If you have a started selling products on Teachers Pay Teachers, you will likely have people telling you that you should start a blog, or an email list, or both!
And that probably sounds like a lot.
You’re already spending your free time making products, creating preview files and images, and uploading them to TpT. Which is already consuming a lot of your time.
You’re probably also posting your products on social media and Pinterest in an effort to get more traffic to your TpT store – and you should be.
Do you really have more time to start a Blog or an Email list?
The Benefits of Email
Email has immense value for an online marketer – which you are!
You own Your Email List
We have recently all experienced, or at least heard of some of the issues TpT Sellers have recently had with changes to the algorithm on Facebook and on TeachersPayTeachers.com
Lots of people were severely impacted by these changes. But many of us were unaffected because the bulk of our traffic came from our email list.
Our email list didn’t change, we were still able to communicate with our customers and send them to our site.
Highest Return on Investment
Because almost everyone with a computer has an email, and almost everyone with an email checks it daily, email marketing remains the most effective form of marketing that there is (maybe besides Super Bowl Commercials).
In 2022, Hubspot released a report that said that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get a $36 return. Today, that number could be even higher.
Ease of Use
Email marketing can literally be started in just a few minutes. After selecting an Email Service Provider (ESP), click here to read which ESP I recommend for TpT Sellers, you can begin right away. You don’t have to learn coding or graphic design. You don’t even have to be very good at copywriting. Most ESP’s have prebuilt templates for landing pages and even emails to send.
All that you really need to do to get started is to get a link for people to get on your email list, and then start collecting email addresses and emailing them regularly.
Of course, you will get more people’s email addresses if you have an email opt-in, which is a freebie you give them in exchange for their address. But you can still get started if you don’t yet have that.
After getting emails, your goal is to email your customers regularly, in an effort to move them from being an email subscriber to being a customer. Keep reading below for ideas on what to write your email list.
Affordable
You can actually start email marketing for free. Many ESP’s have a free trial period that is for a certain amount of time. However, some offer their free trial until you have a certain number of subscribers on your list.
But beware, I do not recommend you select an ESP based on it’s free trial period. Starting an email list does take work. And the longer you have your ESP, the more work you will put into it; building landing pages, sequences, and other automations – as well as learning all of their vernacular. Spending all of that time and energy learning a platform will make it difficult to switch. So I recommend selecting your ESP based on its capabilities, not its free trial period. You want to select one that you will be able to stick with for at least a year.
You can get start your email marketing with most ESP’s for just a few dollars a week.
Email Marketing also Allows Personalization
When I post something on Facebook, I have no control over which members in my audience see it. And you might think that I would want all of my audience to see my post, but that’s not always true. Sometimes I only want people who have not yet purchased something, or who teach a certain grade or subject, or have already taken a certain action to see specific messages from me – which I can do when I send an email, but not when I post on Social Media.
When you post on social media, only a small percentage will see my post, and I have no control over which ones my posts will be sent to, unless I pay for that feature – and even still it is very difficult to do. However, when you use email marketing, you absolutely can segment your audience and only send it to people who meet those characteristics.
The Benefits of Blogging
Blogging will help you get found by more potential customers, build your brand, and increase your authority.
Easier Navigation
A blog allows you to have a central hub to store all of your content and help your readers navigate through the resources that will best be for them. For example, if you post a helpful resource on a 6th grade world history learning activity on your social media page, and someone sees it and likes it, how can they find more of your posts like this? It is not always so easy on most social media platforms. However, if you have a blog you could create a page with all of your world history activities on one page. Or each blog post could link to other posts.
Higher SEO
Blog posts have the ability to capture long tail phrases. So instead of just “adding integers worksheet” you can rank for terms like “how to add integers,” “how to teach adding integers,” and others. None of my TpT resources will show at the top of a search on Google (or other search engines). However, I have the top ranking for many long tail phrases like the ones mentioned above.
Blog posts also get better reach on social media platforms like Pinterest and Facebook. If you share your TpT resource on one of these resources and then share a blog post you wrote for that resource, the blog post will perform much better than the link to the TpT product.
Another Bonus
Blogging has other benefits as well. Blogging will build your credibility. As you create more value through the website, and it gets better distribution, you will also build your exposure, which is known to increase conversion percentages. As people get to know you through your blog posts, they will know, like and trust you more as well (which also increases conversion rates).
Having a blog will get you more traffic, build your notoriety, and increase your likeability. It will also help customers find your best content and get more traffic through Search Engines.
Which to do first?
As you can see, both blogging and email marketing will get you more traffic to your TpT store. But if you can only do one, which one should it be?
If you only have time for one, I would recommend doing email marketing first. The reason being that email marketing has a greater return on investment than blogging does.
Starting an email list and emailing them regularly will help you improve your copywriting skills and polish your message so that when you start blogging (on posts that will forever be on the internet) you’ve already spent a good amount of time perfecting your craft.
Email marketing is also easier to begin, no need to worry about website design or Pinterest images.
Do you need a Blog to have an email list?
Many people think you need a blog to have an email list. To get people on your email list, a great strategy is to give away a freebie. Which means you need to build an opt-in form. And where else can you host that besides your website?
There are actually many places you can host an email opt-in form. Though a blog is a great place to do so. The image below shows 10 places to host your email opt-in. I go over this in more depth in my email marketing course for TpT sellers.
How to Start
If you would like to start blogging, I have a course that will walk you through the process of selecting your hosting and domain name, getting setup with Google, and how to start writing, editing, and publishing blogs that will get read. Click here to check out the course on Blogging for TpT Sellers.
I also have a blog post that will walk you through some of these steps. Check out my free post on how to start blogging by clicking here.
If you would like help starting your Email marketing journey, you can download my email starter kit which will help you select an Email Service provider, teach you some principles of email marketing with a mini eBook, and contains a swipe file with 109 blog post titles (can also be used as email subject lines). Click here to get my email starter kit for TpT Sellers.
I also have a course on email marketing that contains tutorials, premade templates, automations, and more. Click here to check out the course on email marketing.
Both of these courses are included in my membership. Click here to check out the membership.
