I’m SO glad that you are starting a Teachers Pay Teachers page. It’s a great decision that will help you in SO many ways – not-the-least being that it will help you generate a bit of side income.
But it’s tough to learn how to do it and be successful.
My page now makes hundreds of dollars each month. But it took me a long time to get here. And if I hadn’t made these mistakes, I would have gotten here sooner, and be further along now than I am.
So here’s a list of 9 Mistakes I made when I started that I hope you can avoid.
1 – I didn’t offer free resources
TpT forces you to put something free on their website before you can sell anything. But that’s where I left it. So my store had several products and one free product, which I did not put much energy or thought into.
What I failed to realize was the power of free resources.
Free resources allow potential customers to sample your work and see how great it is. It also helps build trust with them, so that they are more likely to purchase from you in the future.
Allowing people to get free resources from you also builds brand recognition. As people download items from you for free, they will start to recognize your brank name – again, making them more likely to buy from you in the future.
Free resources also get shared easily. It’s like free advertising! Give something away for free and people are more likely to share the link to your resource with their friends and on social media platforms. With all these people coming to your website for free, somebody’s likely to buy something…. at some time!
Many people teaching about TpT products recommend that 10% of the products on your page should be free. I think this is a good guide, but I will encourage you that the more free products you can put on your page, the better.
Here’s a tip to help you with your free products. Not everything that you give away for free needs to be original. For example, perhaps you sell a product that has 10 worksheets in it. You can give one away for free and then add a note at the end of the page that says, “If you would like 9 more resources like this one, click here” and then hyperlink to your original 10 pack.
2 – My cover images were too busy
I tried to communicate too much with my thumbnail images. Usually, people are scrolling through a long list of resources and trying to make a good decision, so they are judging a book by its cover. Your thumbnail needs to catch their attention so that they will read the description.
Most thumbnails are dominantly text. Keep it that way.
Make a thumbnail image that is minimalistic, clean, and catches their attention. Let your preview images and product description do the rest.
3 – I didn’t include a thank you page
ALL of your resources should have a thank you page.
On your thank you page, you want to thank the customer for downloading or purchasing your item, and then promote something else. I recommend promoting your free products. This brings them right back to your TpT page to see more of your great products – increasing the chance for a sale.
Here’s what mine looks like:
If you are able to read the image, you will note that I give away three things.
The first is an invite to my Facebook group. People love building community and connecting with other individuals of like minds. So this is something that my customers will enjoy, but it also gives me more opportunities to promote my products to them. Inside my FB group I promote my free products, but I also occasionally promote my paid ones. So it’s a circle, constantly building brand recognition.
My second and third free products are related to my webpage, and is aimed at promoting my book and online course. But both of these are free products that benefit my customers (so they’ll appreciate it) and help me build brand recognition and generate more selling opportunities.
It’s okay to ask for customers to like your FB page, TpT page, or other sources after downloading your product, especially if it’s a free one. It’s a small ask.
4 – No borders
Borders make every product look better. They’re easy to add to your stuff and make a big difference. I didn’t consider it valuable at the time, but I wish I had. Now I’m going back through all my products and trying to add them.
The image above shows a worksheet I sell for adding fractions. Note how much more inviting the one with a border is than the one without.
You can use a simple box tool in PowerPoint or Word.
For something a bit better, you can go to a royalty-free website and download borders for free. Make sure you read the licensing agreement on the website before using the image that you downloaded. Sometimes they’re royalty-free but you’re not allowed to use them on products you’re selling. Other times, you’re allowed but you must give credit to the creator.
One more tip. You can get borders (paid and free) on Teachers Pay Teachers!!! Just type ‘borders’ into the search bar and organize by price.
5 – Name not on paper
Have you ever seen a teacher using something that you thought was really cool, and you ask them where they got it? They always say “Teachers Pay Teachers.” Rarely do they remember the name of the seller.
Adding your name to your product will help everyone remember your brand name and bring them back to your store.
This will also help prevent stealing.
6 – I didn’t purchase the premium seller account
When I started TpT, I was doing it for the extra income and was pessimistic about making enough money to justify the $60 it cost for a premium membership. So I waited until I had made more than $60 to justify spending the money.
This was a mistake.
Here’s why
As a premium seller, you get to keep 80% of your sales, as opposed to 55%.
But that’s not all! You also don’t have a 30 cent transaction fee.
I won’t bore you with the math, but consider a $1 product. If you sold it on your basic (free) seller account, TpT will take the first 30 cents as a transaction fee. Then, with the remaining $0.70, you get 55%. Which is 38 and a half cents!
If you were a premium seller, you would actually make 68 cents. Almost twice as much. Multiply that by 20 sales and we’re up to $6. Multiply that by 12 months and the Premium Seller account has paid for itself.
Do the same math on a $3 product, and the contrast is $1.49 versus $2.40.
This means that the $60 I made on the free account would have probably been $100 or even a bit more on the premium account. But to make matters worse, I used that $60 to purchase the Premium account.
I should have purchased the Premium account from the beginning, or at least after I had a few products on there to sell.
7 – I tried to learn it all on my own (instead of investing in a course)
Again, I was very cheap when I began my TpT journey, and I made a lot of mistakes. It has cost me a lot of time and money. I currently am making over $400 a month on TpT, but I am still spending a lot of my time going back and trying to fix my mistakes.
The time I am spending doing this, I could spend making new products or marketing my current ones. This means that instead of making money, I am working on fixing my mistakes. It took me a long time to get to where I now am and to learn the things I now know. I did learn most of it for free, but I have left a lot of money on the table – and I have spent a lot more time than I should have to learn these things.
So please head my advice. If you want to start generating some money on TpT, spend the money on a premium account and on some training to help you be successful.
I do offer an online training, and it is quality. There are, of course, other websites doing the same. Spend some time researching the one you like and make the investment. You’ll get your money back quickly, and the time you will save will have made it worth it. You will also earn more money, faster, which will pay for the course several times over.
8 – I didn’t understand the preview button
The preview button allows customers to get a good look at your product – which we all want to do before we purchase something. But it also makes it very easy for people to get your product for free. I loaded previews that were doing just that – giving away my resources for free! (again, costing me time and money).
Once I started fixing my previews, I noticed that sales went up on these products (meaning people stopped getting them for free). So be careful with your previews, images, and videos, they could be costing you sales and making you waste a lot of time.
9 – I didn’t put common core standards or keywords to help people find my products
People search for items by their name, their resource type, or their standard. So it’s important to include them in your product name, image, and description so that people can find them more easily.
If I was looking for a lesson plan on quadratic formulas, I would likely type the words “quadratic formula lesson plan” into the Google search bar or the Teachers Pay Teachers search bar. It’s possible that I would also type in the standard. If you have a lesson plan on quadratic formulas, you need it to show up in these searches. And you want it to show up towards the top of the page.
This is called “Search Engine Optimization” or “SEO” for short.
One key to making your products rank well on these searches is to label them properly. Which includes listing the standard(s). There are other strategies to help you get good rankings on these searches that you will need to learn (and I do go over them in my online course). But proper verbiage and listing the standards is a great place to start.
10 – Spam
TpT sellers are spammers! And I was a bad one (I probably still am one, but I try to be better). It’s hard. The lure of a FB group with thousands of followers all seeing your product is so tempting. But it doesn’t do you much good, and usually gets you banned from the group.
There are much better ways to promote your products for free that don’t include spamming. We go over some great strategies to get traffic to your store that don’t cost you any money in our online course – I hope you’ll check it out.
11 – I didn’t offer bonuses
Did you notice that this post was titled “9 Mistakes I Made…” and yet here we are on point 11? That’s because you need to give your customers more than they bargained for. That’s why my “Thank You” page has multiple bonuses in it. But I include bonuses in my downloads as well.
So add some bonuses to your products: an extra worksheet, a lesson plan, a sneak peek of another product, anything extra that you can provide to make customers remember how great your stuff is.
Remember that there 5 million users on TpT these days. You want to stand out. So quality products is a great way. Bonuses are also really good.
Want to Make More Money Instead of More Mistakes?
Starting a TpT page isn’t as easy as some make it out to be. There are lots of errors you want to avoid, and best practices you can learn.
Doing things right the first time will set you up for more success, more quickly.
That’s why I created an online course to walk you through the process of creating your store and making your first $1,000. Learn more by clicking here.
Or download my Free eBook to get started today,
