0:03
Hey 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 sale. Let’s get started y’all.
0:22
Hey, hey, friends, I am so happy that you’re here listening today, because today, I am shining a little bit of a spotlight on a common mistake that TPT sellers make in the TPT product creation process that is slowing your work down. And it might even be confusing your customers.
0:44
You know those hours that you spend scrolling through hundreds of fonts on your computer, lost in a maze of clipart looking for the perfect color palette? Yeah, I’ve been there too. It’s something a lot of us struggle with. So let’s chat about it.
1:02
Chances are, you have probably had situations where you feel like you have spent as much time perfecting the look of your product, as you do actually creating the content of the product itself. It’s like we get caught up in a web of fonts and colors and clipart. And there are so many choices.
1:23
But it’s fun, right? Who doesn’t love playing around with new clipart or finding an amazing font pair that you really love. It’s actually really common among us teacher sellers to have this struggle. And I think part of the reason really goes back to our creativity. But let’s talk about why it’s a TPT product creation mistake.
1:43
Everything we do in our business has a cost, whether it’s a time cost or actual dollars, or maybe both. Every minute that you spend hemming and hawing about which one of those 27 cookie graphics that are in your folder is perfect for this product is a minute, you’re not making progress getting the actual product created.
2:04
And it can seem like just a little bit at a time. But little by little this really chips away at your productivity. And it leads to decision fatigue. There’s also the actual money that it costs you to constantly buy new clipart and new fonts. I know it’s fun. I know they’re exciting.
2:24
But to be honest, I don’t even want to know how much I have spent on fonts and clipart on TPT. In the 11 years that I’ve been a seller. And I would be willing to bet you don’t really want to know that number either.
2:37
So those are some reasons that it’s bad for you the seller. But what about your buyers? Well, when your designs are all over the place, it actually dilutes your brand’s image. And it can be confusing to people who might otherwise be loyal buyers, that they can’t recognize your work.
2:55
I’ve talked with so many of you who have told me that you sometimes spend hours looking for the perfect shade of teal, or a font pair that looks good together before you even start creating the product. And then you’ve told me that you do it all over again, for every new product that you make. This is a huge time suck in our business.
3:18
Not to mention, like I said, it can be confusing for our buyers. And it causes us to spend extra money buying more and more of these fonts and clipart. So what’s the solution? It’s actually really simple. The solution here is consistency. I know consistency sounds boring. But this is exactly what solves our problem.
3:42
Stick to a consistent set of brand fonts and colors that you use throughout your products. And when it comes to clip art, choose a few artists that you really like and use their graphics consistently. Keeping those design elements consistent throughout all of your products is great for a few reasons.
4:01
Not only does it speed up the creation process, and save you money, but it also makes your brand stronger and more recognizable to buyers. And it allows you to use one of my favorite things, templates, to speed up your product creation process even more, because you can go ahead and create page templates with common layouts that you would use for worksheets or for game cards of various sizes.
4:29
And you can go ahead and put placeholder text in there that is the right size, the right colors, the right font, so that you are able to speed up that process even more by using those templates to create new products. So how do we choose those fonts, those colors the clipart we’re going to use?
4:46
First of all I want to challenge the idea that branding your TPT products means you need to use your logos, fonts and colors or make it match your website.
4:59
See, branding is all about the audience. It’s about how you can best reach the people that this piece of content is for. Your website’s audience is teachers or SLPs, or whoever. These are adults in their 20s, and up, and they are probably mostly women.
5:24
The same thing goes for your covers your thumbnails, your previews, but your actual product pages are made for students. And that means that you need to brand them with the student audience in mind, not the adults who are purchasing.
5:39
So you want to consider things like using really easy to read fonts. If you’re going to use a script font for something, make sure it is really just there to be decorative. And keep in mind, good color contrast. So even if you’re brand like mine uses a dark gray for most of your body text on things that you’re printing out for students, you’re going to want to use black instead. Because we won’t really strong color contrast.
6:08
You’ll also want to choose your graphics based on the age of the students that are in your target market. So if you’re creating for preschool or kindergarten students, you’ll probably choose very different graphics from someone creating for middle and high school.
6:23
I personally have a separate set of branding, completely separate and unique set of branding that I use in my product file, versus the branding that I use for social for my website, and for what I call the product packaging. That’s your cover your thumbnails, your preview those images that are created to sell your product to the teachers who are shopping for them.
6:44
Now, there is a lot of overlap, obviously, between these two sets of branding, because I want to choose things that work well together, things that seem consistent, but they are not identical. So for example, my teal shade is the same in both places, as is the dark blue shade.
7:02
But my products use a lot of bolder colors that don’t show up anywhere on my website, like some purples and some bolder pinks and things like that. The same goes for fonts. I have a couple of brand fonts that I use on my website. But the body font on my website is not super readable for students.
7:23
So the font that I use for the text on all of my student pages is a completely different font. But I did try to keep them somewhat consistent in terms of they’re always in black, they are about the same font weight, so one of them is not much darker and heavier lines than the other those sorts of things.
7:42
As you’re trying to decide which fonts and what colors to use for your TPT products, look through your existing products that you’d have now. Which combinations stand out to you the most? Which ones sell the best? Which of those do you just like the best? Aand then start with those to start building your branding for your products.
8:05
When it comes to clipart, I would suggest thinking about the artists that you keep going back to time and time again, and trying to settle on a handful of artists that you really like. Preferably, once you have broad catalogs of graphics you can use so that you will hopefully be able to find what you need in one of those artists and not have to branch out from them too much.
8:27
Bonus points if those artists have kind of similar styles, because sticking to just a few artists means that those graphics will all be cohesive. You won’t have one page that has images with really thick, bold outlines, and another with really thin lines and maybe sometimes you have images with no outlines at all.
8:47
Sticking to similar styles will help those pages look cohesive. Not to mention, it saves you a ton of time scrolling through the search results on TPT looking for new clipart because you can actually just head right in to your favorite clip artists store, look through what they have and purchase what you need.
9:06
One thing I’ve learned from doing this is that sometimes the best clip artists to find might not necessarily be marketing exactly what I need. There is an artist that I use really frequently and I have bought this person’s alphabet set. Now you might remember that I’ve mentioned in the past I create for upper elementary.
9:25
I really don’t need a lot of alphabet style clipart. However, the alphabet set includes tons of random everyday objects, animals, school supplies, loads of things, and they are sorted alphabetically, which means if I need an alligator, I open up the a and if I need a stack of books, I open up the folder with B and it is so easy for me to find things.
9:50
So I chose that particular artist based mostly on the fact that they had a huge catalog and it was all organized in a way that was going to make it really easy for me to find what I needed, not to mention, of course, I love their style.
10:04
Now, once you’ve made your decisions, put them into a separate brand board that is specific to your products. If you’re not familiar, a brand board is just a PDF or an image. I like to use PDFs because then I can copy paste the text, but a PDF that includes the fonts that you use for different things, including if they’re going to be in all caps or not. If your headings are always bolded, or something like that, all of those fonts are on there.
10:33
Your colors are on there with color swatches, as well as the hex codes that you would need to use to find those colors on your computer. And you can also drop in the logos and links to your favorite clip artists stores on that product brand board to make that easy to find as well.
10:50
I personally keep one brand board for my website and my social media and a separate brand board for my TPT product branding. Now if you’re not familiar with how to create a brand board, or you just want to shortcut, I’ve put together a free brand board template that can help you do this right in your Canva account. And you can download it on the show notes for this episode at Kristendoyle.co/episode 60.
11:14
So there you have it brands the sneaky little time theme that has been slowing down your product creation is that endless cycle of searching for new fonts, colors ,and clipart for every new product that you create. But now that you’re onto it, it’s easy to be your secret weapon is as simple as it gets. It is just good old fashioned consistency.
11:39
Now, I would love for you to walk away from this episode and give this consistency thing a try and see how it speeds things up for you and keeps your products looking professional and branded. When you do don’t be shy about it. Drop your new brand boards into the Savvy Teacher Sellers Facebook group.
11:55
Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of The Savvy Teacher Seller. Remember to keep things simple and stay consistent so that you can keep creating amazing teaching resources for those teachers who need them.
12:01
It is a great place to get some feedback on your brand board if you’re maybe a little stuck on things or just to celebrate with TPT friends who understand why you’re excited about a new brand board. After all, TPT is a lot more fun when we do things together right.
12:14
I’ll catch you in the next episode. It is going to be all about four more mistakes that TPT sellers are making when it comes to product creation. Talk to you then.
12:41
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.
