A real walkthrough of using DraftMill to research a niche, generate two complete ebooks, and publish them on Etsy — all in one sitting. Including the actual competition data.
Most advice about selling digital products on Etsy goes something like this: find a niche, create something valuable, list it, repeat. What that advice skips is the part where you spend three hours researching whether your niche is worth entering, another two hours trying to write a title that actually ranks, and then a full day writing the content itself.
I wanted to test whether that entire process could happen in one afternoon. Here’s exactly what happened.
I didn’t start with a product idea. I started with a broad topic — ADHD productivity — and let the data tell me what to build.
This is the key shift that makes the difference between listing something and listing something that sells. Etsy is a search engine as much as it is a marketplace. If nobody is searching for what you create, it doesn’t matter how good it is.
The first thing I did was run a competition check on the keyword “ADHD focus timer guide.”
Here’s what came back:
A difficulty score under 30 on a topic with real buyer intent is genuinely rare. Most niches that seem obvious — budget planners, meal prep guides, habit trackers — score 60 or higher because the market is already saturated.
The low favourites count (2.4 average) confirmed something else: the existing listings weren’t performing particularly well. There was room for a better product.
The competition data also surfaces what’s missing from the current listings — not just what exists. In this niche, the gap was clear:
Current listings bundle focus timers as secondary features inside broader planners. Nobody is positioning a timer guide as the core educational product with implementation worksheets.
That one paragraph told me exactly what to build: a standalone, beginner-friendly guide focused entirely on timer methods for ADHD — not another planner that happens to mention timers.
Rather than guessing at a title, I generated options based on proven formats — How-To, Outcome-Based, Question-Based, Number-Based. The winning title:
The ADHD Focus Timer Guide: How to Use Timed Intervals to Build Consistent Work Habits Without Burnout
It’s specific, addresses a real objection (burnout), and front-loads the searchable keywords. That combination is what separates titles that rank from titles that disappear.
The ebook generated chapter by chapter — intro, eleven body chapters, and a bonus section. Final output: 60 pages covering five timer protocols, a 30-day roadmap, troubleshooting for the twelve most common obstacles ADHD users face, and a quick-reference resources section.
The whole generation took one sitting.
With the PDF ready, I built the cover in Canva using the generated cover brief — hourglass background image, navy overlay, salmon accent line. The Etsy listing went up the same day with an optimised title, keyword-rich description, and 13 tags pulled from the competition data.
Total time from keyword to live listing: one afternoon.
I ran the same process for a second listing — the ADHD College Student Planner — and confirmed something important: the research step is the highest-leverage part of the whole workflow.
Choosing a niche with a difficulty score under 40, reading the gap correctly, and building to fill that specific gap is what determines whether a listing gets found. The writing and formatting, while time-consuming to do manually, is almost secondary once the positioning is right.
Here’s the workflow distilled:
No guesswork. No blank page. No wondering whether the niche is worth your time before you’ve already spent it.
Both guides are live at PublishReadyCo on Etsy — built entirely with this workflow as a real test of what DraftMill produces.
DraftMill handles keyword research, competition analysis, title generation, and writes the full ebook — formatted and ready to sell. Try it free.
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