The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
TpT Then & Now: Old Advice to Ignore
Remember when TPT felt like the promised land of passive income? When a feature in their newsletter could skyrocket your downloads overnight? Those days are behind us, but that doesn't mean you can't thrive as a teacher-seller in today's marketplace.
The teaching resources landscape has fundamentally transformed. What worked brilliantly in 2018 might be holding you back in 2023. As someone who's navigated these changes while maintaining a successful business, I'm pulling back the curtain on four pieces of outdated TPT advice you can confidently leave behind.
First, let's address the passive income myth. While you can build systems that reduce your workload, true "set it and forget it" success simply doesn't exist anymore. Even established stores require maintenance as search trends evolve and algorithms update. The Pinterest strategies that once drove direct sales have similarly become ineffective in isolation – today, Pinterest serves as one component in a broader marketing funnel rather than a standalone solution. TPT's newsletter features and the famous "50 product rule" have also transformed in significance, requiring us to adapt our approaches accordingly.
But don't worry – this isn't all doom and gloom! Some principles remain timeless: creating high-quality, comprehensive resources that solve real teacher problems will always outperform quick-made materials. The "slow cooker" approach to business building still yields the most sustainable results. I'll show you how to focus your energy on what actually moves the needle in today's marketplace.
Ready to stop wasting time on outdated strategies and start building a TPT business that aligns with current realities? Hit subscribe and join thousands of teacher-entrepreneurs who are adapting and thriving in this new landscape!
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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.
Speaker 1:When I first started selling on TPT, I heard so much advice that was honestly, really solid advice, but that same advice just doesn't work anymore and a lot of it's still floating around out there. So in this episode, I'm breaking down four old pieces of TPT advice that you can stop wasting your energy on, can stop aiming towards. Give you a few things to focus on instead. Number one this one I still hear people saying, although certainly not as much, but it is like the highly sought after, it's like the goal. Everybody wants TPT to be passive, like they want it to be passive income, and I think a lot of people are kind of even those who've been around for a while like they have this idea in their head that they're going to post resources to TPT, they're going to spend time growing their business and then they're going to be able to sit back on the beach sip their favorite summer drink and just watch the money roll in. And that's true. You can absolutely do that for a season. But here's the thing that you need to know about TPT, especially now. It is not passive at all. Now I'm not saying that you have to work super hard or that you're going to have to be working 24-7 once you get your store established. That's not what I'm saying. You can certainly have phenomenal systems put in place to keep your TPT as passive as you possibly can. But, like we talked about in the last episode, resources are still going to need to be updated from time to time. You're still going to want to make sure that you're staying on top of SEO, because search trends are going to change. Their search engine algorithm is going to have minor tweaks and updates over time, and you're going to want to have some sort of ongoing marketing. And even the best funnel system that uses ads to kind of automate a lot of that marketing for you is still going to have to be monitored. It's still going to have to be looked after, still going to need tweaks and changes, and you're still going to have ongoing marketing, even if it's just writing weekly emails. So even the best well-oiled machine is going to have to have maintenance. You cannot expect that once you get to $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month, that at that point you're just going to be able to coast. It doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1:I can tell you that my TPT business has been mostly passive for the last several years and every single year it goes down. That doesn't mean that I'm not making money on TPT. That doesn't mean that my business isn't still doing well. It just means that over the years my business has shifted and so most of the time I make probably anywhere between two and 20 times the amount that I make on TPT elsewhere selling my resources so still selling teaching resources. But I'm just making that money somewhere else, whether that's through membership, whether it's through selling on my own website or through other endeavors. Okay, so I make that money in other places and it's not passive at all.
Speaker 1:I still do direct traffic to my TPT store, but I can tell you that if you are not consistently regularly directing traffic to TPT, even just taking the focus from directing traffic to TPT to directing traffic elsewhere impacts your sales on TPT. Even just taking the focus from directing traffic to TPT to directing traffic elsewhere impacts your sales on TPT Well and that part is kind of obvious, because, if you think about it, you're not going to be making the money on TPT, You're making it elsewhere. It doesn't really matter where it comes from, as long as you're making money right. But what ends up happening is when you start directing traffic away from TPT to, say, your own website or to your course or your membership or whatever, when you start doing some of these things and selling off of TPT and this isn't a reason not to do it okay, I'm not giving you a reason not to do it, that's not it at all but what ends up happening is, over time, those resources that used to be bestsellers for you on TPT they start to drop in search engine ranking because they're just not getting the same volume of sales as they were before, and so TPT starts sort of deprioritizing those resources. You have to consistently be marketing to TPT in order to see those sales maintain, and you also have to make sure that you're doing some maintenance on your TPT listings themselves. You really need to make sure your previews are still converting, your covers are still getting clicks, because over time, trends change, expectations change, what buyers are attracted to starts to change, and I'm not talking about in the space of one to two years. I'm talking about a cover that was performing really well five years ago might not perform well this year, or a search engine or keywords that buyers were searching for three or four years ago. They may not be searching for them in the same way now, and so your store is just going to require regular maintenance and your products are going to require regular updating and you have to continue to market those resources. On TPT if you're wanting to keep the TPT income up Now, if you're like me, you don't really care. If the TPT income stays up, as long as everything's up across the board, then it doesn't really matter. But it is something to keep in mind that if you are chasing that, one day I'm going to have passive income from TPT, that's great and you can have passive income from TPT, but it's probably not going to look the way that a lot of people imagine that it would look.
Speaker 1:Number two TPT newsletter and TPT emails. So, if you don't know, tpt sends out a newsletter, and the way that they structure these newsletters has changed a lot over the years. Used to they would send out a newsletter on Sundays, and if you made it in the newsletter it'd have like 10 free downloads and it would have like a couple of featured paid products. If you made it in the newsletter you were big time Like it was phenomenal. Even if it was a free product, like a freebie, you would see like thousands of downloads on that freebie. You'd see loads of traffic to your store. A lot of times you would see sales on paid products because you would get all of this incredible free traffic from the newsletter that they sent out to their email list. Over time that newsletter has shifted. For a while it was completely algorithm driven. It's been personalized. It's had different versions of it. I honestly don't even know where they're at with the newsletter now. To be honest with you, I just know that it's not a big deal.
Speaker 1:There's a spot on the TPT website where you could go to submit to have a resource placed in the newsletter. If you are new to TPT and you have freebies or resources that you would like to submit to get placed in the newsletter, I don't think it's a bad idea. I just wouldn't do it all the time. So, like when I first started, way back, when it was suggested do it every week, you could submit one free product and one paid product, and every week I had a timer In fact the timer, I think, is still on my phone for Tuesdays at 4pm that as soon as I got home from school, from work, that was what I was going to do. I sat down and I would submit a paid product and a free product to the newsletter in hopes that I would get in. I did get a freebie in, maybe once or twice, but honestly I never made any money off of it, or at least not very much. I did get some traffic, I did get a few follows to my store, but it really wasn't anything significant and it long-term for me at all. It was a very short-term burst of traffic that I received and it didn't change the game for me and I think a lot of people back in the day like getting into the TPT newsletter could be a huge game changer for your business, both short-term and long-term, and that is just not the case today.
Speaker 1:The other way that a lot of sellers really try to get into the newsletter or get into the TPT email list is by releasing new resources, and so when you release a new product, an email gets sent to your followers, so anyone who is on TPT, who has a TPT account. They get an email, potentially every day, saying new from people you follow right and it can have your resources in it. Now, used to, it was like most recent would populate in there and they could click and they could see all of them. Now my understanding is it's more algorithm driven, based on recent purchases that they've made, recent stores that they've interacted with, recent products that they viewed. You get the idea. It's more algorithm driven, so even if you release a new product, it may not get sent out to all of your followers. It may get sent out to a fraction of them. So there's a lot of antiquated advice that revolves around this new resource email that TPT sends out.
Speaker 1:For example, during a site-wide sale, you could release new products the night before and then it would get sent out to your followers the next day. You could release products on at the end of day one of the sale and it would get sent out the next day, on day two of the sale, like new from people you follow right. They would see your new resources pop up during the sale, which is great advertisement, and so there were all of these kind of strategies that sort of revolved around it, but now that it's more algorithm based, honestly, especially if you don't have very many followers, this is not really something that I would focus on, because let's say you have 1000 followers and only 100 of them have interacted with you recently or have a reason for your product to show up in the algorithm based email over somebody else's, then 100 views is really not that much. Very few of those are probably going to convert to any kind of a sale, if any, and so your time could be spent better somewhere else. So, while I'm not going to just straight up say TPT emails and newsletters are something you should never try to get into, like I'm not going to say that, I just think for the vast majority of people it's not going to be worth your time. It might be something that say you submit a couple of paid and a couple of free resources to the newsletter so that hopefully, you can get in, but then after that I wouldn't let it be a regular thing like submit it one and done. Once you've submitted it, start focusing on things that you can control within your business versus things that are outside of your control. Things that you can control within your business versus things that are outside of your control.
Speaker 1:Another outdated piece of advice is Pinterest. Now, I'm not saying Pinterest is outdated and that Pinterest can't help you. That's not what I'm saying. But the Pinterest strategies that you'll hear in a lot of older videos, a lot of older content, a lot of older blogs, a lot of older podcasts they're just really outdated, and Pinterest is a piece of a puzzle. So, rather than it being a marketing system or strategy in and of itself, it's now a piece of a marketing strategy. So, used to, you could create Pinterest pins, these beautiful images you could link to your TPT store, and you can still do that, but it's not going to be effective, and so this was definitely an antiquated strategy.
Speaker 1:Now, if you're doing Pinterest, you really want to be doing it in conjunction with other things, and that brings us to where we're at today, which is like if you're marketing smart, you're marketing effectively. It's thinking about where the buyer comes in, how to collect their data, how to collect their information so that you can contact them on a regular basis, and how you can market to them in an ongoing way, and so Pinterest can be a piece of that marketing puzzle. It can be a part of your funnel, but it's not going to be the beginning and the end of your marketing strategy. Same thing goes for, say, instagram blogging, things like that. They can be a piece of your marketing strategy. Same thing goes for, say, instagram blogging, things like that they can be a piece of your marketing strategy, they can be a piece of your marketing funnel, but it's not the beginning and the end. It's not.
Speaker 1:I'm going to market on Pinterest and everyone's going to go to TPT and purchase my product. It just doesn't work that way anymore. It's more like I'm going to write a blog post that links to a freebie and opt-in for my email list, and then I'm going to create pins for that blog post and pin them on Pinterest. So I'm going to pin the pins to my blog about my blog post to Pinterest. It's they're going to go to my blog post. They're then going to join my email list and then from there I get to market the product that I want to sell to them. Right? It's a big piece of a funnel. So, while pinning on Pinterest used to be a really big strategy, for TPT sellers, definitely no longer relevant in the same way.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, number four is the 50 product rule. Now, the 50 product rule is not antiquated. We need to update that a little bit. So I used to hear all the time like once you hit 50 products, like that's when you're going to see a significant change, significant shift in your income. You're going to hit 50 products and you're going to see a jump in your income, your income is going to be more consistent, you're going to be making more money and all that. And honestly, I think that it could probably still be true or is probably still true for a lot of people 50 products it's a great number to aim for, and then after that, the next one was like 100, right, and then you would. So you 50, then you aim for 100. But I think really, the rule of 50 now, at least for me, when I'm talking to new sellers is less about how much money you're going to be making, it's less about consistency in sales and it's really more about that once you hit 50, that means it's time to move to the next step in your business, which for me, would be creating some of those marketing funnels or really creating a comprehensive marketing plan and marketing strategy for the resources that you have, because you now have enough resources in your store to make your marketing efforts really worth it, whereas if I'm, you know, really working hard to grow an email list and I've got 1000s of subscribers on my email list and I have like 15 products in my store, it's just sending an email is not going to have the same impact as if I had 50 products versus 15. Right, so the rule of 50, I think, is still important, like it's still an important number to aim for, but for different reasons than it once was.
Speaker 1:But I wanna finish with this because a lot of the old advice is still some of the best, most solid advice out there, and here are a few that I can think of off the top of your head. Think about your TPT business as a slow cooker or a crockpot business and I did not coin that term, someone else did. I cannot remember who it was. I know I've heard like Angie Kratzer talk about it. It may not have even been her, but think about it more as like a slow cooker versus an instant pot.
Speaker 1:If you think about long-term, I'm gonna be creating, I'm gonna be putting resources into my store and, over time, the thing that I'm doing right now is going to lead me to where I want to be over time. Not, I'm gonna put this work in and in 30 minutes or in 30 days I'm going to be making the money that I've always dreamed of making. While that does happen for some people, it is absolutely not the norm. And if I'm trying really hard to instantly grow my business, to have an instant pot business, it doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means that I'm really increasing the odds that I'm going to be disappointed, going to be burnt out, and I'm going to feel like a failure because I'm not seeing the results that I want as quickly as I want them. There's a lot to learn when it comes to starting a teacher's pay teacher's business.
Speaker 1:It's really and truly not just about creating products and posting them on TPT and watching the money come in. I really wish that it were that simple. And people who tell you that it's that simple I'm not going to say that they're lying to you. I'm just going to say that they're had a different experience than you maybe, or they've seen people do it before, so they know it's possible, because it's true.
Speaker 1:It can't happen for a very small group of people and it's not that that small group of people have something special or did something special or necessarily anything like that. It's just that their circumstances, maybe the types of resources that they were creating for a very specific niche, were more in demand and they happened to. I don't want to use the word luck into it, but they happen to be in a different niche than you are, or they happen to have a different set of circumstances. Maybe they already had an existing audience that they could tap into or market to. There are a number of different reasons why it can happen for different people, and luck is not the only thing. Some of these people put in a lot, a lot of time and energy and effort and they get very little sleep for several months and they do that and they start to see results really quickly and that's amazing for them.
Speaker 1:But I just think it's important to understand that this is not going to be a formula of if I do these things and I do it this quickly, then I'm going to get this result in 30 days. It's just not really an expectation that I would set for myself, and certainly really an expectation that I would set for myself, and certainly not an expectation that I would tell anyone else to set for themselves. So if you think about your store as being more of a slow cooker or a crock pot, where I'm going to do, I'm going to set myself up for success now and I'm going to think ahead and I'm going to think long-term, and that involves pulling the meal out of the freezer, letting it thaw the night before, sticking it in the crock pot, turning it on the next morning, putting in the work, putting in the consistency and then waiting for it to do its thing. That's a little bit more realistic and I think that that is some really good advice that's been around for a long time.
Speaker 1:Another piece of advice that's been around for a long time that I think is gold is that when you create high quality products, they really will sell themselves and they will stand the test of time a whole lot better than resources that you just popped out. So if you're able to create a resource in 30 minutes, that's amazing, but that resource that you created in 30 minutes, chances are, is not going to sell as well long term as a resource that it takes three hours or even 30 hours to create. Because if you can create the resource in 30 minutes, so can someone else, and so you're increasing the chances that you're going to have a lot of competition for that product. Also, you're not going to be able to charge as much for it, and teachers are not going to be as willing to pay for it, because they can create something or find something that's very similar online for free, or they can create something themselves because it doesn't take that long to make. But when we're talking about more in-depth resources, resources that take longer to make and they're very well thought out, very well constructed and a teacher can use them for a lengthier period of time than just, say, 30 minutes or a single class period, now we're talking about resources that are really going to stand the test of time and help bring in money long-term and bring in lifelong followers and buyers for your business.
Speaker 1:Those are a couple of pieces of advice that have really and truly stood the test of the time that I think every TPT seller should not ignore. No matter how old the blog post was that you read, no matter how old the podcast was that you listened to, it's something that you should still definitely keep in mind as you're creating resources and building up your brand. Thanks so much for being here. If you enjoyed this video. Make sure to like it and subscribe. I'm trying to hit 6,000 followers. We are almost there before the end of the year and I would love it if you could help me out with that. If you have a piece of advice that really helped you on your TPT journey, drop it down below for someone else and I'm going to see you right back here next week.