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Okay, TPT sellers ready to see growth in your business? You’re in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Teacher Seller. I’m Kristen Doyle. And I’m here to give you no fluff tools and strategies that will really make an impact on your sales. Let’s get started y’all.
0:21
Hey, y’all, welcome to this episode of the savvy teacher seller. I’m your host, Kristen Doyle. And today we are diving in to some creative ways to get more teachers looking at your TPT products. It is no secret that views on TPT overall are down right now. But that doesn’t mean that your hands are tied.
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See as business owners, sometimes it’s up to us to get a little creative and diversify our marketing strategies to keep our TPT business thriving. In this episode, I’m sharing eight strategies to get more eyes on your TPT products. No matter how long you’ve been at this, I would be willing to bet there’ll be some strategies in today’s episode that you haven’t even considered. So let’s get to it.
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The first strategy I want you to think about is getting really strategic about your freebies. The idea here is that you should be giving away high quality activities or lesson plans, and other smaller resources for free to try and hook those potential customers. You can do this in two ways.
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You can put these directly into your TPT store, so that people who are browsing TPT for freebies, find your freebies and then are encouraged to purchase your products as well. I definitely recommend that you do this and when can do if that freebie is related to or is part of a product line that you have bundled, be sure you include the freebie in the bundle.
1:52
This will create a little upsell right on your freebie for that bundle. The second way that you can do this is to use a signup form on your website. Or you can even just create a landing page through your email provider if you don’t have a website yet. And you can offer this freebie as an email opt in to get people onto your email list where you can nurture them and then begin to sell them your resources there as well.
2:17
The good thing about freebies is that they do help to grow your email list. We know that TPT has told us that most teachers who come to TPT start by downloading freebies before they ever make purchases. So this is a good way to grow your audience there as well. And it really helps to build trust in you as the creator.
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Nobody wants to buy something from a creator that they don’t trust yet. So this is a really good way to build trust. And to let people sample one of your products. Just make sure that you’re being really strategic about what you choose for these freebies.
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You want to grow an audience, whether it’s TPT followers, or your email list, you want to grow an audience of people who are your ideal customers, not just any teacher anywhere all over the world. If you’re thinking about this in terms of email opt ins, you might want to go back and listen to the email series I did in November of 2022 because there are definitely some tips in there on how to choose the right email opt in. And we’ll link to that in the show notes for you.
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Your second strategy is one that I think is really important right now, because what we’re seeing lately is that teachers are not as willing to buy great big bundles at the moment. They are buying things that are smaller the things that they need right now in the moment, the things that cost less. So make sure that you are offering plenty of bite sized products at those lower price points that give buyers a taste of your bigger resources.
3:49
Now, I would not recommend creating a sampler that feels like it’s not really usable, I would create a complete product, but one that is just very small. So maybe it’s just a pack of a couple of worksheets on a topic or one center activity for a certain skill as opposed to an entire year’s worth or tons of centers to cover an entire topic.
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This way you can create these smaller resources and price them low enough to be that no brainer purchase. For people who are a little more budget conscious right now. We all know that inflation is where it is. Inflation is high right now. And everyone is a little more budget conscious than we normally have been in the past. So these little products can serve as a stepping stone to your bigger ticket resources.
4:42
Number three is to create an ambassador program. Chances are even if you haven’t seen this in the TPT world, you have probably seen Ambassador programs at work all over Instagram and anywhere else. And the idea here is that you create a team of teachers who love your products and are already using them. And you kind of enlist the these teachers to help spread the word about your products.
5:07
You can offer them free products or discounted products in exchange for posting on their social media, for taking photos that you can then use on your social media or for writing testimonials for you. And the win here is that you’re getting authentic promotion from teachers who actually use your resources. And you’re getting real life pictures of your products in action in different classroom settings, is really is a great way to start sharing the word about your products in a way that shows that teachers are loving them.
5:40
Number four, is to start thinking about collaborating with other TPT sellers. If this is something you’ve never done before, then I would encourage you to look for other TPT sellers that you can partner up with for different types of promotional events, you can cross promote each other’s products, this would be kind of the simplest way to collaborate. For example, my TPT store is mostly upper elementary ELA resources.
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I have a little bit of math stuff here and there. But if I knew a science seller who also does upper elementary, but maybe that person doesn’t do ELA, then that seller and I could trade off resources and we could cross promote so I could promote their science activities, they could promote my ELA activities.
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This is a really great really easy way to collaborate with another TPT seller. You could also get a group of sellers together to host a hashtag sale. If you’re new to hashtag sales, the idea there is you create a hashtag for your event. And everyone adds that hashtag to a couple of products, I would definitely recommend creating some rules for your sale around what is the discount going to be how many products, what should the value of the products be at regular price.
6:56
And you can do those hashtag sales as dollar sales or 50% off sale. However you do them, it should be a big enough discount that it’s a no brainer for teachers to purchase. And then everyone in the group promotes this hash tag sale to their email list on social media, in their note followers. And that’s how you get a lot of traffic, which generates more sales.
7:16
Some other ways to collaborate with sellers would be to create some special opt in promos where you’re all working together to grow each other’s email list or do giveaways. There are lots of things you can do to collaborate with other sellers. The strategy here would be that you want to look for sellers who have the same target audience that you do.
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See, I have participated in collaborations in the past where some of the sellers were upper elementary, but others were maybe primary grades. And what happens then is we build an audience of people who aren’t really interested in my products or my blog posts. So you want to look for sellers who have the same target audience that you do. And it’s even better if you find sellers whose products don’t actually compete with yours, because then everyone wins.
8:07
If I am the only upper elementary ELA seller in our promo, then I will get all of the ELA sale. And if someone else is the only upper elementary science seller or math seller or social studies seller, then they will get all of those sales because there’s less competition in our group and everyone wins.
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Now, if you have not found your group of sellers to collaborate with would definitely encourage you to head to the Savvy Teacher Sellers Facebook group, because in that group, you will find a directory of TPT sellers who are interested in doing collaborations like this. There are almost 300 sellers on there last time I’ve checked, and everyone has indicated who their target audiences, what subjects they create for all of those things that you might want to know and have left their contact information so you can reach out to them and start working on creating a collaboration together.
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The real benefit collaborating like this with other sellers is the fact that you can grow your audience. You are tapping into new audiences, new people who may never have heard of you before, and you’re giving them something really valuable. Whether it’s a really good sale price or some free resources, you’re giving them something really valuable, which helps to build that know like and trust factor.
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Number five is one that will cost you a little bit of money, but it should earn you back more than it costs if you’re doing it right and if it’s working well. And that is to run some retargeting ads.
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I hope you know by now that we have access to put our Facebook pixel into our TPT store. If you need help with that, take a look inside the savvy teacher sellers Facebook group. There are plenty of conversations about that in there with instructions on where to do it. When you put your Facebook pixel in your TPT store. Then you can create Facebook ads to retarget teachers who have visited your store in the past.
10:07
And the reason that this is good is because those teachers have already been either in your storefront or on one of your product pages. So they have already thought about purchasing from you. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Because of how the pixel works on TPT, we can’t actually eliminate people who have purchased, we can only track people in our storefront and in our product pages, we can’t track them through the checkout process.
10:32
So what I would recommend is to create an ad that has a carousel of some of your best sellers, or some very timely resources for the current season. That way, you are just showing people who’ve already shown some interest in your products or your store some more of your resources in this ad, rather than trying to retarget a specific product.
10:53
You might have seen ads in the past where you have visited a sales page. And the ad almost says, Hey, I know you looked at this, but you didn’t buy it. Unfortunately, because of the way that the pixel works like I explained earlier, we can’t eliminate people we can’t tell who’s purchased and who hasn’t. So I wouldn’t try to target something really specific.
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But this is a really good way to retarget people who have already shown some interest in your products. And it helps you to increase the chances of converting those people who were maybe almost customers and just didn’t check out.
11:25
Okay, number six. This is a fun idea if you have products that solves a really specific challenge that maybe teachers struggle with a lot. If you do, think about creating an interactive quiz. It is no secret that we all love personality quizzes. So think about a way that you could create a super engaging quiz that would guide teachers toward the products that solve their specific challenges.
11:55
Maybe you have a range of products around a certain topic, and you could ask some quiz questions to guide teachers to the one that is best for them. And then share that quiz on social media and through your email list. This can give teachers some more personalized product recommendations, which makes it easier for them to decide to make a purchase. But it also can be a way that you grow your email list because you can use these as an email opt in as well.
12:22
Alright, number seven, is to hold an online scavenger hunt. You can do this in the form of a virtual scavenger hunt giveaway. Or you can do a scavenger hunt where clues are leading to different products in your TPT store. You would want to offer some good prizes to encourage people to participate. But this can be a really fun way to engage your audience, especially if you have a pretty decent sized social media audience. Engage those teachers, get them excited about something fun, and also introduce them to some of your products.
13:02
Number eight, you know I could not let this entire episode go back without reminding you that you need to make sure that the SEO on your products is good to go. You want to make sure that your TPT products are ranking as high as possible in search results. Because so many teachers go straight to TPT. And they just search for the things that they need.
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They don’t follow us all on social media, they might have unsubscribed from all our email list, but they do head to TPT and search. So make sure you’re using relevant keywords in your product titles and your descriptions. And that will help you to increase your organic traffic and lead to more sales over time because like I always say sales are a math problem, and more traffic will equal more sales.
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All right, here is your action steps for today’s episode. Pick just one or two of the strategies that I shared today, and take some steps to implement them in your TPT store this week. If you’re short on time, my suggestion for the very first thing to do would be to do a little keyword research and make some tweaks to your product titles and descriptions because those can yield a huge transition and a big result without much effort.
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Then head over to the Facebook group to grab that list of collaborators and to share about your experience and how your products have moved around in search. That is it for today’s episode. I hope you’re walking away with a couple of fresh ideas to boost this TPT sales. If you’re loving the show, don’t forget to follow on your podcast app and leave a review. It helps more teacher sellers just like you find the show and I really appreciate it. I’ll talk to you soon.
14:56
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 Kristindoyle.co/TPT. Talk to you soon