Gold City Ventures E-Printables Course Review (How I Made 900+ Sales on Etsy!)

Contemplating starting a side hustle selling printables and digital products on Etsy? If so, you might want to look into taking the Gold City Ventures E-Printables Course! This course teaches you all the foundations of starting an Etsy shop, doing keyword research, creating printable products, and more. This is the only Etsy course I personally took and I found it invaluable in creating my shop which brings in some passive revenue each month.

Let’s dive in!

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links; I earn a commission on sales. Note that I did not become an affiliate for the course until after I completed modules and earned income via the principles taught for Etsy. As with any course, experiences may not be typical, results are not guaranteed. 😊

My experience with the E-Printables course and my Etsy Shop

It’s always helpful to hear personal experience, so let me share mine and then further down I’ll dig into the nitty gritty of the course.

I signed up for the Gold City Ventures E-Printables course at the end of October 2022, and started my Etsy shop right around the same time. I spent time over the next two months consuming the most important lessons in the course then adding products to my shop using the information I learned.

I did skip some course modules – for example, there was a module on creating editable products with Corjl that I passed over. I didn’t feel like learning another tool at that point.

When creating my shop, I went with some digital products, as taught by the E-Printables course. I also decided to test some physical products (like print on demand artwork and sweatshirts) – this wasn’t in the course but I thought it would be fun to play around with it.

It’s now almost two years later, and here are my results and lessons learned:

• Over the last two years, I’ve made over 980 sales. 99% of my sales came from the digital products that I created using the information from the course. (I’ll probably nix the physical products completely soon, because clearly they’re not doing much for me. I should have just stuck with what I learned in the course, haha.)

• The course was super helpful for teaching me things I would have never thought about when creating digital items, like margins to leave, not using too much color, copyright on fonts, etc. All the random things I would have never thought about when designing a printable, since I don’t have a design background.

• Same goes for how to create good listings – I learned what kind of images to use, how to use tags, how to create a good headline, etc.

• I came into this with an SEO background, but had I not, I really appreciated that the course dove into using SEO to find product ideas. They use eRank, which is specific to Etsy. I signed up for that for a short time, and it was helpful. If you’re not familiar with SEO and you don’t currently blog, that’s probably the best bet to use.

• However, because I already use KeySearch for blogging, I figured that I could probably find SEO-driven options using KeySearch – and I was right. The number one seller in my shop came from a keyword that I found using KeySearch. I took a peek and noticed none of the Google results or Etsy results were meeting the user’s needs. I put together a digital template for that keyword, and boom – tons of sales.

• In the screenshot below, you can see a lot of my shop’s visits come from “Etsy Marketing and SEO” which includes both Etsy-funded offsite promotions and search engine optimization, aka people finding the listing on Google.

• The screenshot above brings up another point – clearly, I need to do better marketing on my own! I could really benefit from sharing my shop on social and in my email newsletter more for products that are relevant to my audience.

• I have 14 total items in my shop, which is not enough, haha! With two exceptions, almost all the items were added in those first two months back in 2022. The last year and a half were spent focusing more heavily on another business venture (a membership), and now that I’m shutting that down, I’m SO happy to refocus on my Etsy shop. I plan to get at least 10 new items up there by the end of 2024. (That said, how awesome is it that I’ve still had some passive income rolling in the last two years despite taking a long break?!)

• Even though you may think a digital product or template is well-explained and easy to use, inevitably people will be emailing you because they can’t figure it out. I have a Canva template that sells in my shop, and I realized quickly that a) I need to say “Canva template” all over the place, because if not people completely miss that it’s on Canva, and b) I needed to make a quick video showing people how to edit the template on Canva so I didn’t get lots of questions on that. For the later, I included the video link in the instructions that are automatically provided to people on Etsy when they purchase that product.

• While there are other ways to sell digital products, like E-Junkie or Gum Road, I really like that Etsy builds in all the tax stuff for you. My brain has enough to handle and knowing that’s all taken care of makes my life easy peasy.

• You’ll often see major success stories promoted for course launches, like people bringing in 100K/year through their shop. That’s amazing and they definitely exist. However, I hope that my experience provides a more balanced review, showing you that it’s definitely possible to make money but it may just be one income stream to add to a business with multiple streams, or a side hustle.

What’s included in the Gold City Ventures E-Printables Course?

Now that you’ve got my specific experience, let’s talk about the Gold City Ventures course itself. It covers a ton of topics relevant to building an Etsy shop with printables – here is a high-level overview:

• Overview of what digital products are and how to come up with ideas
• How to create printables and templates using Canva
• Creating good listing images, headlines, and descriptions
• How to do keyword research to find opportunities for digital products
• Tips for marketing and optimizing your Esty shop

How long does it take to complete the course?

The course includes some video lessons and some text-based lessons. None are particularly lengthy. I think it took me two weeks to review what I needed to in the course, but I was trying to simultaneously put everything in action that I learned (and also juggling the other aspects of my business).  If you were a go-getter, you could probably knock it out in a couple days.

How much is the course?

The standard price for the course is $247, but at launch times, you can typically find it using this link at a $50 discount, making it $197. (If it’s not during a launch, you can sign up for the waitlist at that link).

Can’t you just find this material for free on blogs and YouTube?

Maybe. It would require a lot of hopping around the interwebs.

If you don’t have any money to invest, then you could certainly find a lot of helpful tips and tricks by searching blogs and YouTube. I’m never a fan of suggesting people spend money if they truly are struggling to meet their basic living needs. If you are in a precarious financial situation, please don’t worsen that by purchasing this course.

If you are not in that type of situation and do have funds to invest in yourself and your business, there are two reasons I think the course makes sense:

1. Everything is packaged together in an order that makes sense, saving you time (which is always something I feel like I never have enough of!).

• You know the saying – “you don’t know what you don’t know”? There were some things I would have never searched for simply because I didn’t know I should know them when getting started.

Are you just saying you like the course because you’re an affiliate?

I only promote affiliate products I believe in. I’ve been in the blogging and in the online biz space since 2014 (or 2011 if you want to count my first website), and believe me – there have been a lot of courses and products that I would never become an affiliate for because they are terrible.

This course is not one of those. This is one that I think offers a lot of value for those unfamiliar with creating digital products and using Etsy.

Are you guaranteed to make money?

Nope, just like any other online business venture. There’s a chance you could spend time putting up an Etsy shop and developing printables and never make a dime.

(I know, someone told me a dream crusher recently, lol. I’m just realistic!)

However, if you follow what’s taught in the Gold City Ventures course, you’ll be way ahead of many other people who are trying to start an Etsy shop with digital products. You’ll understand how to do keyword research to find printable options and how to save your time in creating them.

If you follow the information in the course, you should see results. I was glad that I did!

Also, remember another way you can sell on Etsy is to create your shop there but market the products to an audience you already have! Are you a blogger or social media influencer? If so, what kinds of products do you find your audience asking about? What requests have you gotten in the past? What blog content do you have that does well that could possibly be expanded upon for a paid product?

Once you get some ideas there, you should be able to develop products for the audience you have, and be able to market to them via email, social, etc.

What is the VIP membership?

The VIP membership is a monthly membership in addition to the course. You’re automatically enrolled when you buy the course, however the first 30 days are free.

It includes a Facebook group for support, access to new monthly templates that you can use for printables each month, and access to some additional trainings. I find the Facebook group to have helpful info and discussions, and just used one of the VIP templates as I’m working on getting another product into my shop this month.

You can cancel the VIP membership before that 30-day mark, but if you stay in it and reach 100 sales while active, you’ll automatically get free membership moving forward. That’s what I chose to do. I joined at the end of October and had reached 100 sales by the beginning of January, so I only paid for two months ($29/month) before I earned my free lifetime membership.

What kinds of printables and digital products can I create?

We’ve got a lot of readers on this site that are in the wellness space – nutrition, food, fitness, etc. Some of y’all may be wondering how this course could be applicable to you. After all, many printables that we see on Etsy are things like invitations, games, or party decorations. But there are so many more options out there for every niche!

When doing keyword research for ideas, think of expanding on phrases like planner, template, printable, guide, calculator, spreadsheet, log, etc that could be relevant to your niche. For example, here are some quick ideas:

• Meal plans (could be specific to a dietary need, grocery store, etc.)
• Recipe e-books
• Habit tracking printables
• Fitness planners or trackers
• Wellness-related bingo cards
• Nutrition or fitness challenge – 7 days, 30 days, etc.
• Meal prep guide
• Intuitive eating workbook or journal
• Wellness-related gift tags for teacher printables (I haven’t posted them on Etsy, but one year I made cute “Have a Merry Christmas and a Chappy New Year” printables on cardstock, and there was a space to tape some fancy chapsticks I bought. Silly but cute!).
• Medication or supplement trackers
• Specific fitness plan or training plan
• Workout games
• Condition-specific guides / e-books
• Notion templates, Google sheets templates, or other popular technology templates for any nutrition/fitness related planning or tracking
• Digital courses delivered via Google Drive

With any of the above, niching down the specific product is usually best. For example, instead of a generic e-book with 20 healthy recipes, maybe you do an overnight oats ebook with 20 recipes. Similarly, I’d probably avoid a “30 day strength training plan” and narrow down instead to something like “30 day strength training plan for discus throwers”.

Sample digital product keyword research

Let’s say I’m a dietitian that specializes in gut health, and I’m looking up keywords about the low fodmap diet. I spot this keyword for 30-day low fodmap meal plan.

As you can see, it gets a decent number of searches each month (480) and the competition score isn’t too high (36 – easy-moderate). (PS – if you want to learn more about how to actually do keyword research, I recommend reading my KeySearch tutorial here).

Now I’m going to go into Google and Etsy and check out the current results.

On Google, I have some results that pop up with meal plans, but only one actually meets the user intent of finding a 30-day meal plan.

On Etsy (shown below), I have some results related to food choices on a low fodmap diet and a 7-day meal plan, but none were currently showing up that met the user intent of finding a 30-day plan.

If that were me, I’d go ahead and create a 30-day plan with a printable shopping list and recipes, and I’ve got myself a unique stand-out product on Etsy (that will hopefully also be displayed by Google, or at least via Etsy offsite ads on Google).

And you can use the info you learn in Gold City Ventures to figure out how to make the printable look nice, how to use a template to accelerate the speed that you create it, how to optimize your listings, etc.

The Bottom Line

I personally think the cost of the Gold City Ventures course is well worth what is delivered. It will you through how to get started with an Etsy shop that sells digital products. If you are new to those avenues, you’ll get a lot out of this course.

Keep in mind – you need to put time and effort into developing those products and make sure people are looking to buy them (i.e. keyword research or platform research). If you take the course and just throw up a few generic printables, odds are you won’t do well. But if you take the time to research and develop unique products, you’ll probably make sales. That’s a nice passive income stream that could be arriving in your bank account.

Plus, if you act on the information quickly and earn your 100 sales, you’ll secure your lifetime access to the VIP membership for the Facebook groups and templates, without having to pay too much extra over your course fee.

TLDR: I’m a fan of the course!

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