The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
5 Ways to Quickly Boost Your Sales on Teachers Pay Teachers
Ready to supercharge your TPT sales? Whether you're trying to hit a specific income goal or looking for sustainable ways to boost your store's performance, these five actionable strategies can help you drive meaningful results without burning out.
Flash sales remain the gold standard for quick revenue boosts, but there's a science to doing them right. The sweet spot isn't necessarily the deepest discount—Lauren explains why a strategic 24-48 hour sale on product lines or bundles often outperforms dramatic price slashing. The common assumption that halving your prices will double your sales rarely holds true, making smart pricing crucial to your success.
For sellers looking to move wishlisted items or encourage larger purchases, the free gift strategy creates irresistible incentives. This approach works especially well during seasonal periods, offering immediate value that teachers can implement in their classrooms right away. Lauren breaks down exactly how to implement this on TPT despite platform limitations, including tiered rewards that encourage bigger spends.
What about sellers without established audiences? The collaborative hashtag sale strategy opens doors even for newcomers. By partnering with 8-10 sellers in your specific niche and coordinating discounts under a searchable term, you can leverage others' audiences while contributing organizational value. The key insight: keeping participant groups relatively small ensures your resources appear on that crucial first page of search results.
Perhaps most valuable is Lauren's approach to seasonal resource optimization—a strategy that delivers immediate sales while building assets that generate revenue year after year. Creating multiple themed resources with varied SEO approaches provides market insights while increasing your chances of ranking well during peak seasonal searches.
Subscribe now for next week's episode on "Smart TPT Trades" where Lauren will reveal strategies for trading with other sellers to save money and increase visibility for your resources—perfect for both new and established TPT entrepreneurs!
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Welcome to the Rebranded Teacher Podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher, author and seller on Teachers, pay Teachers and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPT businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started it. Let's talk about five ways that you can boost your TPT sales in a short period of time to help you meet a sales goal. If you're new here, hi, I'm Lauren Fulton. I've been a TPT seller for nine years now which is absolutely insane to me and for almost six of those years I have been full-time TPT, left the classroom back in 2019. And I'm here to share all of my TPT tips and secrets with you, because for the last three years, I have been helping other TPT sellers grow their businesses so that they can leave the classroom too. And in this episode, we are talking all about little things that you can do to kind of help boost your TPT income. We've all been there. We have a sales goal and maybe it's make $50, or make $20, or make $2,000 or finally hit that five or $10,000 goal for the month. Whatever your goal may be, we've all been there and we're like this close and we really, really wanna push things over the edge. Or maybe we wanna challenge ourself one month and be like, hey, you know what, this month I'm going to give it my all. I'm going to hit this with everything that I have. Or I have a special summer vacation planned, or I want to go on a ski trip this winter and we're looking for little things that we can do to make little boosts to our income. Now, these are not long-term strategies. These are not leverage your earning power on TPT. But at the very end, I'm going to be talking about some strategies that don't involve having an audience, that you can utilize when you don't have an existing audience. So make sure you stick around for that, because even if you do have an audience, some of these strategies can be perfectly paired with marketing strategies to kind of help get you over the edge.
Speaker 1:So let's start off with one of my tried and true favorites, and this is throwing a flash sale. Now, I'm not talking about a week-long sale. I'm not talking about multiple sales over and over and over again. This is a flash sale. This is like a 24, 48 hour special sale. That's separate from the TPT site-wide sales separate from any regular sale that you do, where you flash discount an item or a product line. And I really like to do a product line or maybe a set of bundles, something that's like higher ticket. You flash sell it for 24, 48 hours.
Speaker 1:So I've done this before with product lines, where I will take a product line and say all my Adventurous Joes or all of my mini mysteries are going to be 20% off, and then it's going to be an additional 20% off the bundle. Or maybe I'll do a super flash sale on the bundle and say all of the bundles in my store, not the mega bundles or anything like that. But you could even do something like all of these bundles are going to be 20 bucks, so you can go get a single grade level bundle for $20, where the normal price might be 28 or $30 or somewhere around that neighborhood. While you could certainly do a steeper discount than that, I don't recommend doing that on a regular basis and you just need to remember that the return on your investment may not be the same. So if I discount something to $10 when it's normally $40, that might be a huge sale and I may sell a ton of $10 bundles, but am I gonna sell twice as many $10 bundles as I would sell $20 bundles? That's kind of the big question, and a lot of times the answer to that question is no. A lot of times we think like the more I discount it, the more I'm gonna sell, and that's true. But am I gonna make the same amount of money? And a lot of times the answer is no. You would make more money at the higher ticket price, because there's no guarantee that you're gonna double your sales just because you cut your price in half.
Speaker 1:But running a flash sale on a product or product line is a really great way to get in some additional sales and you can market this anywhere. You can market this on social media. You could market this to your email list, to your Facebook group. You can market this any place where you have an existing audience. It's a tried and true staple. I've done this many times and it generally works really well. The key is to make sure that you are following up with your audience. You're not just sending one email, you're not just making one social media post and you're doing this for a very short period of time, if people know they have to act fast because it's gonna be gone. They're going to act fast.
Speaker 1:Strategy number two is a free gift with purchase. Now, this is a little bit harder on TPT than it is with selling on your own site, but you can do it. I did it before I ever had a Shopify store. I did it with my TPT store. You could do a Google form, you can do an opt-in. I personally chose to do an opt-in and I had a field where they could put their order number and I could check those order numbers if I wanted to Honestly, I didn't, and they would just put their order number in and then it would automatically send them the free gift with purchase, because I didn't wanna check all of them. But if you have a smaller audience, you could check and you could say reply to this email with your order number.
Speaker 1:If you purchase anything from my store in the next 24 hours, I'm going to send you this for free, and so they could purchase a dollar item, they could purchase a $3 item, $5 item, they could go add a lot to their cart. Whatever, you can make this as simple or as elaborate as you want, so it can be as simple as everyone who purchases one thing from my store gets this free item. You just have to send me your order number so I can confirm, or send me a screenshot of your receipt, which that one is gonna take up a lot of space in your inbox, just FYI or fill out this form when you're done and it'll send it to you. However you wanna set that up or you could make it a little bit more complex and this would take a little bit more time but you could say if you purchase $10 worth of product from my store, then you get this bigger free item, and anyone who spends 20 or $50 or whatever your threshold is, or more, I'm gonna send you this bundle for free, like whatever, whatever it is that you want to give them, and this would be items that are not normally free or maybe that you've created specifically for this event, but it's like a nice little bonus and incentive where they're like oh my gosh, this is really great, especially if you have some diehard fans or you have a lot of wishlisted numbers where you know that throughout the year you've been marketing things and people have been adding items to their wishlist. This is a really great way to go ahead and help them shop off that wishlist and find things in your store that they've always wanted or they've been meaning to purchase or they've had their eye on for a little bit, and kind of go ahead and push them in that direction by giving them a free gift.
Speaker 1:I found this to be really effective during seasonal times, like for Valentine's Day or Halloween or fall or something like that. I'll say, like here, I'll give you this free fall themed gift or this free Halloween themed gift or whatever it is with any purchase that you make, because they're like oh, I could use this tomorrow. Right, they know that they could use the item straight away because it's a seasonal item, and so that really increases the value for them, because they know exactly when and where and how they would use that item, and so it brings more value to the free resource. Number three is honestly a lot of fun, but I'm going to tell you, it's definitely kind of time consuming. So this is not a strategy that you want to utilize if you're overwhelmed or don't have a lot of time or you can't manage this, but it is a super fun strategy.
Speaker 1:You could organize some rapid fire sales, so you see other businesses do this where, like every hour, something new goes on sale, and so you're getting people into your store like over and over and over again to go ahead and purchase things. Now, the downside to this is that they're probably not going to add multiples of anything to their cart. They're probably going to be buying like one thing at a time because they're like, well, what if I buy something else and it goes on sale in the next hour? So that's the only problem. But the good thing is is like you have multiple opportunities to put something on sale that somebody's really going to like, and it's a very short window of time, so you can tell them. On Saturday or on Monday or whenever it is. I'm going to be doing a rapid fire sale and every hour I'm going to send you an email and tell you what's on sale, or every hour I'm going to post and tell you what's on sale, and so they can watch your stories super closely. They have, like this much time to make a decision. That's what's so fun about it is that it's really going to increase those impulse sales.
Speaker 1:So I would not necessarily do this as like super high ticket items, because you might find that higher ticket items just don't convert quite as well, and so I would do like a nice mixture of you know five $5 resources on sale for $3 right now. Or you can get these three $3 items for a dollar and you could get super creative with this and like at one o'clock, these items are a dollar, at two o'clock these items are $2. At three, three o'clock, these items are $3. You could get as creative as you want to, but just do a super flash sale. Now I will tell you that I think the only way that this is going to really work for you or provide a boost for your income is if you have a really active and engaged audience, and probably on the larger side, because you're really relying on eyeballs to see these emails or these announcements on social media in a very short window of time, and so you have to have enough people who are watching, opening your emails, whatever, in order to make this worth it for you. And I would say the same thing is probably true for a lot of these strategies that even if you have an audience, if they're not active, engaged, if you don't have a large audience, some of these things might be in vain. So be sure and weigh your time cost with this, like if I have a list, an email list, of 2000 people, it would probably be worth my time to do a flash 24 hour or 48 hour sale for a specific product line. Like I'm probably gonna get some bites with that. I'm probably not going to put in the time to like set aside five or six hours of my day to every hour, send out a new email and go into my TPT store and lower the price for something and manually adjust prices. Like that was probably just not going to be worth it. But if I have an 20% of people are opening that email within the first hour, then that's still 4,000 people opening the email each hour and seeing that flash sale before it ends. So those are some things to keep in mind is the size of your audience, the engagement of your audience and whether or not they typically respond to sales emails, sales marketing, any of that stuff. So if your list is already like not responding to things that you're putting out there, then I would not pick a high time investment strategy for this.
Speaker 1:Okay, now let's talk about some strategies that you can utilize, no matter the size of your audience or even if you don't have an audience at all. One strategy you can utilize is hashtag sale. Now, I love a classic hashtag sale. Now I don't think that hashtags technically work on TPT anymore, but it doesn't matter, because you're just putting a search term. Let's say I'm going to do a 50% off bundle sale. I could do 50 math or 50 bundle. I would team up with a group of other sellers in my niche, and I think that these really do work best when they're niche related sales. I think when you get into some of these really big hashtag sales even if it's with people in your niche, when they get really big, you really decrease your odds of being able to get seen, and so hashtag sales are really way more effective if you're doing them with a smaller group of people, but that group of people does have an audience that they can market it to.
Speaker 1:Even if you don't have an audience, though, you can still utilize some marketing strategies to make this work. So there are some. I guarantee you to get a little creative, but I guarantee you there are some Facebook groups that you can find, whether they are local Facebook groups, niche-related Facebook groups, whatever. We run sales throughout the year, and you'd be surprised at how many Facebook groups do not have a no promotions rule inside their Facebook group Like a lot of them do, and you have to be really careful, but some of them don't. So rule inside their Facebook group Like a lot of them do, and you have to be really careful, but some of them don't.
Speaker 1:So you could post about the hashtag sale and different Facebook groups and partner with other people who do have an audience, and you can run that hashtag sale where you say, like each one of us is going to take two of our resources that are valued at like $5 and we are going to, you know, do a discount to like $1 or $2 or something like this. It's a really steep discount and it's usually for a short amount of time 24, 48 hours and everyone markets the sales. So, even if you don't have an existing audience, you can find some Facebook groups that you can market it in or you can post it on your personal Facebook page, because chances are you know other teachers in your niche who might be interested in those things. But if you organize it and you're creating the graphics, then you're bringing a lot of value to the table, even if you don't have an audience. So reaching out to people and saying, hey, I'm wanting to do this sale on X date. If you're interested, I would love if you would be a part. I'm creating the graphics, I'm doing all the organization the email marketing copy or the Instagram copy or whatever it is that they may need to make the marketing super easy for them.
Speaker 1:All you have to do is discount a resource that's valued between three and five dollars to be one dollar for the duration of the sale, and that's just made up rules. You could do whatever rules you wanted it to be for the pricing and then you partner with maybe 10, 12 people in your niche. I love the idea of doing 10 because then if you have 10 people and everyone has two resources and it's a very hyper-specific niche, like third grade math or fifth grade ELAR, then everybody that they're marketing to is going to be interested in that and everybody shows up on the first page, which is really awesome. The more people you do it, obviously, the more eyeballs are going to be on the sale because the more marketing opportunities you're going to have because you have more sellers involved. But do remember when you're choosing items for a hashtag sale, that TPT is still ranking resources in terms of what they think is going to bring in the most amount of money. And so, even if all of these resources have the same hashtag in the title, they're still going to be prioritizing resources that have made them historically converting the best in recent sales history. So you're still going to be competing with other sellers for a space on that first page of search results and you still want to be on the first page of search results, and you still want to be on the first page of search results.
Speaker 1:Most buyers are not going to comb through three, four, five, a hundred pages of hashtag sale material. They're just not going to do it, and so I recommend, highly recommend if you don't have any resources with a lot of reviews or a lot of traction, then just choose maybe 10 people to work with so that your resource can show up on the first page and get a little bit more eyes on it. This is a great way to bring in a little bit of extra income, provide a little to your week or to your month, and, while I wouldn't overutilize any of these strategies, this is a great strategy to pull out, maybe like once a year, and it's a great way to reach new buyers. Lastly, if you don't have an audience, or even if you do, one of the tried and true ways of helping to boost your income for the month is going through and making tweaks and changes that are going to increase your income long-term and short-term. So really going in and making sure that you have your seasonal items, especially If it's October. Make sure your Halloween resources are perfectly search engine optimized. Make sure your covers are in order. Make sure your previews are in order.
Speaker 1:If you don't have any Halloween resources, create two, three, five Halloween products for your niche to really help bring more views to your store and to increase your odds of getting seen. Create several different seasonal resources to help boost your sales. This can really help, especially if you're a new seller, and creating more than one seasonal item can be a game changer, because you may not know which keywords to target, and so you can kind of even split up, like, okay, I'm on a time crunch, it's October 5th and I really want to create something for Halloween. Rather than creating one resource and having to really watch and monitor and make sure that the SEO is perfect, you can create three to five resources for Halloween, kind of split your efforts and try one SEO strategy for one resource and one SEO strategy for another and target different keywords to see which one is going to get you the most traction, or to kind of give you a little bit of insight into what buyers are more interested in during that season. So creating seasonal resources and making sure your seasonal resources are up to date and making sure you have an upsell in those seasonal resources that are going to get more views and more eyes on them during that time of year can bring in a boost of sales to your store and ultimately help boost your income long-term, because, guess what, that season's going to come around next year too, and so it can help set you up for success for years to come.
Speaker 1:If you've utilized one of these strategies before, tell us a little bit about it in the comments, or if you're planning to utilize one of them, I would love to hear which strategy you're looking forward to utilizing the most. Again, you really want to make sure that you are using your time wisely. So if you are brand new, you have a small audience. Don't come at it and try to do all three straight out the gate. You're probably not going to get a great return on your time investment, and so utilize some of those tried and true strategies, like organizing a little hashtag sale or like creating some seasonal resources for your store that can really help boost your income long-term.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this episode, let me tell you you wanna make sure that you are subscribed to this podcast, because next week next week I'm putting on an episode called Smart TPT Trades ways that you can trade with other sellers to save money or get more eyes on your resources. This is incredibly valuable to anyone, whether you've been selling on TPT for a long time or you're brand new and you're trying to get more eyes on your resources. Our episode next week is probably going to blow your mind. Thanks so much for being here, you guys. I'm going to see you right back here next week.