No, I’m not suggesting you sell on Etsy. At least, not in this example.

But you can use Etsy to make a very nice, ongoing income through drop shipping. And you won’t even need to pay for your products until you produce sales.

You can drive traffic through valuable content, or you can simply purchase Facebook ads and then optimize them for the maximum return on your investment.

Think of it as building a money machine. You put in 50 cents of advertising, you take a dollar out. Then you tweak your machine to produce that dollar on only 25 cents of advertising, and then you rinse and repeat.

Here’s how:

Spend an hour or two researching on Etsy. You are looking for products that that are selling well and appear to be massively underpriced.

You can tell how popular a product is by the number of times it’s been favorited as well as the number of times it’s been reviewed.

You’re not looking for well known, branded items because the competition on those is too fierce and the profits are too low. Instead, you’re looking for unique white-label products that show well.

Look for products priced well below what you would consider paying for them. High value and low price means there is an opportunity there for you to exploit.

And of course it must be an item that the seller can continually supply to you, whether they are creating the item themselves or drop shipping. One-of-a-kind items won’t work.

Promoting the items you choose off of Etsy is going to give you an advantage. You won’t be limited by Etsy’s platform and user base.

And you can retarget, bringing prospects back to your item for a second viewing.

Remember, it often takes seeing a product more than once to convince a prospect to become a buyer.

Once you find items that appear underpriced and are doing well, you can check Alibaba to see if they are drop shipping, and if so, how much they are paying. You can then go straight through Alibaba, if you choose.

Or if you prefer to go through the Etsy seller, or it’s an item the Etsy seller is making, then you’ll need to contact them.

Your email might read:

Hi, I’m __ and I run online e-commerce stores. I love your Etsy store, and I especially like the ___ product. I am interested in selling it from my store – would you be interested in supplying me?

I’m looking for a drop shipping arrangement. Basically, when I make a sale I’ll email you with the customer’s info, and you’ll ship it directly to them for me.

Please let me know if you’re interested and we’ll work out the details.

Categories of items to look for:

Bath and body products – These are generally made by the Etsy sellers themselves, and they can often be purchased cheaply and sold for a very large markup. For example, you might sell a $3 item for $10-$15.

Jewelry – again, the markup on jewelry is potentialy very large. Look for items targeted to certain groups of people. For example, jewelry with cats on it for cat lovers, jewelry for fans of sports teams, personalized jewelry for young girls, etc.

Household items – beautiful clocks, artwork, candle holders, etc.

Novelty items – this could be anything that is extremely eye-catching in the photos. For example, there is a product called Fairy Dust in a Bottle. The bottle of ‘fairy dust’ lights up, and it sells like hotcakes. Show a great photo of this on Facebook to the right target market, and odds are you’ll do extremely well.

Anything that presents really well in a photograph, is underpriced and in demand is a good choice. It’s better to choose products that are colorful or eye-catching in some way. As they say, the right photo is worth a thousand words.

One last note: Keep strict track of your math. If you’ve got a $10 margin on a product, and it’s costing you $5 of advertising per sale, then it’s simply a matter of scaling up the advertising to make more money. 20 sales a day would be $100 in profit per day and $700 profit per week.

See if you can adjust your targeting and your advertising to do even better.

Then find more products and repeat the process.

This is a really easy way to make good money online in your spare time.

And anyone can do it. It just takes some research and legwork, as well as a good knowledge of Facebook ads to make a profitable success from it.