s safe.

It looks safe. Demand clearly exists.

But look closer. Hundreds of sellers making almost the same thing. The buyer can’t tell you apart, so the only thing left to compete on is price. You’ve proven the market exists. You haven’t proven you can win in it.

The second is differentiation potential. Not “is anyone buying this,” but “what is nobody giving buyers that they clearly want.”

This usually shows up in reviews, not bestseller lists. Common complaints. Missing formats. The same request repeated in someone else’s listing.

Differentiation potential has no bestseller to point to. No thousands of reviews proving the idea. It feels riskier, because it is. Nobody has proven this specific thing sells.

Here’s why the risk is worth it.

Proven demand isn’t actually safe on Etsy, it’s just familiar. You’re one of five hundred nearly identical listings, competing on price, invisible without an ad budget most solo sellers don’t have.

Differentiation potential is a real risk. But it comes with a real reward. If you’re right, you’re not one of five hundred. You’re the only one solving that specific complaint. A buyer can tell you apart in two sentences.

“Proven demand gives you proof without protection. Differentiation potential gives you protection without proof”.

Not every risky-feeling idea is good. Some things are risky because nobody wants them, not because you’re early.

The test isn’t confidence, it’s evidence. If real buyers keep saying “I wish this also did X” in reviews of an already-successful listing, that’s differentiation potential with a customer attached. If you just think it would be cool and nobody’s made it, that’s an idea without a complaint behind it, and those fail more often than they work.

If you sell PNG bundles on Etsy, don’t ask whether people buy them. They obviously do, thousands sell for under a dollar. Ask what buyers are still unhappy about, in the reviews of the bundles already selling. Missing formats, no instructions, no personalization. That complaint is your differentiation potential, sitting inside a market that already proved people will pay.

Proven demand feels responsible. It’s also how you end up as one of five hundred sellers on Etsy, protected by nothing but a price you can’t sustain.

Differentiation potential feels reckless, because no data says it works. But it’s the only real safety a solo seller has on Etsy, being different enough that comparison stops working against you.

Both are research. Only one protects you after you launch.

Your Etsy shop got 5,000 views this month, and made zero sales. Congratulations. You’re running a museum, not a business.

Everyone wants to rank at the top on Etsy so more people see their listings. Most of them don’t actually understand how Etsy’s algorithm works. You don’t need to be seen by everyone. You need to be seen by the people who are going to buy.

Success on Etsy can’t be measured in views. Sometimes more views are actually a problem. If people are seeing your listing and not buying, that sends Etsy a negative signal, that the product isn’t good enough, or the price is wrong, and your ranking can drop because of it.

Do you think success is how many people see your listing, or click on it? That’s a basic-level mindset, and it’s the one that fails.

There are two ways of thinking about this. One fails. One succeeds consistently.

The failing mindset counts. How many listings do I have, how many views, how many clicks, how much did I earn.

The mindset that grows consistently asks a different question. How many people can I actually solve a problem for. It focuses on the buyer’s transformation, not the seller’s numbers.

Here’s why that mindset wins. Someone who understands their customer, their problem, and how to solve it, knows what to do when things go wrong. Someone counting views has no idea what to do when the counting stops going up. They just guess.

Once you actually think about who your customer is, what problem they have, and how your product solves it, you can explain your business in under a minute. And that matters more than it sounds like it should.

There’s a real psychological principle behind this, called cognitive ease. The human brain trusts and acts on things that are simple to process, and resists things that take effort to understand. When a buyer lands on your listing and immediately gets it, here’s who this is for, here’s what changes for them, their brain relaxes and moves toward buying. When they have to work it out, scroll through five photos trying to figure out what they’re even looking at, read a description twice, that effort itself creates hesitation. Most people don’t push through the hesitation. They leave and buy from whoever made it easy.

That’s usually the real reason you get views and clicks but no sales. The buyer never understood, quickly enough, what changes for them.

And here’s the trap that follows. No sales creates anxiety. Anxiety makes you start changing things blindly, tags, titles, prices, all at once. Blind changes rarely fix the actual problem, so the anxiety returns, except now you’re also anxious about how long this has been going on.

The philosopher Alan Watts described something close to this, often called the backwards law. The more directly you chase a result, the more it slips away from you, because the chasing itself gets in the way. Pleasure chased directly turns into anxiety. Security chased directly turns into fear of losing it. The people who actually get the result are usually doing something else, solving a real problem properly, and the result arrives as a byproduct of that, not as the target itself.

That’s exactly what’s happening with sales. Chase the number and you get anxiety and guesswork. Chase understanding your customer and solving their problem properly, and the sales show up on their own, because you removed the thing that was stopping them.

One more thing worth saying honestly. A lot of what gets shared on social media is a screenshot of views or a single big sale day. Almost nobody shows what it actually cost them to get that, what the real profit was, or whether it happened again the following week.

Getting a sale isn’t the hard part. Getting the same result consistently is the actual goal, and it only comes from understanding the customer well enough to solve their problem on purpose, not by accident.

If you can’t answer these three questions about your own shop in two minutes, your customer won’t be able to answer them at all. And if they can’t, they won’t buy.

The three questions:

1. Who is this for?

2. What changes in their life after they buy it?

3. Why should they buy from you and not your competitor?

If you have an Etsy shop, treat this as an exercise. Two minutes, all three. If you can do it, you pass. If you can’t, you’re guessing and hoping the guesses work.

Here’s why each one matters.

Who is this for

If you’re selling to everyone, you can’t answer this. And if you can’t describe the specific person who buys from you, their situation, what they care about, why they spend money, then you also can’t know what your product changes for them.

What changes in their life

People don’t buy products. They buy a change in their situation.

Think of a bathroom cleaner advert. It doesn’t open with the bottle. It opens with a dirty bathroom and a frustrated woman who is tired of scrubbing. The product isn’t cleaner. The product is her not being frustrated anymore.

Your Etsy listing works the same way. A wedding invitation isn’t paper. It’s a bride who wants her wedding to look how she imagined it. A fitness planner isn’t a PDF. It’s someone who has tried and failed three times and wants a structure that finally holds.

If you can’t name the change, you’re selling an object.

Why you and not your competitor

You’re not the only person trying to solve this problem. So what’s your reason?

It doesn’t have to be a better product. It can be narrower. Instead of wedding invitations, wedding invitations for small home weddings. Instead of fitness plans, fitness plans for people with twenty minutes and no gym.

Same product category, but suddenly you’re the obvious choice for a specific person rather than one option among two thousand.

That’s the job. Not making something better than everyone. Making something that’s clearly for someone.

So before you ask how to get more sales, answer these three. Most shops that aren’t selling fail at question one, and everything after it depends on getting that right.

When sales drop on Etsy, most people panic and start changing everything. Titles, tags, descriptions, images, prices. All at once, in the same afternoon.

I understand the instinct. Sales stopped, so something must be wrong, so change everything and hope one of them was it.

But this usually makes things worse. You end up changing the things that were already working, and now you have no idea what caused what. A week later sales are still flat and you’ve lost the version that was performing.

Before you change anything, find the actual problem.

There are only three.

One. People aren’t finding your products.
Two. People find them but don’t click.
Three. People click but don’t buy.

Every drop in sales is one of these. Your Etsy stats tell you which one you have.

Open your Stats tab and look at three numbers: impressions, visits, and orders. Impressions mean your listing appeared in front of someone. Visits mean they clicked it. Orders mean they bought.

If impressions are low, people aren’t finding you at all. Your listing isn’t showing up in search, so nothing else matters yet.

Say you’re selling a wedding planner and you’ve titled it “Beautiful Planner for Your Big Day.” Nobody types that into Etsy. They type “wedding planner printable” or “wedding checklist PDF.” Your listing is fine, your title just doesn’t match anything anyone is searching for.

The other version of this is worse. Sometimes the keywords are right and the demand simply isn’t there. If you picked a niche nobody searches for, no amount of optimisation fixes that.

If impressions are fine but visits are low, people are seeing your listing and scrolling past it. This is the one most sellers get wrong. Your SEO is working, that’s why you have impressions. Don’t touch it.

The only thing those people saw before deciding was your main image and your price. Almost always, it’s the image.

A friend of mine was adding five listings a day, print on demand, and getting impressions but almost no clicks. His mockups were flat product shots on a plain white background. Every competitor above him had the same product photographed in a real room, on a real wall, with furniture around it. Same design, same price, completely different click rate. He didn’t have an SEO problem. He had a photography problem.

If visits are fine but orders are low, people are interested enough to open your listing and still walking away. Something after the click is losing them.

Check these in order.

First, your price against successful competitors selling something similar. I audited a shop last month selling digital invitations at $12 when three sellers above them, all with hundreds of reviews, were selling nearly identical designs at $5. Ranking first doesn’t help when the buyer opens two tabs and compares.

Second, whether you have reviews at all. A new shop with no reviews converts badly no matter what else is right. That one only fixes itself with time and patience, and it’s the reason new sellers panic unnecessarily in month two.

Then your other photos, your description, and whether your variations and options are clear. If someone has to guess what size they’re getting or whether the file works with their software, most won’t bother asking. They’ll just leave.

The reason this matters is simple. Every one of those three problems has a completely different fix. If you have a click problem and you spend a week rewriting your tags, you’ve wasted a week and the problem is still there.

Look at the numbers first. Then change one thing.

Fix the right thing, not everything.

Your best seller on Etsy isn’t one listing. It’s a hidden catalogue of dozens of products you haven’t published yet.

Most Etsy sellers chase new product ideas every day, because they’ve been told to add more. That’s a mistake. You don’t need new random products. You need the right ones.

You’ve already chosen a niche. You’ve done the branding. You’ve listed products. Now look at your best seller and turn it into dozens of listings with very little extra effort.

First, why expand a best seller instead of starting something new?

Because the best seller is already telling you something. It’s telling you there’s a specific group of people interested in a specific product, and that Etsy’s algorithm is already showing it to them. Rather than starting from zero with a new audience, give that same group more options for their specific needs, occasions, and seasons.

Now, how to do it.

Say you have a wedding invitation card with pink roses along the border. People like it. Here’s how you turn that into dozens of listings.

Change the colours. Same flowers, in green, red, orange, whatever fits.

Change the sizes and orientation. Portrait, landscape, square.

Change the occasion. Valentine’s, birthdays, parties, anniversaries.

Change the style. If the original is cute, make a boho version, a minimalist version.

Bundle them. Sets and collections from what you’ve already made.

One important thing. Give each listing its own controlling idea. That means being clear about what this specific product is for and why someone needs it.

The pink rose original might be for a romantic spring wedding. The minimalist black version is for a modern city wedding. The bundle is for someone who wants matching invitations, place cards, and thank-you notes without designing three separate things.

Same base design, genuinely different purposes. That’s what stops it feeling repetitive or duplicated, and starts making it feel like a consistent brand.

If you’re solo, with limited time or budget, this is the fastest way to scale a shop.

These days, whatever field you’re in, you want to be a content creator. And for good reason, it gives you an audience, people who listen, people who buy from you, people who hire you.

The problem is most people don’t know what to post.

So they post randomly. Lifestyle content, cars, food, wherever they’ve been. Then after a while they disappear, because they’ve run out of things to say. That won’t make you a content creator, unless you’re actually in the car business or the food business.

Most people sharing lifestyle content end up feeling depressed, pressured, short of time, stuck. Why? Because they’re going in the wrong direction.

It’s like wanting good grades in maths and spending all your time reading English literature. You can work hard and still get nowhere.

After reading books, articles, and magazines about content creation, the best thing I found was Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

Let me explain what it taught me.

First, understand what being a content creator is actually worth. In one line: opportunities land on your doorstep.

Everyone wants that. The only real question is what to post.

The answer is simple. Share your work, not your life.

Work is one part of your life. You also eat, spend time with family, go on holiday, take long drives. None of that needs to be shared. What you share is the work.

How you got a client. How you completed a job. How you find clients in the first place. What a particular client was like to work with. What you’re learning right now. Everything from your work is material.

And here’s what happens. You never run out of ideas. And you never feel exposed, because you aren’t sharing anything personal.

Lifestyle is the output of what you do professionally. Output can be faked, and nobody is genuinely interested in it as content.

Nobody watches a film about buyers picking products off a shelf. But people spend hours watching how those products were made.

Nobody wants to know how many cars you own after building a brand. Everyone wants to know how you built it.

So share the process. It keeps you public and private at the same time. It makes you visible as a professional in your field. It finds you clients, and it finds customers for what you sell.

If you don’t have a map, if you don’t know the path, you’re going somewhere without knowing where. The chances of arriving are almost none.

Most people start selling on Etsy on guesswork. It’s like firing a bullet in the dark and expecting to hit a target.

In other words, it’s gambling. You don’t understand why you’re listing what you’re listing, why someone should buy from you, or why someone did buy from you. You don’t know what to do when your performance drops. Eventually you leave in frustration and decide Etsy isn’t a marketplace for you.

Here are seven signs you’re running your shop on guesswork instead of strategy. If you recognise them, you can shift.

Sign 1: You don’t know exactly who your customer is

Before you started, you never identified your target audience. If you’re selling to everyone, you’re selling to no one. You need to know who they are, what they want, their age, gender, interests, and budget. Know that, and you’re most likely building a shop that generates consistent sales.

Sign 2: You picked your niche because it was trending

You saw a niche trending everywhere on social media and decided to sell in it. That’s a guess, not a business decision.

The shops that grow consistently don’t follow trends, they solve a specific problem for specific buyers. If you sell wall art for new homeowners, you’re solving the problem of empty walls for people who just bought a house.

Sign 3: You can’t explain why someone should buy from you

You need to be able to say what makes you different, what thousands of other sellers aren’t offering that you are. This is your controlling idea, and it should be clear in your shop, your products, your graphics, your thank-you cards.

For example, if you sell a fitness plan with only two workouts a week, twenty minutes each, you’re targeting busy people. Your controlling idea is: twenty minutes a day, two days a week. That’s it.

Sign 4: Your sales feel random

Getting sales on Etsy isn’t the hard part. Getting them consistently is what keeps you in business.

Most sellers with random sales are working on guesswork. One good day, then nothing for weeks. That means there’s no plan behind it. A real strategy produces consistent results.

Sign 5: Designing products first, researching second

I’ve seen many people design products, list them, and only then hire an SEO expert to research the market.

It’s like opening a restaurant somewhere with no customers, and then hiring marketers to fix it. No one is buying, no matter how good the experts are.

Research comes before you decide what to sell. Know your audience, your branding approach, what your niche actually demands, and how much competition exists. Then design.

Sign 6: You don’t know what to fix when sales drop

If you don’t know your audience, your branding, your demand, or your competition, you’ll have no idea what to look at when sales fall.

You should understand demand, click-through rate, conversion rate, and competition well enough to identify the real problem rather than guessing.

Sign 7: You’re not tracking your business

Most successful sellers share this habit. They analyse their numbers constantly and set expectations based on what the data actually shows.

For example, if your products don’t sell on certain holidays, and you’ve confirmed it across several events because you tracked it, you won’t panic next time sales drop on those days. That’s what tracking gives you.

If most of these describe your shop, it’s in trouble. The fix isn’t complicated. Stop guessing and start building a strategy.

If you’re an Etsy seller, at some point in your journey you’ve felt stuck. Plenty of sellers are stuck right now.

And when someone gets stuck, they usually assume the problem is SEO, mostly because that’s what they’ve been told.

SEO matters. But it isn’t necessarily the reason your shop is underperforming. There are plenty of shops with good SEO that still convert badly.

Look at any Etsy community and it’s the same thing everywhere, do SEO, you need SEO, buy SEO, learn SEO. I’m not denying it matters, I sold Etsy SEO services for years and earned well doing it. That’s exactly why I’m telling you this. SEO is one possible problem. There are many others, and a shop with solid SEO can still convert terribly.

Let me give you three examples.

First, low demand niche. If you’re selling into a niche with very little demand on Etsy, your growth will be limited no matter what. If your shop isn’t growing the way you expected, the issue may be that you didn’t research the market before choosing your niche. That’s not an SEO problem. That’s a demand problem.

Second, pricing against your competitors. Your prices are high compared to successful competitors who have more reviews, more items in carts, and proven sales, and they’re selling the same thing cheaper. Even if your listings rank at the top, your conversion rate will be low. That’s not SEO. That’s not understanding your buyers or your competition.

Third, your shop is simply new. You’re getting views and visits but no sales. The issue isn’t ranking, it’s conversion, and the reason is that you have no reviews yet to prove your products are good. Here you need patience, not more SEO. Sales grow slowly as proof accumulates.

There are many more examples. The point of this post is simply that SEO is not the only thing to fix. This is a business, and there are a lot of things to review, analyse, and correct.

So the next time someone tells you that you need SEO, don’t accept it automatically. Check whether that’s actually your problem first.

Most people think adding more products to an Etsy store means creating more opportunities.

I hear this constantly. “Aqib, I added 100 products but I’m not getting consistent sales.” I ask, who told you to add 100 products first? They always point to a mentor.

Let me tell you, this is a myth. Adding more products can sometimes add more problems to your store.

I’ve worked with clients and run my own Etsy shops for ten years, and I faced this exact problem for a long time myself. Once I understood I was adding more problems by adding more listings, fixing it got me real results. So I understand the frustration if you’re stuck in the same place.

Why does adding more products mean adding more problems? Three reasons I see constantly.

First, unfixed problems multiply. If you have 15 products and they all share a problem, or your whole store has one, and you add new listings before fixing it, you’re not creating new opportunities. You’re duplicating the same problem 15 more times.

Second, no clear audience. I recently audited a shop with 100 products, sales were inconsistent and low. When I looked closely, the shop wasn’t built for any specific group of people, it was built for everyone. A hundred products for everyone means you’re competing with everyone. That’s not a fight you can win. 15 products for a specific audience beats 100 products for no one in particular.

Third, and this happened to me just yesterday. An old friend told me he’s adding 5 listings a day. I said, wait, don’t add anything yet, let me check first. He’s selling print on demand, and his mockups were bad. Here’s the thing, if a 5-listing shop has bad mockups, that’s a small problem to fix. If a 1,000-listing shop has bad mockups, that’s a very big problem. Adding more products with the same flaw doesn’t fix the flaw, it just multiplies it.

My honest recommendation, identify a specific group of people you want to sell to first, then list products only for them, and fix what’s already broken before you add anything new.

So ask yourself, do you actually know what’s wrong in your store right now? If not, you’re firing a gun in the dark, hoping to hit a target you can’t see.

Every effect has a cause. If something happens, something caused it to happen. I taught 250 students, and most of them failed. I’ve talked to many more people outside that group who learned a skill, tried it, quit, and that was the end of it.

When I looked closely at my own 250 students and asked what actually caused the failures, I found two things, over and over.

They chose the wrong mentor.

And they were only looking for success, never prepared for failure.

Let me explain both.

Choosing the wrong mentor

Nobody teaches you how to spot a good mentor from a bad one. We’re mostly blind here, so let me fix that.

Look at how someone presents themselves. If they’re constantly showing you their success, their cars, their lifestyle, their achievements, if they present as a hero, be careful.

You don’t need another hero. You’re already the hero of your own story. You have goals, and you have problems standing in the way of them, internal and external. That’s what makes a story a story.

Think of Ertuğrul from the series. He’s the hero, he has a mission, and he has real problems along the way. Now imagine if Ibn ul Arabi showed up in that story with the same problems Ertuğrul had, needing help himself. Ertuğrul wouldn’t be able to learn anything from him. A hero can’t guide another hero.

What Ertuğrul actually needed was a guide, someone who wasn’t fighting the same battle, but who understood his struggle and had real competence to offer. According to Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand, a guide has two qualities: empathy and competence.

Empathy means they understand what you’re actually feeling right now. Competence means they have real knowledge and skill, and they’ve used it.

Look at how a potential mentor presents themselves online. Are they talking about your situation, your struggle, and their actual knowledge and skills? Or are they mostly showing you what they’ve won? The first is a guide. The second is just another hero, no more equipped to help you than you are.

Only looking for success

The second cause is you.

If you’re the hero of your own story, look at how heroes actually succeed. Read history. Nobody gets there overnight.

Abraham Lincoln failed for decades before becoming president. Nelson Mandela’s fight spanned most of his life. Every real story of success is also a long story of failure.

The problem is simple. We fail, and we quit. We don’t like the discomfort of struggling. But think about it, if the hero in a film gave up the first time things went wrong, would anyone watch that film? The bigger the hero, the bigger the problems they face along the way. That’s not a flaw in the story. That’s the story.

You will always have problems. No one solves them for you. A good guide gives you a plan, direction on what to do. But you’re the one who has to act on it.

So what actually causes failure?

Not the plan. Not the industry. Two things, over and over: following the wrong guide, or giving up the first time the plan gets hard.

Fix both, and you’re already ahead of most people who try this.

If you’re at that stage, no clear direction, unsure what to trust, let me help.

I’m writing this for beginners. People who aren’t especially tech savvy, who don’t have capital to invest, and who want to build a real, full time income online. Not a side hustle. Not a hobby. The whole thing.

First: every industry has good people and bad people. Scammers exist everywhere, not just online. That doesn’t make the whole industry fake. Online earning is real.

When I started, most people around me were certain it was all a scam. The few who admitted it was possible never accepted it as a real, full time income.

It can be. I’m proof. I’ve never earned money any other way. Ten years, online, full time.

So how do you actually tell what’s real from what’s fake?

Look for one thing: a product.

If there’s no product, there’s no real business. Everything that generates money exists around a product. Either you’re selling one, or you’re helping someone else sell theirs.

Selling a product yourself is e-commerce. Daraz locally, Etsy or Amazon internationally, or your own website.

Helping someone else sell is called services or freelancing. SEO to rank their products, ads to promote them, design work for their creatives, product research, brand strategy. Or build an audience yourself, a YouTube channel, a blog, and let sellers advertise to the people watching or reading.

Products can be digital too. Planners, templates, wedding invitations. That still counts.

If you can’t find the product underneath what someone’s selling you, be careful. That’s usually where the scam is.

My honest recommendation: start by learning one skill and offering it as a service, on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Fiverr. No capital needed, just time and consistency.

Earning online from Pakistan is possible, and it can genuinely beat inflation. But you need direction to get through the hard parts, and you need to stay with it for years, not months.

I have a lot of interest in poetry, and I write it too. I learned from a well-known poet.

There was another student of the same poet who wrote very well. I asked him how, because writing poetry that well was my dream.

He said: “I learn from my audience.”

I asked him to explain.

He said he used to read every piece he wrote to anyone willing to listen, and he kept doing it for years. He watched the reaction of every listener, line by line, and learned what pleased them and what didn’t.

After years of this he had a portion of his poetry that pleased everyone — because he had tested it. Now he writes from that portion, which is why it feels perfect to you.

In short: there was a process. Years of junk poetry produced a few beautiful poems and ghazals.

I never applied his formula to poetry. I applied it to my career.

In 2019 I received my first $5 order on Fiverr. It was Etsy SEO.

Here’s the thing — I had never learned Etsy SEO before that order. I had never sold on Etsy in my life.

The client ordered SEO for three listings. I took the whole night to complete it. I delivered.

An hour later she put it in revision.

I asked detailed questions to understand her concerns, noted every point, and revised everything. There was no AI then, and it was very difficult to find any reliable information about Etsy SEO anywhere.

So I made her an offer. I said I would do the SEO for her whole shop at no extra charge — just keep asking me for revisions whenever something felt wrong.

I did 26 revisions on that order and earned $5. Four dollars, actually, after Fiverr’s 20%.

But the $4 wasn’t the real earning.

The real earning was access. Someone let me into their shop. I made every mistake I could possibly make, and I learned more from that one order than from anything I could have read.

And here’s what happened afterwards: in my entire career on Fiverr, I never did 26 revisions on an order again.

Later I taught Etsy SEO to 250 students. Very few of them are still earning today, and this is where I think the difference sat.

Most of them hated revisions. A revision felt like an insult, like a sign they had done something wrong. They wanted the order marked complete and the money released.

But the revision is where the learning is. The client is telling you exactly what they wanted and you didn’t deliver. Nobody else will ever give you that information for free.

I think most young people misunderstand money.

Money is not something you earn. Money is the output of something you earn.

What you actually earn is the skill, the practice, the reputation, the consistency. Money is what comes out of that. My students wanted the output without the thing that produces it.

The lesson is this. Start today — not to earn, but to learn. Don’t wait for the perfect time. Don’t try to be perfect first. Take action and keep learning.

Price yourself low at the start, and be honest about why. Tell the buyer you’re a beginner, that your rate reflects that, and that you’ll keep working until they’re satisfied.

You’re not underselling yourself. You’re buying access and access is what makes everything after it possible.

I went to a restaurant in Bahria Town Lahore today with a few close friends. The waiter came with the menu and he looked so sad I felt he might cry at any moment.

I put the menu aside and asked him to sit with us for five minutes. He accepted.

I asked why he was sad. He said a girl he had been with for six years had broken up with him. I asked why. He said her parents were looking for someone more financially stable.

He said, “I could do anything for her if she gave me a chance. I used to give her gifts regularly, but I think that was not enough.”

Then he said: you must have an income these days that can fulfil at least a few dreams, otherwise anyone can end up broken like me.

First I felt sad for him. Then I realised something.

I am like that girl. I am the one who left for a better opportunity and did not care about love.

I reviewed my own past in a few minutes and told my friends. I used to try many things at the same time to earn more. I posted regularly on YouTube — it was giving me maybe $100 a month. Then I started article writing, and it gave me almost double, so I left YouTube. Then Fiverr gave me almost double of article writing, so I dropped article writing.

Speaking and writing. Those were my two passions. I left both of them for better opportunities.

It doesn’t mean I failed at YouTube and article writing. I got through the difficult part. I was earning decent money from both. But once I found something better, I left.

Let me explain the whole journey.

YouTube

I started YouTube in 2016 from nowhere. No expertise, no idea what to post, no good camera, no mic, no decent phone.

Me and a friend in the hostel planned to rent a camera and mic. He knew I was creative and could speak, so he had confidence in me. I had some confidence too — I used to speak at events, take part in debate competitions, write poetry. (Maybe I’ll share some of that with you one day.)

Two natural abilities from childhood: I could speak, and I could write. I used both in the videos.

We rented a camera and mic for 1,000 rupees a night from a wedding cameraman. We recorded many videos in one night and posted all of them. Then I made a few low-quality videos on my mobile and posted those too.

One of the mobile videos went viral. Around 250,000 views.

The channel was monetised within a year and the AdSense payments started. But I decided the money wasn’t enough. I didn’t understand what that channel could have become.

So I kept looking for something more. Then the same friend introduced me to SEO content writing. This was 2018.

Content writing

He knew I could write, so he referred some clients. They paid very little at the start — 0.3 or 0.4 rupees per word.

Writing takes a lot of time. I used to write all day and half the night. I had no table and no chair. I kept the laptop on my lap on the bed, charger plugged in all the time.

Clients increased. I hired an assistant, then another, until I had six assistants and a manager. I trained all of them. This ran from 2018 to 2021.

At its best it was maybe 1 to 2 lakh rupees a month. Good money — but not something I could see lasting.

Fiverr

A friend introduced me to Etsy in 2019. I made a gig on Fiverr and got my first $5 order.

I had no idea what to do with it. I spent the whole night completing one $5 order. I hadn’t learned this anywhere — I got the order first and worked it out as I went.

During Covid I earned a lot. Most businesses had closed, so people opened Etsy shops, and that created the work.

Then I built a system. I hired people, trained them, opened Fiverr accounts for them, agreed a commission. Between 2021 and 2025 I had around 15 active Fiverr accounts, two managers handling clients, and 10 to 15 people doing the work. It was almost fully automated.

Most of my earnings came from here. I dropped content writing in 2021 — it paid far less and took far more time.

Blogging and Amazon Affiliates

Around the time I started Etsy SEO on Fiverr, I also started an AdSense website in partnership with a friend. I wrote the content, he did the off-page SEO.

Even my first blog worked. It earned around $200 a month for many months.

But $200 wasn’t something I could stay with. I wanted more.

In the same period I started an Amazon affiliate site. That one failed completely.

The Agency Website

Fiverr was automated and I had a good team, but the work fluctuated. At the start of every year the team would go quiet.

So I built an agency website. Good site, decent budget on Facebook ads.

One client. That’s all I got.

I wasn’t trained for it. I didn’t know how to bring in clients, how to retarget, how to build trust cold. On Fiverr the communication was warm — the client came to you already wanting something. Facebook ads felt completely cold to me.

I have to accept I failed at that one. The good thing was that Fiverr was still running well.

The eBook

Etsy wasn’t available in Pakistan at that time.

I’ve always had a passion for writing, so I decided to write an ebook and sell it. I wrote the whole thing, built a website, ran ads.

I got decent sales. But it came out roughly at breakeven. So I dropped that too.

Looking at all of it, there’s a difference I only see now.

Amazon affiliates and the agency website failed. I couldn’t make them work.

YouTube, content writing, blogging and the ebook did not fail. They worked. I left them because something else paid more.

There is a time in life when you only stick to what brings in more money, because you need the money. And then a time comes when you start looking for your passions again — because the need is gone, and now you miss them, and you wonder why you couldn’t stay with them.

But I don’t think I was wrong.

You can’t love, you can’t follow a passion, you can’t do anything for anyone else if you’re hungry. First you need to eat.

That waiter was telling me his story. I was hearing mine.

During the workout I asked why he wasn’t taking personal training.

He was quick, direct and very clear. We don’t need trainers or teachers nowadays. Everything is on YouTube, or you can ask ChatGPT directly.

That stopped me. I use these tools every day, and I have still paid hundreds of thousands of rupees to a gym trainer.

He was completely confident about what he had learned. So I asked him more — about his diet, his supplements, how he was deciding what to eat. He told me exactly what he was eating and exactly what he was taking, and said he got all of it from the internet.

I have paid a nutritionist to build my diet plans.

I am not saying he was wrong. But it felt like watching someone freedive — going underwater on a single breath, no tank, no regulator. It is more enjoyable and it gives you more confidence. It is also more risky.

The internet gives you information. But information can be wrong, incomplete, outdated, or simply distracting.

A teacher gives you DCA (Direction, Correction, Accountability)

The internet is very useful — under the direction of a teacher.

Let me explain from my own ten years.

I learned almost everything I know from the internet. It took far longer than it needed to. My first two years I earned nothing at all, and even after that the income was very low. Looking back at my whole career, I think a teacher could have saved me at least half that time. Probably more.

But notice what I said. A teacher could have saved my time. I did not say a teacher would have helped me earn more.

That decision was always mine — what I wanted, how big my target was, how much time I would give it, how much effort I could make. A teacher only gives direction inside that. A teacher does not guarantee results. A teacher saves time.

Now let me apply the same test to my own teaching.

I taught 250 students about online earning.

Hardly three or four are doing well consistently. The others started, earned something, and left. Some never earned at all.

I gave all of them the same direction. Three or four stuck with it.

That is exactly why the 19-year-old is half right. Whether you succeed still comes down to how long you can stay with it — and nobody, teacher or internet, can do that part for you. The students who are earning today deserve full credit for it. They did the part that actually mattered.

So where does a teacher come in?

Imagine you’re a new employee at a large bookstore. The racks are organised, but there are no labels on top. Your boss asks you to bring a specific book. Every book is right there in front of you — and you go rack by rack, and it takes you a very long time.

Now imagine someone trained you for a few days first. Your boss asks for the same book. The first thing you do is rule out every rack it isn’t in.

Nobody found the book for you. You found it. But the training saved you an hour.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

If I could give that 19-year-old one piece of advice, it would be this: pay a teacher, get direction, find the information yourself on the internet, bring it back, and let him correct you.

My father gave me my first laptop in 2014, for studies. I needed money — a lot of money — and I knew I could not make it in the offline market, because I had no resources and no skills. But a laptop, internet, and time felt like enough.

In 2016 I started a YouTube channel about kids and parenting. I had no expertise in it at all. One video went viral — “solution to stubborn child” — and got 250,000 views. Over the next two years the channel reached 15,000 subscribers. It’s down to 13,000 now, because I abandoned it. It gave me a few AdSense payments and nothing else, and I needed a lot more than that.

Since then: SEO content writing for local clients, an office in Manawala, Etsy SEO on Fiverr, a team I trained myself, 250 students, offices opened and closed, a team that left, and now an Etsy shop I run alone. Ten years, and around $200,000.

I will tell all of it properly, one piece at a time.

The real question is why I never shared any of it, and why I am starting now.

Honestly, I was shy. I was not comfortable sharing. I kept thinking I was not at the point where I could tell anyone anything — that I had to be successful first, and then I could speak.

I don’t think that anymore. I don’t need a result to share with you. I need a journey to share.

When someone goes on holiday, they share the journey, and we enjoy it. Nobody waits until they get home to say anything. This is the same. I work, I share, I learn, you learn.

So I will share all of it — what worked, what didn’t, what failed, why it failed, and what I learned.