As a marketplace for handmade, creative, and authentic products, Etsy is home to a wide variety of craftsmen and artisans. Blacksmiths included.

If you are a talented blacksmith, you can grow a successful side business by selling your handmade creations to people who will appreciate your skills with iron and steel. However, in order to do so, first you’ll need to come up with a strategy.

Some of the things you’ll need to think about are what type of products will generate the most interest, how to price your creations, how diverse your portfolio should be, and more.

To help you lay the foundations, we will present you with some insights from Etsy gathered with the help of Sale Samurai.

Successful blacksmith strategies on Etsy

The blacksmith space is diverse and opportunity-rich. Blacksmiths in the past were mostly associated with the creation of tools and weapons that were used in everyday life. Today, there are a ton of additional gadgets, decors, and accessories that blacksmiths can sell to consumers.

Let us now explore some of the best practices employed by successful blacksmiths on Etsy.

Professional Photos

Presenting your blacksmith creation in the best light will massively increase your chances of grabbing attention. If you’ve done your research on Etsy in the past, you may have noticed that every niche has a distinctive use of imagery in listings. This is also connected with the type of audience you are after.

For example, when it comes to blacksmiths, chances are that the majority of your audience will be male. As a result, most successful product listings include simple and clean images, without any elements distracting the focus from the product. It’s also popular to use wood as a background, which makes the iron or steel pop up even more.

This doesn’t mean that you should exclude women, however. For instance, you may specialize in the creation of blacksmith jewelry or women’s accessories. In this case, Sellers usually shoot their products in a specific setting or as a wearable. One example is a listing of a blacksmith’s decorative hairpin, where the image is of a woman in the forest with the accessory in her hair.

Price Variety

The next important bit of strategy for your blacksmith business on Etsy is pricing. Prices in the blacksmith niche vary, depending on the level of sophistication of the product, the specific materials used, the size, and more. Although there is no perfect answer as to what your pricing should be, we did notice that blacksmith Sellers offer a substantial price variety in their listings. For example, they may launch a large and complex creation that costs around $100, but they’ll also have smaller accessories or tools that are sold for around $10.

Why do they do this?

Because this pricing strategy allows them to increase their chances of generating consistent profits from different target groups. Sure, the profit you will receive from selling a $100 product is a lot more than that from a $10 sale. However, it’s safe to say that there are a lot more buyers prepared to spend $10 on a blacksmith creation than $100. By having both types of products available in your Etsy shop, you can enjoy profits from both groups.

Product Variety

Most successful blacksmith Sellers on Etsy are also masters of product variety. As we mentioned earlier, the blacksmith art is no longer just about weapons, knives and tools. Here is a list of some of the popular blacksmith products found on Etsy:

• Rings
• Bracelets
• Watches
• Necklaces
• Earrings
• Bottle openers
• Locks
• Keys
• Hooks
• Handles
• Sculptures
• Candlesticks
• Garden trellises
• Hanging artwork
• Hammers

Instead of selling different versions of the same product, most blacksmiths on Etsy create different types of products. Why? To satisfy a more diverse pool of demand. The more variety you have in your seller portfolio, the wider your audience will become. This ultimately leads to more sales and more money-making potential.

Niching Down

Niches are a popular part of blacksmith strategies on Etsy. Niching down is related both to product variety (as we explained earlier) and designing products for a specific buyer group. For example, most successful products from the space are specifically targeted at men or women, they are described as a perfect gift for an occasion, or are themed in line with a popular trend.

For instance, selling a ‘Viking’ hammer is a great way to niche down an otherwise ordinary product – a hammer. This increases your chances of scoring a sale from buyers interested in the Viking way of life or even movies or TV series related to this era.

Keywords

Another common practice that became clear during our research into successful blacksmith listings on Etsy is the use of niche-specific keywords. The majority of the best-sellers have the word “blacksmith” in their title or description. But that’s not all. Some of the other popular keywords in this category include:

• ‘Personalized’
• ‘Hand forged’
• ‘Blacksmith made’
• ‘Iron’

Keywords like this help Sellers make their products more noticeable as they increase the likelihood of your listings showing up on specific search queries on Etsy. And the more visibility your listings have, the higher the chances of generating sales.

Special Occasion Gifts

Blacksmith products are unique, handcrafted items that make a great gift for special occasions. We can confirm this as a lot of the best-sellers from the category are designed specifically for events like anniversaries, especially in the jewelry niche. For example, the ‘Iron anniversary gift, 6th-anniversary keychain. Blacksmith forged personalized key chain gift. Wrought iron customized keychain’ has been sold an impressive 7,954 times. It has generated 1,624 customer reviews, and costs $26. This product has performed exceptionally well and has resulted in a significant profit for its Seller.

However, it’s important to note that its success is not only a reflection of the fact that it’s promoted as an anniversary gift. It includes some of the trendy keywords we mentioned, like ‘personalized’, ‘blacksmith’, and ‘iron’. The image is nice and clean, with a wooden background under the key chains. It’s a niche product and a perfect example of most things that we’ve covered so far in this article.

Tips For Making Your Blacksmith Listings Stand Out

Now that you know what some of the successful blacksmith strategies on Etsy are, what can you do to make a difference in your performance as a Seller? We strongly believe that being aware of what other flourishing Sellers are doing can inspire you to enhance your own strategy. From the details that we outlined above we can make the following recommendations:

• Enrich your listings with high-quality product images that have been adapted to your target audience
• Create a Seller portfolio with both expensive and affordable products to maximize your chances of consistent sales
• Strive for product variety to attract more buyer groups
• Niche down to stay competitive
• Optimize your listings with niche-specific keywords to increase visibility

Let’s look at an example.

The ‘6th Anniversary Heart – Iron Anniversary – Personalised Anniversary Gift – Valentine – Wedding – Blacksmith Made’ is a popular product from the blacksmith category on Etsy. It’s targeted at a romantic occasion, therefore the imagery is carefully customized with roses. The title includes keywords like ‘personalized’, ‘anniversary gift’, and ‘blacksmith’. The product has generated 6,331 sales and costs $50.37. We can clearly see the success here, but let’s look at the Seller’s other products to get an idea of their overall strategy.

Their most expensive blacksmith product costs $110.29, while their most affordable one is $23.57. In other words, we can see the price diversity that we discussed earlier. In addition, they have a total of 36 products for sale, with enough variety to capture the attention of different buyers. They’ve also successfully niched down by creating gifts for specific occasions, treble clef toasting forks to target a niche of music lovers and musicians, and more.

As a blacksmith on Etsy, you can optimize your listings and design your products strategically to empower your Seller profile and increase your sales.

How Sale Samurai helps blacksmiths on Etsy

As a business intelligence tool, Sale Samurai can help you make the right strategic decisions and stay ahead of the competition. The tool enables you to explore what other top-performing blacksmith Sellers are doing. You can also find relevant keywords that are popular on the platform, audit and optimize your listings with tags and photos. For example, by including some of your competitors from Etsy in the ‘Shops’ tool in Sale Samurai, you’ll be able to peek into how many listings they have active, how they’ve optimized them, and what types of products they sell.

This can help you diversify your own portfolio and include products that are trending. By connecting your Etsy shop to Sale Samurai, you’ll be able to audit your listings and find any missing gaps. For example, you may need to add more images or include extra keywords in a listing to make it fully optimized and ready to generate sales. By running a basic search from the ‘Search’ tool, you’ll have the ability to find relevant blacksmith-related keywords that buyers are actively searching for on the platform. This will help you make the right decisions about the tags you use in your listings.

In addition, by using Sale Samurai’s calendar, you’ll be able to stay ahead of any special events and holidays throughout the year that you can use to sell blacksmith gifts. All of these efforts will lead you down the same path – more visibility, more sales, and ultimately a Seller profile that has turned into a success story.

In A Nutshell

The blacksmith art is certainly one that is generating a lot of interest on Etsy. As a blacksmith, being informed about the successful strategies in your space will help you enhance and strengthen your Seller profile, optimize your listings, and outperform your competitors. Don’t forget to use Sale Samurai and its insights to make the right strategic decisions and unlock the full potential of your craftsmanship.