Kristen Doyle 0:00
Hey y’all. Welcome to this episode of the Savvy Teacher Seller. I’m your host, Kristen Doyle and today we are continuing our diversifying series with my guest, Brittany Blackwell. She’s an award winning special educator, the voice behind the Resilient Teacher Podcast and a course creator.
Kristen Doyle 0:17
Brittany started out sharing helpful teaching tips on TikTok during the pandemic, then began selling on TPT. And she has since added course creation as another income stream. She’s here to shed light on combating burnout, creating courses that matter and the power of automating our workload. So let’s dive right into this conversation.
Kristen Doyle 0:39
Hey, TPT sellers, ready to see growth in your business? You’re in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Teacher Seller. And I’m here to give you no fluff tools and strategies that will really make an impact on your sale. Let’s get started y’all.
Kristen Doyle 1:00
Hey, Brittany, thank you so much for being here today.
Brittany 1:03
Yes, thank you so much for having me. Kristen. I am so excited to be here.
Kristen Doyle 1:07
So can you start out just by telling us what motivated you to get into course creation in the first place.
Brittany 1:16
So I guess I kind of have to go back a little bit and share with you kind of how I got started sharing teacher stuff to begin with. So I started sharing teacher helpful tips, I guess, on Tik Tok during the pandemic, I think we were all just trying to figure out how to navigate pandemic teaching together. And so I found these tech things that were really working for me, so I’d post about them.
Brittany 1:42
And then I started creating things for my own classroom and then I posted those to Teachers Pay Teachers, and I would share those on TikTok, on Instagram, that sort of thing. But I noticed this, like, huge shift happening were the things that I was providing, as far as products on Teachers Pay Teachers, those were working well. But there was a larger problem at bay, and that was that teachers were burning out, they had anxiety, they had depression, they were leaving the profession at an alarming rate.
Brittany 2:14
And some of them were the most passionate teachers that I knew they were leaving, and I realized my products were solving some very minut problems. But in order to make the change that I wanted to make in the system of education, it was going to take more than just small band aids. It was going to take mindset, it was going to take action, it was going to take support. And so what I did was I took my passion, my experience, my research, and I rolled it up into this experience and that was my first course.
Kristen Doyle 2:46
I love that your course topic is something just so important and so big right now in the field of education in general. I know lots of sellers have created or maybe thought about creating a course related to the content that we sell. You know, if you sell math content, maybe you create a course on how to teach math, those sorts of things. That seems to be kind of the more natural place that a lot of sellers go.
Kristen Doyle 3:11
But I love that you looked at that big picture, at a huge problem that is happening in education and how you could help support teachers in that way. I know all of our TPT products are helping teachers with burnout, because we are, you know, taking so much of that work off of their plate. But like you said, individual products are a bandaid for a bigger problem.
Brittany 3:31
Just kind of based on what you were just talking about. Like I created two different courses at two different times, because I saw two different types of problems. As I got to kind of know the teachers that I was working with. I noticed I really wanted to help them with an individualized way, because I’m a special educator. I see everything is individualistic, and I saw it as they needed an individualized burnout recovery plan.
Brittany 3:58
And a lot of teachers they would say, Oh, well, I’m burned out because of the workload, i’m burned out because I’m not getting that support. And so I would see these different pieces, and I’m like, how can I solve that big problem. And like we just said, my products themselves, were solving little minut pieces. But at the end of the day, that was just the action that they needed to take. But they also needed mindset. They also needed support. And a lot of my Teachers Pay Teacher’s products could not provide that mindset or that support, but I could and so that’s where that course kind of came into play.
Kristen Doyle 4:39
Yeah, mindset is just so important, regardless of what your profession is. Mindset is important for us as TPT sellers.
Brittany 4:45
Yeah, absolutely.
Kristen Doyle 4:47
It is important for teachers. It’s important for moms and dads and just everyone. I’ve been doing a lot of mindset work over the last maybe two years, I guess. And it really is amazing how much of a difference it makes when you start focusing on that and applying some solid strategies to put yourself in a better mental place. And, you know, setting boundaries around work life balance and things like that. And all of that is so important, especially for teachers.
Brittany 5:15
Yes, completely agree. Then the second part, I did the individualized Educare program, and then I went into the Automate Your Classroom program. And that was where I taught teachers how to create a workflow and a system based on what I learned from having a business really. I learned how to do these things in my business, and then I brought them into the classroom. And then I realized, hey, teachers need to know that they can also do these types of things.
Brittany 5:42
How to create a workflow, how to create systems with automation, so that they could reduce that time that they were spending on administrative tasks after contract hours. Really getting that work life balance that we all crave. And so that mindset piece that we need for work life balance was also kind of put in with the automation piece that we kind of use in our business. We were talking before we started about Smarter Queue and how it’s an automation as well.
Kristen Doyle 6:09
Yeah, it is saves so much time. I see your Automate Your Classroom stuff all the time on social and I have not been in the classroom for what, five years now. And I’m still so tempted to buy this. I’m like this is genius. This is what we need.
Brittany 6:28
Yes and you know, I had very small things on Teachers Pay Teacher’s, like I had a missing assignment form that was a Google form. That was a form of automation. That was my initial automation that I ever used, and sold it, and people loved it. But they wanted to know how can they do that with more stuff? And that’s really what I did. I looked at what I was selling on Teachers Pay Teacher’s, what was selling the most, the biggest volume? What was the one that everybody’s like, I need this.
Brittany 7:00
And I then kind of narrowed it down to what was the thing that they were really looking for? Oh, they want to see more of this. They want to know how to do this and more than just a missing assignment form. You know, they want to do this with everything.
Kristen Doyle 7:15
What is the real problem that they’re having?
Brittany 7:17
Exactly. And that’s kind of what helped me determine, this is what I need to create a course on. And it’s worked really well for me.
Kristen Doyle 7:26
Yeah, I think when you tap into those underlying I know, the phrase pain points is so overused, but it’s true, that underlying real problem that the teacher needs to solve, or whoever your audience is. That’s where you find that really compelling course topic that will hook people in so that it is a successful course. And so that you’re making a big difference for people, because you’re addressing what they really need.
Kristen Doyle 7:53
And not just, you know, here’s a product for this, here’s a product for that, which of course, we know, those products are definitely very helpful. They’re super important. But like you said they are solving a timing problem, where there’s this huge underlying problem that you can also create more support around and teach teachers in your case, how to solve this bigger life problem?
Brittany 8:18
Yes.
Kristen Doyle 8:18
Can we talk a little bit about some questions that people may have about courses? Like how do you figure out how to structure a course in an effective way, you know, deciding what content to include and how to arrange things.
Brittany 8:33
So one of the things that I kind of looked at was, I started with the end in mind, like how we do with teaching, like all of us, probably who are selling on Teachers Pay Teacher’s, our teachers, you know, we know how to teach. And I think that’s such a really cool part about creating a course is that you don’t have a curriculum, you’re creating your curriculum. So I think the most important kind of piece to look at is the end, what is the end problem you’re trying to solve? And then kind of moving backwards from that?
Brittany 9:10
The problem that I see that happens, or that happened with me, was I want to share everything, just every little piece and that can be overwhelming. I mean, my whole purpose was to not overwhelm right. But when I originally created my course, and I’ve reiterated it several times to really just narrow down the basic information that people need to know so that they don’t get overwhelmed and so that they’re actually taking action was just getting down to the nitty gritty of what are the basic things that they need to know.
Brittany 9:45
Then having that in a way that was actionable, because one of the other pieces that I’ve seen as I’ve created this course and as I’ve had these courses, and seen a lot of success is that I would have people join my course, but then they would never do anything with it. And my whole goal with that was to see my students succeed.
Brittany 10:09
I think we all want to see our students succeed in the classroom, we want to see them succeed if we’re creating a course, right. And so I wanted to see that. So I had to think of where were my students getting stuck, where they just like this is a whole lot. And they were, and so really simplifying it down, and finding ways to just give them the meat and potatoes, and then have a way to give them that extra stuff later on when they could absorb it.
Kristen Doyle 10:39
Yeah. And that’s so smart just to start with something that feels doable and manageable for people. In some cases, I think it’s almost more important what we leave out of the course, then how much we can fit into it. There was a time when you would see these courses that said, they were you know, 100 and whatever lessons, it’s everything you’ll ever need to know about whatever topic and that honestly just feels overwhelming now.
Kristen Doyle 11:06
Maybe it’s a symptom of where we are just as a society, but that feels overwhelming now, I would much rather buy the like five lesson mini course that’s going to tell me what I need to know about XYZ.
Brittany 11:18
Yes, I think that’s something that people get, you know, caught up, and they think, I’ve just got to give everything that is going to help them do everything. And people don’t want everything. They just want to know what they need to know, to get to that end goal.
Kristen Doyle 11:35
So maybe if anyone is out there thinking that, of course is too big of an undertaking, because they have to do all the things and maybe this is a good reminder that the smaller courses can make a huge difference. And the other thing to keep in mind, too is that a smaller course, you should be pricing at a lower price point. And that makes it a lot more affordable for teachers. So you might be able to increase your impact that way, too.
Brittany 11:57
Absolutely.
Kristen Doyle 11:59
So let’s talk a little bit about automation. You’re so into automations in the classroom, and I know that you did some automation in your course creation process. Who can you tell us about that?
Brittany 12:10
Yes, clearly, I love this question. Automation is like my thing. And I’m not like a super like computer person. But I’m obsessed with working smarter and not harder. So for me personally, because I think this is very different for everybody, you know, as far as like, what they should automate in their course creation and things like that. But the first thing that I really struggled with, and I know this about myself is idea overload, like, I need some structure.
Brittany 12:40
And so one of the things that I automated was my content organization, that way, my ideas had a specific place and they could make sense. So I would have all these ideas, and they would be jumbled up. And so I automated the organization of that. And so I use a couple of different tools for this, like, depending on what part of my workflow I’m in when I’m creating a course.
Brittany 13:06
But in idea generation, and just brain dumping, I typically use Notion. Now I’ve used several different things. But I love notion just for kind of keeping all of those ideas together and organized. But then it automatically sorts it and then categorizes it. So I’m saving time, I’m ensuring that that material is well organized, and it’s easy to navigate. And then I can remove things as I needed to which like we talked about earlier, like that was something that I needed to do.
Kristen Doyle 13:35
Yes.
Brittany 13:36
I also know that I struggle with communication sometimes. So even like in my classroom, I automated my communication procedures. So that was definitely a part in creating my course that I think was very important to automate as well. Like I don’t think many people think about that part of the creation process. But like I said earlier, we want to see our students succeed. And so it’s not just about, you know, making money off of them, like I created my course, because I wanted to help.
Brittany 14:06
And so in order for my students to show progress, I needed onboarding, like with an email sequence. So I automated that, any updates to the materials, I automated that as well checking in with them having a procedure in place for any questions and support that they might need. And so I automated that through my email service provider with tags and things like that, just to kind of keep it flowing to show that progress.
Brittany 14:35
And then the last thing I did was something I actually automated with my students as well. So all of these things I did in my classroom, too, but I tracked my students progress. And again, like I want to see them succeed. So I had automations for scheduling for reminders to check in with those students to make sure that my curriculum development during that creation process had deadlines to it. So I had reminders set up for that automation. And that was super impactful as well.
Brittany 15:07
The one thing that I’ve started doing recently is using AI to automate some of almost like a back and forth like I needed somebody to bounce ideas off of and that’s what I use. I use ChatGPT, I know some people use Bing or Claude or whatever. I love ChatGPT just to kind of bounce those ideas off of and think, hey, would my audience need a, b and c?
Brittany 15:32
If I don’t have somebody already that I can ask those questions to that’s part of my audience, and just kind of automating that as well. So I’ve used automation in so many different ways. I could probably spend hours talking about it. But those are like the main ones that I think really helped in the creation process.
Kristen Doyle 15:50
Yeah, I love using AI tools for that idea generation. Like he said, a lot of times, I’ll put in what I kind of have planned. And I’ll ask a question like, What am I leaving out? Is there something I’ve forgotten?
Brittany 16:03
Yes.
Kristen Doyle 16:04
And sometimes I get ideas that I’m not going to use because I don’t like them. But sometimes I get something. I’m like, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. And it just helps you round out what you’re teaching. And I use ChatGPT a lot for organizing my content to.
Kristen Doyle 16:19
I’m gonna create a course on this or even just a podcast episode, I’m doing a podcast episode on whatever topic, here’s what I want to talk about, help me organize it, help me put it in a logical order. Because sometimes I have a million ideas in my head. And I just am not figuring out you know, sometimes maybe I’m too close to what I’m doing. I have too many ideas. And I just haven’t quite figured out the logical order that it makes sense to present this to other people in right.
Brittany 16:48
I love it for that purpose, too.
Kristen Doyle 16:50
And I know we all have probably mixed feelings about AI in general, and even tools like Notion that are helping to organize things and do work for you. But I think you know, as long as we’re using it in a responsible way, and we are still presenting our ideas and our thoughts, our work using an AI tool to help us fill in some gaps, figure out if we’ve missed something, do some of that planning can really help. And it is, like you said almost like having a team member that you can go back and forth with.
Kristen Doyle 17:18
So let’s talk just a little bit about marketing and getting your course out there. Because that’s a huge part of having a course. You can have courses all day long that sit on your Kajabi or Teachable or ThriveCart or whoever platform and don’t go anywhere. But you have to get them out in front of the right people. So what kind of strategies have you found successful for getting your course in front of that teacher audience?
Brittany 17:45
Well, I think the main thing that really helped me in actually reaching my audience was, I didn’t just create a course based on an idea that came up, it was over time. So I had a lot of experience kind of creating a community of teachers on my TikTok and on my Instagram, that I felt comfortable kind of talking with them, and getting that information from them about what they actually needed. Instead of just being like I think teachers need, I think teachers need some burnouts support.
Brittany 18:14
No, I like actually had those conversations on social media, I was bringing that content already there. But even after that, there were a few things that worked really well for me and actually selling my course. And one of those was doing a pre launch podcast series, to really get my audience like primed and ready for the launch, getting them in that state of mind to really want to take some action. So I did a lot of planning around the time of the year that I was launching, looking at the emotional aspect of what my teachers were dealing with. And then addressing those emotional components.
Brittany 18:52
People will call it aggravating the problem, I don’t really think it was aggravating it, as much as I was acknowledging that it was happening. And then I sent my teachers on a journey to realizing, hey, a lot of the things that I’m dealing with could be solved through automating tasks in my classroom. So that was one strategy that went really well.
Brittany 19:11
The other was participating in a few summits back to back, which got a little bit more visibility on me. And I kind of road off of those into a launch. So what I mean is like, the topic that I talked about was kind of like a taste, right? I talked a little bit about it, gave a little bit of a quick win. Then I road off of that summit into a free boot camp. So people were getting to know me a little bit more, I was putting a lot more value into them. So again, giving them that value to those new friends that I met through the summits. And then I went into a launch so I definitely took my audience from cold to warm, and then really took them on a journey and I definitely see the value in creating that purposeful journey into my course, but also providing value along the way.
Kristen Doyle 20:04
Yeah, it’s so important to do that. It’s typically called a launch runway, right. These things we do leading up to a launch. And if you’ve done a few of them, you start to see them everywhere. I’m at the point now where I can get an email from somebody and go, oh, she’s about to launch something, I wonder what it is. And I get excited for it.
Kristen Doyle 20:25
But when we start putting out that content, whether it’s like you did on your podcast, or you know, people who don’t have a podcast, you can do this with your blog, your email list, a YouTube channel, Facebook Lives, whatever it is, you can do it wherever you are creating content. And that’s what I would recommend is to go ahead and do this, wherever you already are creating content, don’t feel like you have to start something brand new.
Kristen Doyle 20:48
Wherever you’re creating content, start talking about those pain points, and it is agitating the pain point. But we can do it in a way that is caring and not salesy, and not that bro marketing feeling, where they make you feel like your entire life is going to end because this pain point is so bad.
Brittany 21:07
Yes.
Kristen Doyle 21:08
We don’t want to do that. But to remind people that yes, you’re struggling with this, maybe yeah, you’re not loving teaching right now. And it’s not your students. And it’s not the content, it’s these other things, just bringing that stuff back to light, reminding them that that’s the underlying problem that they have, and then guiding them into a place where they are ready to buy a course from you.
Kristen Doyle 21:33
Working on visibility is just so important for that. And I love that you’re focusing on that. And you’re doing all these summits and things. Because it’s also a great way just to get your message out to a bigger audience, even if they never end up purchasing something from you. It helps get your message and the support that you provide out to a bigger audience, every time that you’ve presented something like that,
Kristen Doyle 21:53
Like I have people that I’ve actually connected with have never purchased from me, but send people to me all the time, because they learned about me from a summit that I did two years ago. And I was not familiar with summits, I was brand new, but they learned from me, they still follow along with me. And they send people to me, because they’re like, Hey, I know this one girl who talks about teacher burnout. And she’s always talking about it all the time. So they send them to me. And so I think that’s a huge piece to that even if you’re not launching, you’re getting that visibility to people who might then refer you out to others.
Kristen Doyle 22:32
So for sellers who are thinking about creating their own course, what would be your top piece of advice?
Brittany 22:39
I think the biggest piece of advice for TPT sellers, I think they have a real advantage because they can see what products they sell that their target audience really wants. So I definitely think that looking into and digging into those analytics of their TPT store could really help them decide on what their course topic might be, and then allow them to narrow down the problem and the solution.
Brittany 23:05
Also, my best piece of advice would be to create based on your passion, and to use your personal experience as part of your journey and your course. Because anybody can Google anything, they can spend hours finding out the information that you know, and that you experienced. But it’s not going to be the same as your unique experience, what you know to be true from your life experience. I think that’s the biggest part of marketing your course, that can really make it, is sharing your own unique experience.
Kristen Doyle 23:43
We just get so much more out of a course, a conference session or whatever, when we have some kind of a connection with the person who’s presenting and sharing that personal experience is such a good way to do that. Maybe the only way really to build a good connection.
Brittany 23:58
Right? Like I was saying, like you can google and find basic information. But sometimes that stuff doesn’t click, you know, like somebody could Google how to overcome teacher burnout. They could read it on a blog. But until they’re hearing that their experience was validated through things that I’ve talked about, they’re like, ah, somebody else is dealing with this, it’s not just me. Then they start to realize that that’s something they can get support with from other people or me.
Kristen Doyle 24:28
And a lot of times when you join a course you get access to a community of other people who joined the same course for the same reason that you did. So you’re all in this place together. And that part of it can be almost as good as the course itself in some cases.
Brittany 24:42
Absolutely.
Kristen Doyle 24:43
So let’s talk action steps. What would you suggest as maybe a first action step for somebody who is thinking about creating their own course?
Brittany 24:52
Definitely looking into that TPT store and seeing what things their ideal audience is purchasing. What is the highest purchased item that they have? And then maybe looking into what are they passionate abou? If they’re selling math resources, which one is the highest purchased item? So maybe it’s a bundle for algebra.
Brittany 25:15
Okay, so that’s the highest one, they’re really passionate about getting students engaged. So maybe they merge those two things together to really look at what could they create a course on? And then getting that validated by their audience by having those conversations with the people in their audience that would be purchasing it and getting that marketing research done.
Kristen Doyle 25:40
Definitely, that market research is such an important piece of creating any offer, really, but a course, for sure. Where you look at identifying that underlying problem, and then find out if your audience is actually interested in this, before you go down this path of spending tons and tons of time creating something without knowing for sure that it’s going to sell.
Kristen Doyle 26:01
And there are so many places to do audience research, you can drop polls on Instagram, you can email your audience, I’ve been doing this one question, click to respond to email survey lately. In my regular weekly emails, there’s one little question and there’s three options. And I can tell by how many clicks are on each link, which option got the most votes. And it’s such a good way to do some quick audience research. It’s also really great for your email stats, because it gets people interacting with your emails, which helps your deliverability. So it’s a great thing to do for email, as well.
Brittany 26:38
I know some providers, you can actually tag based on which one they clicked. And so then you could have a whole tag for those specific people to maybe target those people later for a specific offer that you have. So I like that too.
Kristen Doyle 26:53
Yeah. And I do those for everything from real market research to just, I did one not too long ago, that was hey, how long do you like podcasts episodes to be?
Brittany 27:02
Yeah.
Kristen Doyle 27:02
Because I just wanted to know that I’m in the right place. I’m recording these every week, I want to make sure I’m in the right range of length for people. So just little questions that can help you make your business better.
Kristen Doyle 27:15
Well, thank you, Brittany, so much for being here. This was such a great conversation around, of course creation and figuring out you know, that right topic and all of those things, and especially about how to automate some of it and take some work off our plates, too. So I appreciate you being here so much. Can you tell everyone where they can find you?
Brittany 27:34
Yes, thank you again, for having me as part of the podcast. I’ve listened to your podcast for quite a while and I love all of the content that you’re bringing. It’s all really relevant for me as a TPT Seller and then also a course creator. But you can find me on Instagram @teachingmindbodyandsoul. I’m also on Tik Tok @MissPrincessteach. I originally started on TikTok. And I just cannot change my name on there for the life of me.
Brittany 28:01
But then I also have a podcast the Resilient Teacher Podcast where I really focus on helping teachers overcome that burnout cycle and start living their best lives inside and outside of the classroom. So you can find that at teachingmindbodyandsoul.com/podcast. And I love connecting with other teachers and teacher sellers and collaborating with them. So anybody who’s listening, who is still a teacher and may need support as far as burnout would love to help with that, but also any teacher sellers who would love to collaborate. I’m always looking for new teacher seller friends.
Kristen Doyle 28:34
Awesome. And we will put clickable links in the show notes for all of the things so they’re easy to locate. Thank you again so much for being here.
Brittany 28:42
Yes, thank you.
Kristen Doyle 28:44
What a great conversation with Brittany Blackwall today. Whether you are thinking about course creation or you’re looking for ways to automate things and prevent burnout. Britney is your girl I would definitely encourage you to connect with her at the links in the show notes. And don’t forget to check out her podcast the Resilient Teacher Podcast for more tips and stories on beating burnout. Talk to you soon friends.
Kristen Doyle 29:08
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, please share it with another teacher seller who would also find it helpful. For more resources on Growing Your TPT business. Head to Kristendoyle.co/TPT. Talk to you soon.
