The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
TPT Income Report & New Store Update!
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Think a small TPT catalog can’t make a dent? We walk through the real numbers from a tiny, neglected second store—23 paid products, zero bundles, minimal email, almost no social—and how it still earned $538 last year and $63 in January. The secret isn’t hustle for hustle’s sake; it’s an intentional system that turns limited time into repeatable outcomes.
We break down the “create three” approach that accelerates validation: design three product templates, publish a few in each, then double down on the line that gets traction. Morning work rose to the top because it’s fast to produce, easy to explain, and simple to expand with themes and grade levels. By reusing layouts and clip art across listings, creation time drops, brand clarity grows, and previews stay consistent—making it easier for buyers to add multiple related items to their carts.
Seasonality and light SEO do quiet heavy lifting. A quick monthly sweep to refresh titles, descriptions, and tags for upcoming holidays kept products visible without a big marketing push. We also unpack the realistic math of scaling: double the listings, roughly double the revenue; add bundles to lift average order value; and nurture a small email list with helpful, on-theme content. Most importantly, we show why intention outperforms volume—fewer, better products in a coherent line often beat scattered catalogs built on guesswork.
Whether you’re new to TPT or rethinking a mature store, you’ll leave with a clear playbook: validate fast, standardize templates, expand winning lines, optimize before peak seasons, and treat your shop like a business if you want business-level results. If this breakdown helped, follow the show, share it with a TPT friend, and leave a quick review so more teacher-sellers can find it. What product line will you test first?
Watch This Episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uFR2HuPBS0M
Check Out My YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/laurenfulton
My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurentschappler/
My Other YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LaurenATsch
Free Rebranded Teacher Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/749538092194115
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. Let's talk about how much money I made last year in my new TPT store. If you're new here, hi, I'm Lauren Fulton. I've been selling on TPT for almost 10 years. It'll be 10 years at the end of the school year, so around May, June. And I have a very well-established TPT store that is consistently in the top 1% of TPT stores, but I also have a very, very small hobby store that I started in May of 2024. In May of 2024, I created maybe six products. I launched them and really put them out there. And then I started having my VA use my templates to create new resources that were well thought out and pretty well researched on TPT before they were created. And then I kind of just stopped everything in 2024. I started out with this small store full force, even did a private podcast about launching this new store. And then towards the end of 2024, I kind of started to taper off. Like I didn't have the time and energy to really put into all of these businesses. And then in early 2025, I got pregnant. And so last year I really did not do much at all with this store. I think I maybe sent one or two emails to my email list, which is a very small list, and certainly not very well maintained or primed for marketing. So let's get into what I made last year and then also what I'm earning so far this year in that teeny tiny store that is very neglected. Okay, to start off, I only have 23 paid products in this store. Again, I started in 2024 and I posted 13 of those resources in 2024, and then the other 10 I posted in 2025. Now, four of those resources were posted in April of 2025, so they had some time to kind of get some traction and do a little work. The other six were posted at the very end of November and early December. So they didn't really have a lot of time to do any work. In fact, four out of the six were Valentine's or St. Patrick's Day resources. So I had a lot of products that were created early in 2025 that got uploaded. And then there were several that needed some tweaking or needed some changes, and they just never made it up on TPT until the end of the year when I did a product sweep and realized that I had several resources that had been created but had never been posted for sale. So that said, last year on TPT, I made a total of$538.17 in this small store. Again, for most of the year, I only had 17 paid products. And I only started the year with 13 paid products. So that's not a lot of resources at all for making$500 and something dollars for the year. Of course,$500 some odd dollars is also not a lot of money, but I've met a lot of people who've been selling on TPT for years who struggle to make that much and they have a lot more resources than I do. So let's get into it and let's take a look at how much money I made last year, and then how much money I've made so far in the month of January and February this year in 2026. So this is the dashboard. Again, this is my second store. This is not my primary TPT store. This is my hobby store. So it gets worked on when I feel like it. And this is how much I made last year off of 23 paid resources, with six of the 23 being added at the very end of the year, end of November, early December. Made$538.17. I'm gonna talk about some takeaways from this data and what I would do moving forward if I knew that I had to start over from scratch, and that was my only job. So if this store were my only store, and this was my only job, which it's not, in addition to having a primary TPT store, which is not my main business focus, I also have a membership of my own for TPT sellers, actually, two memberships for TPT sellers, and then I have a co-membership with a business partner for math teachers, and then we have summits, sales, all kinds of stuff that we do outside of TPT. Things are my primary focus these days. And I say all of that to say that I spent very, very little time on this store. Very little time on this store. And I think that's really important for sellers to know because when you're watching income reports and things like that and you're trying to figure out what's possible for you, where you should be with the products that you have, the number of resources that you have. I personally find this very encouraging for new sellers because if you can make over$500 in a year on a store that you spent maybe 20 hours on for the entire year, like I feel like that's pretty stinking good. That's making about$26 an hour for last year. And when I say 20 hours were spent on my store, I feel like that's being pretty generous, to be honest with you. I don't know that I even spent that much time on the store, but that would be calculating in the amount of time that my VA spent on the store as well. Like, probably like me and my assistant combined probably spent that much time on this store. So I feel like that's more than worth it. Now, again, a lot of those products were made in 2024, and so I was kind of reaping some of what I sowed in 2024, which is really nice. Now, moving on into this year, I found this particularly encouraging, and that was that this year, last month, in the month of January, I made$63.60 last month in January. Now, again, that's not a lot. We're so far kind of on track for hitting the same amount that we hit last year, but I still feel like that's pretty good for just a handful of resources. So for comparison, if I were to take the products that I have right now, which is 23 products, and I were to double that number of products to be 46, then I could expect to make about double what I have right now if I continue with the same strategies. In fact, I could probably make even more because I have zero bundles in my store. Zero, no bundles. So this is what I made with no bundles. But if I were to double this and have 46 paid products in my store, then that would bring me up to about$125 a month. Let's be honest,$125 a month isn't like winning lottery. It's not going to drastically change your life. But$125 a month for a lot of people is some breathing room. And again, we're not talking about a lot of time that it I spent making these resources. So I want to show you a couple of things. And then in next week's video, I'm going to talk more about some of the strategies behind this, but I want you to kind of see the types of resources that I was creating so that you can understand how doable this is for new sellers. So let me show you my store so you can see what I'm talking about here. In my TPT store, most of my resources all follow the same format. Like you can see here, this pre-K morning work and Kinder morning work look very similar to each other. It uses essentially the same clip art. And so we're purchasing one set of clip art for two different products. And the pre-K morning work by theme is also very, very similar. So we're changing out clip art, changing out some of the content, but a lot of the core content stays the same, and certainly the layout and the format stays the same. So it makes it a lot simpler to create these really quickly. So 20 of my products are morning work resources. And then two of my products are no prep workbooks, which also follow the same format, but they're different themes. So one is dinosaur and one is summer. That kind of makes me think that I might be missing some resources, actually. Yeah. So I'm actually missing some resources that should be in here. So I'll have to take a look at that, which is kind of exciting. Then I'll have another resource to add in. But you can see they follow the same format. It's just changing out the clip art. And if you're really smart, like what I did here is I took the same clip art that I used to make these pre-K worksheets, and I used that clip art when creating my pre-K morning workbook. And so I was able to make it go quite a bit farther. I also have this one game that I created and I made a template for it so that I could change it out with different themes as well. So I've talked about this strategy before, but the strategy that I used when I created these resources was I used the create three strategy. So the create three strategy is essentially creating three different templates for your TPT store when you start off and creating a couple of products in each template and testing them to see which one takes off first. In my case, it was the morning work. I found that I could create that faster. It was easier to promote, and it was something that my buyers, they're my that my email audience tended to respond to better. Now the response was still pretty minimal because my email list is very small for this niche, and I definitely didn't spend enough time nurturing it. It takes a while to kind of nurture an email audience and get them to where they know like and trust you. But I found that they responded better to that than they did to a bigger, more expensive product. So with that create three strategy, I found that that's the one that was doing the best. And so I really pursued that product line and expanded that product line first before expanding the others. And that really worked well for me. So you can see I made over$500 yes last year with very few resources, but with a very specific strategy for those products and making sure that the products that I was creating were very intentional. And again, I'll talk more about that in next week's episode because I could get really long. So let's talk about this month. The month of February so far, we're two weeks in and I've made$25 and 28 cents. And my goal would be to make it to about$50 this month. I don't monitor this super closely. I'm not really concerned about how much money I make here because it's a hobby store and it's for fun. But one thing that I have been trying to do the last few months is to go in at the beginning of the month and just make sure whatever seasonal resources I have are search engine optimized that I've updated the SEO on those before the month begins. So mid-January, I went in and tried to optimize the Valentine's Day resources. Didn't spend a lot of time on it. I'm not obsessing over it. In fact, I didn't even check it afterwards, but I just made sure the SEO was up to date and made sure it was following best practices so that it had its best chance going into the Valentine's Day season. And that's all I did. So it's nothing major, it's not taking a lot of my time, but that's how much it's earning me. So here are a couple of takeaways I want to give you if you're a new TPT seller. Number one, make sure if you're new that you tune into next week's video because I'm gonna be talking about things that I would do if I were starting from scratch. So I'm gonna be talking about things that I would be doing if I lost my TPT store and had to start all over again, based off of what I've learned from starting this more recent store and what I'm seeing today. The second thing that I want you to take away, and maybe the most important, is that TPT is not oversaturated. These two markets, preschool and kindergarten, are very, very saturated on TPT. And there's a way to make money from it without having to burn the midnight oil, create tons of resources, have a large following on Instagram, do TikTok dances, or heavily rely on a large email list. There are still ways to create resources that teachers will love and can easily find on TPT and make money off of TPT in your spare time. There are still ways to do that. It's not dead, it doesn't have to be a full-time job. The third thing that I would take away from this is that you have to be really intentional with your product creation. I did not just create things that I wanted to create when I was making this store. I created with intention. And that is probably the reason why it's doing so well and not selling hundreds of dollars worth of products from this. But again, you can easily see where if I were to continue down this path where this would start to scale, and I would begin to make more money by better stocking my store. These are also all new products, and so these are resources that don't have any reviews at all, or maybe have one or two reviews. So you don't have to have a lot of reviews in order to make some money on TPT. You just need to create with intention and create something that buyers want to purchase. And if you're a seasoned seller on TPT and you feel like you're constantly creating products, but you're still not making very much money, I want you to know that one of the best things that you could do for your business is to slow down. And it's better to create one product with intention and have a very well-designed, well thought out, well-researched product line than it is to slap together five products that you think are really cool, but you haven't done a lot of research on. I think so many times we think that we need to be checking all of these boxes and doing all of these things in order to be successful or for our resources to get purchased on TPT. And that's just not the case. The other thing that I want to tell you is just to keep creating. So if you only have a handful of products on TPT, you're probably not gonna make very much money. As you can see, I only have 23 paid resources and I'm not rolling in the dough over here. And I've been doing this for a very long time, and I know a lot about market research, search engine optimization, creating covers and previews. Like I know quite a bit, and I'm still not rolling in the dough from 23 resources. And so while there are some people who may come straight out the gate and have a couple of products really take off, which is incredible for them, that's not the norm for most people. For most of us, it's a combination of quantity and quality, where you have to have high-quality, well-researched products in order for buyers to be able to find them, but you also have to have multiple listings because it's very important that a buyer is able to come in and purchase multiple items all at one time, especially in the beginning, because there are fewer buyers who are going to find your products just because your products are newer. There are fewer buyers who are usually going to find you just because your products are newer and because you don't have as many of them as a season seller and you don't have as many reviews and all of that. There are fewer buyers who are going to come across your products. So when they do come across your products, you want to encourage them to not only buy that product, but to buy other products like that. And in order to do that, you have to stock your you have to stock your store shelves. So you want to create with intention and you want to also just create, create, create. Once you know what you're doing and you have a well-thought-out product line, you need to create those resources as quickly as possible and really stock those store shelves. And then finally, I want to tell you that if you do want to make money from TPT, like real money, not hobby money, you have to treat it like a business and not a hobby. This does not mean, again, that you're gonna be burning the midnight oil and staying up until 2 a.m. making resources. Although if that's your cup of tea, you can certainly do that. But what I mean by that is to say that you have to think strategically and you have to think seriously and you have to produce consistently. I do not produce consistently. This is very much a hobby store for me. And as you can see, it makes hobby money. And that is totally fine. For some people, an extra$50 a month is great, especially if you're creating resources that you enjoy and that you love. But if you want to go beyond hobby status, you're gonna have to work more than 20 hours a year. But if you only have 20 hours a year, then this is about where it can get you. If you have any questions about my newer store, drop them down below. Thanks so much, you guys. I'm gonna see you right back here next week.