Reflecting back on my Teachers Pay Teachers journey years ago and picking up lots of strategies in the EdTech corporate world, I knew sharing TPT sellers tips for new Teachers Pay Teachers Sellers would be an ideal piece of content. This post is not intended to be ‘fancy hacks’. That’s not my style because I firmly believe you can’t ‘hack’ your way to a successful business. Here are TPT seller tips for new teacher’s pay teacher’s sellers who are looking to make an impact and earn more money.
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1. Begin your TPT Store legally (ex: fonts/clipart)
Yes, y’all. We are starting at the most important because I’m not trying to see any of y’all behind bars. They don’t have flair pens and Starbucks there – so take note here.
This includes:
- Investing in commercial fonts and clip art
- Documenting your income and expenses
- Letting your tax person know ASAP
You do not need to buy the massive font and clip art when you are just starting out. You can get by with one thick font, one cursive font, and one print font. You don’t need clip art every time you create. These are extra. If your content is good, it will sell. But do everything legally.
2. Focus on your house and not your neighbors
Sayyy whatt? What do I mean by this? If your neighbor puts a blue run in their living room, do you rush to put a blue rug in your living room? It’s inevitable that your eyes will occasionally gloss over to a competitor’s store and then magically inspiration hits you – don’t let that happen! If this is your ‘strategy’ (cough – it’s not one – cough), you’ll always be steps behind your competition and you’ll never be known for something unique. You’ll be a ‘chaser’ – and that’s not going to catapult your business. You feel me?
If you are chasing your competition, you will not have authenticity in what you’re creating and thus marketing these products will not come from the heart. Your selling someone else’s idea.
Their product roadmap is going to look different than your product roadmap and that’s perfectly fine! Focus on what you planned to create because it’s what’s relevant to your brand and your audience and you’ll start to develop your own vision to take your business strategy to the next level.
3. Start with consistent branding
This one is tough, so hear me out. I understand that when starting your TPT store as a new seller, you’re still experimenting and unsure exactly what colors and fonts you want to commit to. I definitely had a color and font scheme for a couple of years and then rebranded 3 years later. That’s OK – but here’s what you can control:
- Will my product covers be square or rectangle?
- What will my TPT product cover ‘skeleton’ look like?
- Are my themed products titles similarly in a series format?
- Can I commit to a font set & color scheme for one year?
4. Create templates for routine tasks
This is a game-changer! Think about what parts of your TPT process you are routinely doing and create a way to templatize those actions. This is going to speed up your creation process without being hasty to make mistakes. Here are a few examples:
- Your TPT product description
- Your IG Story image announcing you have a new product
- Your TOU page
- The Teacher Guide
- Answer key for products
5. Take your time creating your resources
If it was sooooo easy to create a TPT product for Teachers Pay Teachers and you could publish a new product in 30 minutes, everyone would be millionaires. That’s not the case so let’s bring it down a notch. If you can do this, then I want you to ask yourself if that product is of value enough to be in thousands of classrooms across the world. You are creating what students will use. Please take your time to make an impact in the right way. This is the mindset you should carry with you in all products you create. All the TPT seller tips in the world cannot help if you’re not creating quality resources, so ensure this is at the core of everything you do!
6. Print the resource and proofread before publishing
When creating a digital product, you’re staring at a screen for hours on end. You might not realize that you accidentally glossed over a type of formatting issue since you’ve been looking at the same layout on the screen for 5+ hours. This is why I highly recommend printing out your resource and taking a pen to actually work everything out and read/highlight, etc – all the things to get your product classroom ready.
By fine-tuning your editing process, you are saving yourself the headache later by (1) receiving a bad review because of a mistake and (2) having to go back and edit the product. Do it 100% the first time so you can truly enjoy passive income!
7. Focus on your secret sauce
This is similar to the TPT seller tips about not focusing on your competitors. What can you create that is new and innovating? What is new and fresh and your idea that will be your secret sauce, what you’re known for, and entice teachers to want more from you. You can have other types of products. But this secret sauce product will be the bait to lead people to your store.
Pro Seller Tip: Once you find your secret sauce product. Create a series and expand on it to create bingeable content. By doing this, you’ll have repeat customers, and it’s a lot easier to sell to a teacher the second time, then to convince a new teacher to buy from your the first time.
8. Do not use your school’s curriculum to create products
Do not laugh at this one – it’s super important and I’m assuming you know this but I could not leave this post without writing it. This is simply put, illegal. If you’re looking at math problems and just swapping the names and numbers, that curriculum user still owns it. You are capable of so much, don’t let silly issues like this hinder you from creating the profitable business you are capable of creating.
