Auto insurance can all seem the same until it comes time to use it, so don't get stuck paying more for less coverage. Switch to USA Auto Insurance and you could start saving money in no time. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply. USAA! This episode is brought to you by Atlassian. Atlassian makes the team collaboration software that powers enterprise businesses around the world, including over 80% of the Fortune 500. With Atlassian's AI powered software like Jira, Confluence, and Loom, you'll have more time to do the work that matters. In fact, Atlassian customers experience a 25% reduction in project duration per year. Unleash the potential of your team at Atlassian.com. Atlassian. Welcome to another episode of Ryan's Method, Passive Income Podcast. Here's your host, Ryan Hogue. Back in 2018, I got to take a trip to China for about 10 days, and the one thing I remember about being there was that QR codes were everywhere. Whether you like them, love them, hate them, I would say they're definitely becoming more a part of our day-to-day life here in America as well. When was the last time you went out to eat? And there was no menu. You had to scan a QR code to see what they had for sale. I know not a lot of people are probably big fans of that, but it is becoming more prevalent. And as a seller, right? We've got the seller mindset. I see that as an opportunity. It actually inspired this video today, where I want to do a deep dive into selling custom QR codes as digital products on Etsy, with major upside to upsell those customers on per non-demand products. So let's get to it. So let's get into it, guys. You might have noticed that QR code I flashed up on the screen was a custom one. I customized the color, I added my logo. You can do that for free on a website called QR Code Monkey. It's not a sponsored video, but I'll link to them in the description. If you guys weren't aware, it literally takes 30 seconds to even do a custom one, like the one you just saw. And if for some reason you were feeling inclined to scan it, you should have seen the text in your mobile phone, "LOL, you scanned me." So if you actually hold your phone up, that's the text you would see. You have the ability to do quite a bit with these QR codes, though, check this out. You see up there, QR Code Monkey is doing all the work for us, including letting us customize the color, as you can see, add a logo, etc. But you can send them to a URL of your choice by clicking URL. You can hit text and just have text flash when they scan it. I know that's a popular one on Etsy. That's actually when I initially got this idea, those were the ones I kept seeing, you scan the QR and it just says, "F you." I don't know why it's popular, but I had never messed around with that. I've only ever used QRs to redirect people to a URL. And when I experimented with QR Code Monkey and it worked, I just started laughing to myself. I wish I recorded it because it was organic, that it could be something so simple, you know? Email, you can have it go to an email, you can have it go to a phone number, SMS, that's text message, the vCard stuff, which I personally never use, but I think that's how our phone saves contacts, me card, which I've never even heard of that. You can include locations, so this could be used for a number of reasons, guys. I mean, when you get into the reasons why we might, what, why customers might want QR codes, you're really getting into the marketing aspect. This is what we're selling more or less. The fact that we have the ability to execute it here in QR Code Monkey for free in less than a minute means we can sell it, we can monetize it, right? Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wi-Fi info. Now, that is a really good one. Marketing Wi-Fi to Airbnb hosts and whatnot. In my mind, one of the easiest ways to sell things is to sell to business owners, because if you're owning a business, you probably understand that you can part ways with money to make more money, you know what I mean? To increase the happiness and the ratings from the people who stay at your Airbnb by doing a custom Wi-Fi sign, that's to me, easy, right? We can even experiment with that on Etsy. Event-themed QR codes. I actually made a short list of reasons why you might use QR codes. Check this out. Social media, right? You can link to social medias. I don't know if you guys have ever seen somebody like driving down the street in a really loud car and they've got the social media sticker, they might have their like social media handle on the window in a decal. Well, you can do stickers as well with the QR codes that go to the social media company logos where you can link the company logo like you saw me do here. Scan to view the menu. I used that example talking about this video. Scan to pay. Another reason why businesses might do this. My wife, Maryl, has worked at the farmers market for her small dog business back-to-back years. We didn't do it this year, too busy when we got married and stuff this year, 2024, whatever. It's still early, right? But scan to pay. That's very popular at farmers markets. I mean, personally, I think you should be paying cash at the farmers market, but anyways, scan to pay is common and you could sell to the vendors at farmers markets. Honestly, go up the chain and go to the people who organize the farmers markets and have them market to the vendors for you. Event photos, like if you have a wedding, for instance, my sister is getting married soon. I could hit her up. Hey, do you want me to make you a QR code and make it easy for people to share their photos that they take? I mean, this stuff's already being done, by the way. If you go to Etsy and search this stuff, it's all there. You know what I mean? Another one I saw on Etsy, if lost, scan to return and you sell it on a key chain. I mean, you could sell the digital QR code, but then obviously upsell the customer with the option of having it on like a key chain for something. So are you guys interested in this? I feel like if you're still watching, you must be. Another one here, Bitcoin. They have Bitcoin ones. So crypto addresses, don't just think Bitcoin, this could be any blockchain, any crypto address. It's just a string of numbers and letters, string of text. Under more, they've got, let's see, MP3s, videos, PDF, social media, app stores, image galleries, rating and reviews, another big upsell for businesses and feedback. You know what I mean? And I mean, good feedback mechanisms. I don't want to make this video about that, but like you can ask the person for their feedback first. And then if they're giving you four stars or above, send them to where they can submit it. And if they give you three stars or below, send them to a form that says, what could we have done better? You know what I mean? I mean, that's not an original idea. I know you guys have seen that before. And that way you kind of avoid the low feedback. Anyways, if you go to Etsy here, I went ahead and I typed in custom QR code. So check this out. I don't need to hit search again. Let's just scroll down. One of the things I love most about searching Etsy is that it is a massive e-commerce platform with lots of buyers. People come to this platform with the intent of buying and Google, the number one e-commerce or number one search engine in the world, indexes Etsy listings with priority. So people may find their way to your Etsy listings through Google or from Etsy or from other ways, right? We know Etsy does offsite ads, et cetera. The nice thing about Etsy also is that with the ever B Chrome extension, you get insights into how well these products are selling on the search results page. So instead of me having to guess, we can say, oh, this says scan to party, right? Or scan to pay. Sorry, scan to party. Where's my mind at? Scan to pay right here, this first one under Etsy picks $3.50. So I'm guessing this is a digital product. I want to make sure it's not an ad. It does not look to be an ad. So I can go ahead and click this. And you'll notice, ever B follows us here with the data. So monthly sales about 14 a month, total sales, 661, 21,600 views, converting at about 3%. Listing age 42 months. So no one's getting rich off of a listing like this, but it's minimal effort. If they're charging $3.50, well, let's do quick math, 3.5 times 661. They have made $2,300 a profit from this listing. And this listing is just a very basic like, this isn't, you know, how long you think they spent making this listing? Probably not long at all. If anything, they probably spent more time on the design. But what is that? That's just a friendly script font, which I've told you guys before, I do highly recommend make a short list of your favorite fonts so that if you see something like this and you want to go make your own version of it and compete in this market, you just go to your list of script fonts, you pick one that you like, and you, you know, obviously make it your own. Don't just copy it, right? And yeah, launch the listing on Etsy. Doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. Notice what they did here too. They enabled personalization. It says important. They've got the two big exclamation point emojis. If you're still with me, I'm going to show you something that you may not have known. If you are on Windows, hold the Windows key and hit the semicolon. Okay. I hear right here. I got to click into the text box first. Windows key semicolon. It launches the ability to do the emojis on Windows. So if you didn't know that, it definitely was nice when I first found out. And then you can just do a search so I can hit exclamation point and it shows me how to do, you know, the double exclamation. If you're doing personalization on Etsy, if you have something important to say, put the emojis, it definitely helps get your point across. All right. This video is not about emojis, but I just wanted to share that with you. If you appreciate that, let me know in the comments. Make sure your Etsy email is correct. Do not log in with Apple ID interesting. So it's basically telling you this is a template that you edit in print after purchasing an email will be sent. I'm guessing that this is what it used to say initially. And enough people had problems with their email and their Apple ID that they had to, you know, add that extra stuff. Anyways, you guys get the point. No one's getting rich off a single listing in the QR code space from what I could see, but that is certainly nothing to scoff at. Seven hundred dollars a year of profit. Yeah, I would take that all day. The next one here, QR code looks like scan to view menu. So the first one was scan to pay. The next one right here says scan to view menu. Okay, they're charging $5 and 70 cents, but this does look to be a wooden display. Yeah. Okay. Got you. So this one is not a digital product. The thing is if you're selling digital products like this, offer the print on demand compliment. And we'll talk more about that in just a second. But first, I wanted to just show that, you know, with ever be here, we can see eight sales a month, 96 total sales, you know, 96 sales guys, again, 96, let's just say that maybe they make about $7 on average. I'm just kind of making that up just based on what I saw here in this drop down. That's $672. Now with a physical product, they do have the fees and the shipping fees and whatnot. But also I didn't check what they're charging for shipping. A lot of times people charge more for shipping than they should. And then they pocket a little bit of extra profit that way as well, since they don't show the shipping until you get to the checkout. So I'm guessing that these guys might be doing that as well. Next one, connect with us. All right. So this could just be social media, trying to gain followers. And they're selling it just as a personalized QR sign. So the physical product here, but obviously with the custom QR compliment, $35, they've done 47 total sales. So they're doing quite well. The next one, follow us. They've got their Instagram and their Facebook. So again, I mean, it's easy to market to businesses. When I say that though, it's that's just just if you want to go above and beyond. The first guy ever on Amazon merch, he hit a million dollars. Guess what he did? He did something that other lazy merch sellers like myself weren't doing. He went door to door to businesses. He said, I will make you a custom QR code and customers can scan it. They'll buy your merch. I will have Amazon sell the merch so that you're completely hands off. The customers are now doing the marketing for you, right? Out of sight, out of out of mind. If they don't see your logo and they're not thinking about your company and the inverse is true. They've got the C-shirt. They see the shirt. They wear the shirt. Now, they're thinking of your business and everybody who sees them wearing the shirt is thinking about your business. And I simply keep the royalties, right? I don't even know if the guy pitched the royalties, but he made over a million dollars. He's the first person that I know that did it on Amazon merch using something very similar to what we're talking about here. So the QR code, a lot of people on the outside looking in may think that that's complicated because, you know, technology, but it's not man. It's as hard as we make it. Like I showed you here on QR code monkey, very simple, less than a minute to do a custom one with custom colors, custom logos. Anyways, let's go over a couple more like interesting applications. So the social media one, which we know QR code monkey can do, you know what I mean? Twitter, YouTube, other, you know, you can just go to URL, honestly, and put the link to their Instagram right here. That one has done 11 sales a month. I didn't click to see the total sales, but you can click right here to see the listing details as well in ever be. And you can go ahead and see that this was, this has done about $143 a month, 244 total sales lifetime. So that's nice and healthy times $13. And if you scroll down, by the way, it's always nice to be able to see like what tags they're using in case you've never been in this market before. The tags are just assisting the Etsy algorithm in understanding when you launch a new listing, like what the heck are you selling, right? Because obviously once you start making sales, the algorithm knows from the people who type something into the search bar, clicked your listing and purchased it, what you're selling. But initially, it's nice to be able to spy on successful listings tags and use them as kind of a clue of how you might market this stuff. So beyond that, let's just do a quick scroll here. And by the way, I wanted to show the print on demand compliment and talking through exactly how I'd go about doing this. It looks like you've got sound wave QR codes. I don't know how you'd do that. They would have to probably send you the audio. And then we did see that under QR code monkey, under more, there's mp3 that you can link to. I'm guessing they'll host the file most likely, but you could also do it on YouTube and whatnot, right? Simple. I pay almost nothing for web hosting and I host a bunch of websites from back in my web hosting web development web company. I did have my web development and hosting company and I got some lingering clients. I tell them I don't want to do that anymore, but they're too lazy to find another web developer. So I'm like, all right, I'm charging $200 an hour. Sorry, but it is what it is. All right, so stickers, like I said, that can go on the car. You know what I mean? I've definitely seen a few of these, usually the cars I have like a spoiler on the back and they're super loud. They want the attention. Something like this for like a company that they could put on their, you know, check out like a physical retail location, or those are all like scanned to pay. So that would be for like smaller vendors at like farmers markets and whatnot, because they have the cash app, the Venmo, and then their Instagram, you know, to keep in touch. This one right here is just a hoodie. Now who cares why they do why they wear the hoodie, right? Sell them the hoodie. Now you can obviously jump on over to printful here, the Gilden 18,000 crew neck or the 18,500 hoodie compliment as well. They also have the youth version here. You know, and the QR codes, like some of the funniest ones I saw on Etsy were literally just these custom QR codes right here. This one's doing 95 sales a month. So it's making over $100 a month profit. And it takes less than a minute to do. And a lot of them were just stupid ones that just said F you like I told you, they give them the F word when somebody scans it, they're like, Oh, what's that? And they scan it and their phone just pops the text up F you, you know, thought it was kind of funny. And look at the conversion rate of this listing 11% absolutely incredible. That's a that's that I'm taking notes right there. That means that they are converting extremely well. They're doing something right. Not only are they very affordable. So I'm scrolling down. So you've got the you can do the hoodies that we saw. You could do the stickers. Printful has those as well. All right, starting at $2.60 for I would do the five inch, five and a half by five and a half inches here in printful. And if you have printful growth or printful business, you get even better rates like I do. So if I want to market these car optimized kind of decal stickers, I would go ahead and do the five and a half by five and a half's custom shirts. And by the way, you can of course print on the front and the back. When I think of like QR code shirts, I don't think that's going to be a staple in anybody's wardrobe. So I'm not going to be like upselling on comfort colors, which are, you know, a premium product. I'm probably going to go to the Guilden 5000. It's a unisex shirt. It's not my favorite, but you know, it's got the lowest price point in printful. So, you know, save some money understanding that most people are probably wearing these QR code shirts as a gag. Let's go through a few more. So you've got, you know, the shirt, you've got the keychains, you've got coasters, it looks like. So coasters are super simple as well. Printful has these corkback coasters, starting at $4.95. So very accessible low price point there. Big profit potential. You could sell them probably for 10 bucks a piece. A lot of these are like kind of like more higher end stuff with the gold and decals. So they're probably like handful filling those if I had to guess. I don't know if I'd want to go that far only to sell them for, you know, $8. But at the same time, you're like, oh, $8. But if you're doing 129 sales a month, as ever be says they are, well, 129 times eight, that is $1,032 a month. That's nothing to scoff at, especially when you got to consider they've probably got some very healthy profit in there. So QR code shirts, the coasters again, some of these standalone signs shirts again. I think you start with the digital product. And then what you do is you combine into like a one page PDF, just take the photos straight out of printful, or I guess maybe you'd be better to just put the QR code on there to like inspire them. You know, people are visual typically, the customers are visual. If you show them the QR code sticker, you show them the QR code hoodie, you show them the QR code coaster, you'll need to make one QR code, by the way, and then download it, which QR code monkey makes it very easy to do. There's a download right here. Okay, you can even choose the format. I went ahead and did that for SVG. And you can see right there, you've got the SVG QR code. That might have been the one that I tested earlier that that said F you so don't scan that one. I'm just warning you not meant to be an Easter egg for this video. All right. I think we've seen basically all of it. The Wi-Fi one, you know, you've got the Wi-Fi, just showing an example here. This could be good to market to Airbnb, hotels, etc. If you wanted to go try to sell to businesses. Anyways, I think you guys get the point. This one, there was one more down here at the bottom of the page that I thought was a good idea. The scan me on your keys. I'm assuming that's in case like you lose your keys. Somebody scans it and then the good Samaritan hopefully returns them to you. Anyways guys, hopefully you're feeling inspired. The one thing I love about print on demand is that there's endless possibilities and legit like as soon as you get bored, you realize, oh, I could just sell custom QR codes and it opens the door to infinite possibilities. Market research always makes it easier to make sales. All right. Don't knock market research. There's a reason why we go to major e-commerce platforms like Etsy. We see what's already selling because that's indicative of what people want to buy and it's so much easier to tap into an existing market and existing demand than to try to create a market. All right. So that is why we do what we do. Ever be makes it easier. They're going to be linked in the description. Printfuls who I use for my print on demand fulfillment for most of it anyways. So I would make a one page PDF and show a bunch of those nice printful mockups and attach that anytime that I sell a custom digital QR code for a dollar or two and hope that that's where I make most of the money. By the way, the last thing I'm going to say is that if you're upselling them because they purchase the digital QR code, you can charge a premium. You can charge $25 for a t-shirt. You know why? Because the customer is no longer on Etsy. They're now looking at you in your in their inbox. You are in their inbox and they're looking at your PDF. You get what I'm saying. So charge a premium because you have a monopoly on their attention. You're not competing in search results with 50 other people. So there's really some money to be made there guys. Anyways, I hope you found this video helpful. Please like and subscribe if you did and I will see you soon with another new video.
