What Should My First Free Product Be on Teachers Pay Teachers?

When people visit your TpT store, the very first thing that they are going to see is your Featured Free Download.

This is a free product that you have to upload to your store before you’re allowed to upload any products that you want to sell.

But what should you create as your free Teachers Pay Teachers Product?

Consider Your Niche

Niche is just a fancy word for the type of teacher that your TpT store is made for.

So ask yourself, what is your niche?

Do you ( or will you) create products that are better suited for a specific grade teacher? Perhaps a certain subject? Perhaps you want to specialize in something even more specific, like Middle School Science Teachers with a high ESOL population – or Social Studies Teachers teaching about the Civil War.

It Should Be Broad, Not Deep

You want to create a free product that will benefit the majority (if not the entirety) of people in your niche.

So if you, like me, market to Math Teachers, you need to try to create a product that will help all math teachers, regardless of grade level (or one that will serve as many of them as possible).

For example, if I created a good resource for teaching quadratic equations, but my niche is all math teachers, this is not ideal. I’m missing the majority of the teachers who might visit my store.

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Make the Most of it

Many teachers will download your free product, and never return to your store. That’s okay. But how can you get even a small percentage of these teachers to come back after they’ve downloaded your product?

For starters

With your free download, you can include a simple Thank You page with your free product that invites teachers back to the store or asks them to like and follow you. You could even include links to some of your best products on that Thank You Page, with embedded hyperlinks so that when they click on it they are automatically taken to your page.

Remember You can Change it Later

I have had several different free products on my TpT store. When I first started, it was a simple lesson plan template. Later, I made a Do Now worksheet that helped all teachers. Both of these are still on my page, just not the featured product.

Now, it is a much bigger product. Something that took a lot of time and work, but will serve a lot of teachers. But it took me a long time to get to this level.

It’s okay to start small. You can always change it later.