A Teachers Pay Teachers Seller’s Strategy Guide
You have a Teachers Pay Teachers store and have begun uploading products. What began as excitement over the idea of starting a side hustle and earning extra money has turned to apathy as your sales have floundered.
How to Make More Money
Regardless of the business, There are four ways to make more money
- Increase traffic
- Increase conversions
- Increase cost
- Increase products
Obviously reducing expenses means more profit, but this article is only concerned with increasing revenue.
The Four Ways Illustrated
Let’s assume that your TpT store has 2 products. Each costs $2 and has a conversion rate of 2%. And finally, let’s assume that your store has 100 visitors each month.
So every month, 100 people visit your Teachers Pay Teachers store, and 2 of those 100 purchase one of your two products. So you are making $4 each month (excluding TpT and PayPal fees, let’s ignore those for this illustration)
If we change nothing about our store, but we are able to get more traffic, going from 100 monthly visitors to 200, we would double our sales. Since our conversion rate is still 2% which would now total 4 sales at $2 each, meaning we would now earn $8.
In the same vein, if instead of focusing on getting more traffic, we were able to increase our conversion rate, doubling it to 4%, we would again double our revenue. Going from two $2 sales, to four. Again earning $8.
If we increased costs without changing anything else, our two $2 sales would increase to two $4 sales. We would again make $8. Of course, increasing price will likely affect conversion rates, but this is just for illustrative purposes so we’re not changing the other factors.
Finally, if we increased products, and kept all things the same, we would again double our revenue, going from two $2 products being sold, to four $2 products again being sold.
So increasing each of the four ways of making money listed above has an impact on the total revenue. But which one should we focus on?
The Power of Zero
Before determining which method will get our atttnetion, I want to remind you of the power of zero.
You’ll notice in the illustrations above, that when calculating the revenue we always multiplied numbers. So, remember that anything times zero is zero.
In other words, if you have 1,000 customers every day visiting your TpT store, but a 0% conversion rate, you will have earned zero dollars.
In the same way if you have zero products, you’ll have zero dollars. And if you have zero customers visiting your store; again you will make no money.
So as we move forward, trying to improve our store and earn more of an income, keep the power of zero in mind. If any of your numbers are zero, that is where you focus needs to be.
Know your numbers
Before we can discuss improving our numbers, we must first know what they are.
There are two different ways to preview your sales data inside Teachers Pay Teachers. The first is to click on “My Product Statistics” from the dropdown menu.
From here, you’ll be taken to a screen with a listing of all of your products, and the total number of sales, conversion rate, and earnings for each product. You can organize this information by any of these categories.
You can also click on the “Activity” tab at the top to see the products’ page views, previews, wish listed, and if it’s a free product, how many times it’s been downloaded.
While all of this information is helpful, it is limited to only showing you lifetime data (nothing specific to a time frame). And it can be difficult finding some of the products you’re looking for if you have a lot of items in your store.
Another way to preview
In your main dashboard, you will see your earnings over a period of time. You are likely familiar with this page, but you may not be aware of some of the features available to you from this screen.
You likely know that you can select the “DURING” drop down menu and select a different time frame. However, you can select the “FOR” drop down menu and see all of the products that sold in this time frame in descending order of revenue.
You can actually select the check boxes of these products to see more specific data for one (or more than one) product.
After selecting the check boxes of the product or products you want to focus on, select the “SHOW ME” drop down menu. This will allow you to view specific that product’s page views, conversion percent, units sold, and more. You will even be able to see that product’s performance on each day and over the entire time frame you have selected.
This screen can be very helpful for helping you understand your statistics for different products.
What should I focus on?
There are four categories you can focus on:
- Page views
- Conversion percent
- Number of products
- Price of your products
How do you know which you should focus on, and how much of your available time you should dedicate towards each?
For Starters
If you are just beginning your TpT journey, you need to focus on the number of products in your store. You need to get to close to ten different products before you start directing your attention to other places.
This does not mean that you do not try to get customers or pay attention to your conversion rates, but these should not be your top priority. Your top priority needs to be increasing the number of products in your store.
For more information about your strategy for creating new products, click here.
Step 2
After you have at least ten products in your TpT store, you need to direct your attention to page views (getting people to see your products). Remember the power of zero, you cannot make money if no one is seeing your stuff.
Your goal is to get your store up to 250 page views a month.
This averages to about 25 views per product (or one each day). With a 2-3% conversion rate, this should net you about 5 sales for the month. Hopefully, that will make you between $5 and $50 per month depending on the price of your items. Obviously, if you have higher priced items, this number might increase.
How to Get Page Views
To get your page views up, you need to increase your social media presence. This means being active on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter as well as having a Pinterest Page.
You should not be paying for traffic at this point. Read why here.
I recommend starting a Facebook or Instragram Business account and posting regularly. If you are on Facebook, I strongly urge you to be become active in groups relevant to your niche, by answering questions and posting helpful content regularly – and then posting your content when applicable and occasionally.
To learn more ways to increase traffic to your TpT store, click here.
The Best Way to Get More Page Views
The most impactful way to get more traffic to your TpT store is to start a blog.
Having a blog will give you more ways to attract new customers as well as stay in touch with your current ones by collecting email addresses and sending them relevant content regularly.
Blog posts have better share statistics on social media and create better brand recognition. Having a blog will also allow you to establish yourself as an authority.
Read more about why you need a blog here.
To enroll in my video-based class on How to Start a Blog, click here.
What Next?
If you have 10 products in your store and 250 monthly page views, it is now time to start focusing on your conversion rates. Good conversion rates are above 5%, and bad rates are 2% and below.
Conversion rates and prices are related. So increasing your prices will lower your conversion rates, and vice versa, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t raise your prices. Sometimes, raising your prices will lower your sales numbers but increase your earnings. And sometimes lowering your prices will increase your sales enough to raise your overall earnings.
But there are other things you can do to improve your conversion rates that don’t involve toying with the price. Things like improving your product description or having better preview images can make a big difference.
Learn more about increasing your conversion rates by clicking here.
Summary
You’ve started a TpT store, which is the most difficult (and thus) most important step. It can be difficult knowing what are the next steps to take.
Here are the steps you need to take now that you have begun
- Step 1: Get 10 products into your TpT store
- Step 2: Focus on getting 250 page views (views on your products)
- Step 3: Improve your conversion rates by updating your preview images and product descriptions
- Step 4: Start a blog
