I Tried It: $37,000 With Etsy and Midjourney — My Honest 2-Week Results

You saw the video. The claim is $37,000 selling digital products on Etsy using Midjourney AI and a blog. It sounds almost too clean. So I ran the exact process for two full weeks, kept notes on every step, and checked my keyword rankings in Ahrefs to see what actually happened.

This is the honest breakdown. What the process looks like, how long each step actually takes, what I got after 14 days, and what I would do differently if I were starting this from scratch today. No hype, no screenshots from someone else’s account, just the real picture.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A step-by-step map of the full Etsy plus Midjourney digital product process
How to find a winning niche using Ahrefs keyword research before you create a single image
The exact Midjourney prompt structure used to generate clean, sellable tattoo designs
Why expired domains give new blogs a head start and how to find them on Spamzilla
How to write an Etsy listing and a full blog post using ChatGPT in under 20 minutes total
My real two-week results: which keywords I started ranking for and how many sales I made
Why doing tattoo designs right now is probably the wrong call, and how to find a less-crowded niche
Not sure what online income model fits your actual situation? Find out in two minutes at finder.platformproof.com

The $37,000 Claim and Where It Came From

The original video making this claim comes from Marcus Campbell, who goes by the affiliate marketing dude online. He has been in the affiliate and online marketing space for a long time and has built a real reputation. I have actually purchased a few of his courses and I like his work. That matters because I went into this test genuinely wanting it to work, not looking for reasons to tear it apart.

The core idea is straightforward: use Midjourney to create digital designs, list those designs on Etsy, build a content blog to drive organic traffic to your listings, and use ChatGPT to write both the blog posts and the Etsy listing descriptions quickly. The $37,000 figure is the outcome the original video points to as proof of concept. My goal was to test whether the underlying mechanics of the process actually work for a real person starting from zero.

Step 1: Find a Winning Digital Product Niche With Keyword Research

The process starts with keyword research, not with a tool and not with your creative instincts. You open a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, type in a broad category word, and filter the results by the word “design.” This surfaces all the specific search phrases that include both a subject and the word design, which is exactly what someone types when they are looking for a downloadable or printable asset.

In the video, the example niche is tattoo designs. When you type “tattoo” into Ahrefs and filter for design, you immediately see searches like skull tattoo design, butterfly tattoo design, shark tattoo design, and dozens of other variations. Many of these phrases are getting between five thousand and ten thousand searches per month with relatively low keyword difficulty scores. That combination tells you there is real demand and real room to rank.

The keyword research step is doing two jobs at once. It tells you what designs to create, and it gives you the exact phrases to build your blog posts around. You are not guessing what people want. You are looking at what they are already searching for and building backward from that data. Ahrefs is a paid tool, but even a single month at the lowest tier gives you enough data to map out a full niche.

Step 2: Create the Designs in Midjourney

Once you have a list of design ideas from your keyword research, you move into Midjourney. Midjourney costs $20 per month as of the time of this video and runs entirely through Discord. You type prompts into the chat interface and the tool generates four image variations per prompt within about a minute.

The prompts matter a lot here. Vague prompts produce vague results that you cannot sell. For the tattoo design niche, the prompts that worked were very specific about what to include and what to leave out. One example prompt that produced usable results was: shark tattoo design black and white no skin no background just the design. That combination of positive instructions and explicit exclusions tells Midjourney exactly what format the final image needs to take.

For each design idea, I created three prompt variations to maximize the range of usable outputs. The first prompt was the straight black and white design with no background. The second was a white background vector-style version. The third was a back-of-body placement version on a white background. Each variation serves a different buyer need, so having all three makes the listing more useful.

After generating the images, you download both the full four-image grid and the individual upscaled versions (labeled U1 through U4 in Midjourney). From those raw files, you create two formats for your Etsy listing: PSD files for buyers who use Photoshop and want to customize the design, and PNG files for buyers who just want to download and use the image as-is. Having both file types in one listing adds perceived value and widens your potential customer base.

The Midjourney images also go directly onto your blog as embedded visuals. Before embedding them, add a light watermark using any basic image editor. A text overlay with low opacity is all you need. The watermark keeps your design from being used without purchase while still showing the buyer exactly what they will get.

Step 3: Build a Blog on an Expired Domain

This is the step that separates this strategy from the basic “just post on Etsy” approach. A standard brand new domain can take six months to a year before Google starts sending consistent organic traffic to it. That is a long time to wait to find out if your niche is viable. The expired domain strategy cuts that waiting period down significantly.

Expired domains are website addresses that someone previously owned, built content on, and then let lapse. Because the domain was previously active, it may already have backlinks pointing to it from other websites. It may have already been indexed by Google. It may even rank for a few residual keywords. When you pick that domain back up and start publishing new content on it, you inherit some of that existing authority rather than starting from absolute zero.

The tool recommended for finding expired domains is called Spamzilla. You go to Spamzilla, type in a keyword related to your niche (like “tattoo”), and it returns a list of expired domains that contain that word. You can filter by domain authority, backlink count, and other signals to find domains with the most useful existing equity. Once you find a good one, you can purchase it outright or bid on it depending on the listing type.

My test website for this experiment was called Vadim Tattoo. Not a glamorous name, but the domain had enough prior history to help Google find the new content faster than a completely cold start would allow. The blog is built on standard WordPress with web hosting from a basic provider. Nothing fancy.

Step 4: Write SEO Blog Posts Using ChatGPT

With your niche keywords from step one and your expired domain from step three, you now need content. This is where ChatGPT handles the heavy lifting for speed. You take a keyword from your research list, go to ChatGPT, and prompt it to write a 2,000-word SEO blog post targeting that keyword.

The calibration prompt I used was something like: act as an SEO writer and an expert in creating blog posts. Then I followed with: write a 2,000 word blog post for a skull tattoo design. Please make sure the blog post is SEO optimized and does not copy any existing blog post. Calibrating the AI at the start of the session before making content requests consistently produces better output than jumping straight into the content request.

Each blog post gets structured with three monetization links embedded in the content. The first link goes to your Etsy store so readers who find your blog through Google can purchase your designs directly. The second link is an Amazon affiliate product related to the niche. For tattoo content that might be a tattoo ink set or a practice skin kit. The third link is a ClickBank affiliate product in the same space. Each of these streams adds a potential income source from a single visitor, so you are not relying entirely on Etsy sales to get value from your content investment.

The blog post also gets the watermarked Midjourney images embedded directly in the content. These images help with discoverability in Google Image Search, give readers a visual preview of the designs available in your Etsy shop, and make the post feel more complete than plain text.

Each blog post took me about 10 minutes to produce from keyword to published post. That includes generating the ChatGPT content, adding the three monetization links, embedding the images, and hitting publish. I published one new post every day. I did skip a couple of days during the two weeks due to personal commitments, but I still hit 10 published posts by the end of the test period.

Step 5: Create Your Etsy Listings

You need an Etsy account to list your products. Etsy charges $0.20 per listing you publish. That adds up when you are testing a new niche and listing multiple products. To avoid paying that upfront cost, use a referral link to sign up for your Etsy account. Referral signups get 40 free listings, which means you can test your first 40 products at zero cost and only start paying the listing fee once you know the niche is converting.

For the listing description, you go back to ChatGPT. The prompt structure for an Etsy listing description is more specific than the blog post prompt. An example that works well: answer questions as an expert in Etsy marketing. Write an Etsy listing description for a shark tattoo design. The product includes four PSD files and four PNG files of different shark tattoo designs for artists or customers to use. The designs are not resellable. Include that the designs are pre-created. Also include 13 tags for the listing. Include the tags in the description. Make the description SEO friendly.

That single ChatGPT prompt gives you everything you need to fill out the Etsy listing: a buyer-facing description, the relevant file types and use cases, legal language about non-resale, and 13 keyword tags that help your listing show up in Etsy search. The whole listing process takes under 20 minutes per product once you have the Midjourney images ready and the ChatGPT output in front of you.

Not sure if Etsy digital products is the right model for your situation?

Answer a few quick questions and get a personalized match at finder.platformproof.com.

My Actual Two-Week Results

I started publishing on June 13, 2023. After exactly two weeks, I had 10 blog posts live on the Vadim Tattoo website and had uploaded my first few Etsy listings. Here is what happened in Ahrefs when I checked the keyword rankings.

The blog was already ranking for keywords. That alone was surprising. Most new websites see absolutely nothing in Google for the first three to six months. The expired domain was doing exactly what the strategy promised: it accelerated the indexing and ranking timeline. My oldest post was two weeks old and was already appearing in Google search results.

The specific result I could point to: the blog post targeting “shark tattoo meaning” was ranking for that keyword. The phrase has a search volume of 1,700 searches per month and a keyword difficulty of 3. Starting at position 4 for a keyword with 1,700 monthly searches after just two weeks is genuinely encouraging. Rankings like that typically improve over time as the domain builds more history and the post gets more engagement signals.

On the Etsy side, I had zero sales after two weeks. None. That is the honest number. But in the order of operations for any online business, traffic comes first and sales come second. The blog was getting its first signals of ranking movement. The Etsy shop was live and listed. The full funnel was in place. Whether it converts is a function of consistency over time, not a judgment you can make after 14 days.

The Smarter Move: Find a Niche Nobody Else Is Copying Right Now

Here is the strategic problem with the tattoo niche in the context of this particular video. Marcus Campbell published a video teaching this exact strategy using tattoo designs as the example. That video got views. Everyone who watched it and decided to try it went and set up a Midjourney plus Etsy workflow around tattoo designs. At the time of my test, the tattoo design niche on Etsy was getting more crowded every week because of that one viral walkthrough.

The solution is simple in principle but requires you to actually do the keyword research step instead of just copying the niche from the tutorial. You go back to Ahrefs or your keyword tool of choice, search broadly by the word “design,” and look at the full list of what comes up. You are looking for a design category that has real search volume but is not currently being targeted by every person who watched the same YouTube tutorial you watched.

For example, t-shirt design has strong search volume and dozens of sub-niches within it. Basketball t-shirt design. Firefighter t-shirt design. Birthday t-shirt design. If you go three levels deep into any of those sub-niches, you are likely working in a space where the Etsy and blog competition is thin. T-shirt designs also open up a physical product angle through print-on-demand services like Printify, where you can take the same Midjourney image and turn it into an actual shirt someone can buy rather than a downloadable file.

Nail designs are another example that came up in research. The search volume is real, the intent is clear, and the niche is not currently flooded with AI-generated Etsy listings from people following a step-by-step tutorial. Spend 30 minutes doing your own keyword sweep before you start creating any images. That half hour of research will matter far more to your long-term results than the quality of your Midjourney prompts.

Honest Drawbacks Before You Start

This strategy works. The keyword ranking movement after two weeks is real evidence of that. But there are real costs and real challenges that any honest review has to name.

Upfront tool costs are not zero. Ahrefs costs money monthly at the standard tier. Midjourney is $20 per month. A quality expired domain from Spamzilla can cost anywhere from $20 to several hundred dollars depending on its authority. Web hosting adds another monthly fee. You are probably spending $80 to $150 or more before you see your first sale.
No sales in two weeks is normal but still real. The traffic signals are encouraging, but there is a lag between ranking and revenue. You need to be willing to publish consistently for at least two to three months before drawing any income conclusions.
ChatGPT output still needs editing. The video shows me skipping the editing step for the sake of speed, but the recommendation in the video itself is to read every post before publishing. Google is getting better at detecting thin AI content. At minimum, add your own observations, add the embedded images, and adjust the structure so it does not read like a form letter.
Etsy has its own competition dynamics. Ranking on Google is one thing. Ranking inside Etsy search is a separate challenge. The tags you include in your listing affect your Etsy discoverability and you need to think about both channels independently.
AI image copyright is still unsettled. Midjourney generates images from a model trained on existing images. The legal landscape around selling AI-generated designs commercially is actively evolving. Know the current terms of the platform and the current legal guidance in your country before you build a business on AI outputs.

Find Your X

The Etsy plus Midjourney model works best for people who are comfortable with keyword research, can commit to publishing consistently for a few months, and are willing to put in the niche selection work upfront instead of copying the obvious example niche. If that describes you, the process is repeatable and the early results are real.

But this is one of dozens of online income models, and it is not the right fit for everyone. If you want to see which model actually matches your skills, your schedule, and what you are trying to build, the fastest way is to answer a few questions at finder.platformproof.com. It takes about two minutes and gives you a specific direction rather than a generic list of ideas.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need any design skills to sell Midjourney images on Etsy?

No design skills are required to generate images in Midjourney. The tool works entirely through text prompts. The more specific you are in describing what you want, the more useful the output. The skill you need is prompt clarity, not artistic ability. Writing prompts like “shark tattoo design black and white no skin no background just the design” takes practice but not any drawing or design training.

How much does it actually cost to start this business?

A realistic budget for the first month includes: Midjourney at $20/month, Ahrefs at a minimum of $99/month for the Lite plan (though free alternatives like Google Keyword Planner can substitute with some limitations), an expired domain from Spamzilla which can range from $20 to $200+ depending on authority, and basic web hosting at roughly $5 to $15/month. Etsy listings cost $0.20 each but you can get 40 free via a referral signup. Total startup costs can be kept under $150 if you choose modest tools.

Why use an expired domain instead of just buying a new domain?

A brand new domain has no history with Google and can take six months to a year before Google sends consistent organic traffic to it. An expired domain that was previously active may already have backlinks from other sites pointing to it, may already be indexed in Google, and may even rank for residual keywords. This history helps your new content get discovered faster. The expired domain does not guarantee success but it reduces the cold start problem significantly.

Should I sell PSD files or PNG files on Etsy?

Both. Offering PSD files serves buyers who use Photoshop and want to modify or customize the design. PNG files serve buyers who want to download and use the image without any editing. Including both formats in a single listing costs you nothing extra and increases the perceived value of your product. Many Etsy sellers also include a JPG version for buyers who need maximum compatibility. The more useful formats you include, the better your reviews tend to be.

How long does each blog post take to produce using ChatGPT?

With a calibrated ChatGPT session and your keywords ready, producing a complete blog post takes roughly 10 minutes. That includes prompting ChatGPT for the 2,000-word draft, adding three monetization links (Etsy, Amazon affiliate, ClickBank), embedding the watermarked Midjourney images, and publishing to WordPress. Reading the post before publishing adds another 5 to 10 minutes and is worth doing to catch incoherent sections before Google indexes them.

Why should I avoid the tattoo niche if the original strategy used it?

Because the original strategy video got a large number of views and most of the people who tried the strategy followed the exact same niche example. Etsy search is a competitive marketplace. When many sellers are creating nearly identical tattoo design listings using the same AI tool and the same keyword research approach, it becomes much harder for any individual shop to stand out. Using the process from the video but applying it to a less-saturated design niche gives you the same mechanics with less head-on competition.

Can I combine this with print-on-demand instead of digital downloads?

Yes, and it may actually be a stronger model for some niches. Tools like Printify let you take a Midjourney design and place it on physical products like t-shirts, mugs, or phone cases. You list the product on Etsy and Printify handles printing and shipping when an order comes in. This means you are selling a physical product without holding inventory. The margins are lower than digital downloads, but the buyer pool for physical products on Etsy is larger in many categories.

What does “proof of concept” look like before I call this working?

After two weeks of daily publishing on an expired domain blog, the site was ranking for its target keywords in Google. That is proof of concept for the SEO component. The next milestone to look for is organic traffic actually clicking through to the blog, then clicking through to the Etsy listing, and eventually converting into a purchase. Based on the early results, reaching the first Etsy sale from organic blog traffic within two to three months of consistent publishing is a reasonable expectation for someone following this process carefully.

Sources

Ahrefs keyword research tool: ahrefs.com
Midjourney AI image generation: midjourney.com
Spamzilla expired domain finder: spamzilla.io
Etsy digital product marketplace: etsy.com
Printify print-on-demand platform: printify.com
Original strategy video by Marcus Campbell (the affiliate marketing dude) on YouTube

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.