Coaching Call Series: Elevating TPT Store Success by Prioritizing and Strategizing with Alissa Hinz

Embark on an educational odyssey with Alissa from Hinzspire You teaching. In the bustling world of online educational resources, Alyssa elucidates her 11-year voyage through the realms of middle school math and special education, while navigating the uncharted waters of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we dissect the mechanics of her growth, we delve into the art of systematizing a business to amplify its footprint. Alyssa doesn't hold back in sharing her strategies for nurturing fellow educators and reaching her financial goals. Moreover, she casts a light on her vision for 2024, where collaborations and the power of consistent communication with her cohort of email subscribers reign supreme.

Listen intently as our conversation pivots to the tactical finesse required to captivate and expand your TPT store's audience. Discover the transformative potential of leveraging product previews, learning how to transmute casual glances into a burgeoning email list. We'll discuss embedding lead magnets and why a direct approach may just spell success for your educational offerings. For those entangled in the dance of multiple roles, we explore the alchemy of audience analysis and the strategic sorcery of UTM codes. Together, we'll navigate the complexities of email marketing that promise to carve out more time for your passions while elevating your TPT presence to enthralling new heights.

Alissa's Store Audit on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/PtyWg_cKv2w

Alissa's Blog - Hinzspire You Teaching:
https://hinzspireyou.com/

Alissa's TPT Store - Hinzspire You:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Hinzspire-You

Join Alissa's Email List:
https://view.flodesk.com/pages/60ce4c33dc36eefeb706fdee

Alissa's Co-Teaching Facebook Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/231382832950771/

Alissa's Secondary Math Resources Facebook Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/summerschoolmath/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

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 TPD 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 2: 0:26

Today we are talking with Alyssa from Henspire U teaching. She's been a TPD author for several years and I've actually worked with her before in RTA and some other collaborations for math sellers, and she's absolutely amazing. So I was really excited to have her on the show and to talk with her about her goals for 2024. So Alyssa is at the point in her business where she knows what she wants. She knows she wants to get to a certain income level, but she's not really sure what she should focus on and prioritize next in order to get her to that next level inside of her business, and so we're going to be chatting with her about that today and more. So make sure you tune in and I want you guys to go ahead and meet Alyssa. Hey, alyssa, how are you?

Speaker 3: 1:03

Hi, lauren, I'm good, how are?

Speaker 2: 1:05

you. I'm great, I'm super excited for this conversation. I've known you for quite a while, so I'm really excited to talk a little bit about your TPD store, some of your goals for 2024 and just have a great conversation with you today. So tell everybody a little bit about yourself. How long have you been on TPD, and just tell us a little bit about your journey so far.

Speaker 3: 1:25

Yeah, so I am in my 11th year of teaching. I am a special education teacher, so I'm a full-time teacher. I teach in middle school and I co-teach in. It used to be just math, but now it's math and English classes and I got started pretty much like COVID. When COVID hit and you know we were all homebound. One of my co-teachers back then was always like you know, you've got really great stuff you should think about like getting it out there. And I was like no, I don't know if I could do that and then.

Speaker 3: 1:50

COVID came and I was like well, I got all this time, so I might as well try it. So then I kind of just dabbled in a little bit. I watched a lot of you know Instagram people and YouTube and learned more and more about it. So you know, just kind of in the last year it's been really been more of a business and not just like a side hustle to me.

Speaker 2: 2:10

I love it. So you're in middle school math right.

Speaker 3: 2:14

Yes, most of my resources are middle school math. I used to teach sixth grade Last year I was sixth and seventh, and now this year I'm seventh and eighth. So I'm kind of trying to broaden to just all middle school and then I'm also kind of starting to dabble in more of special education like co-teaching resources, because I know that is a need that I hear a lot of teachers want and that's kind of one of my passions and specialties. So I'm really hoping to start kind of kicking that off a little more too.

Speaker 2: 2:40

So tell us a little bit about your goals for 2024 and what you feel like. Let's just start with that. Tell us about your goals for 2024. When you look forward to next year, like this time next year, because we're in October, end of October, when we're recording this a year from now, we come to the end of 2024. What do you want your business to look like?

Speaker 3: 2:59

And I thought a lot about that even this last year. I would really like to kind of continue growing it. I'm trying to do a lot more collaborations with people and to just get more out there. One of my big passions is just helping teachers, whether that's with resources or even tips and strategies. So one of my biggest goals is just to continue trying to get a bigger reach and collaborate with more people, more teachers around the country. But then also I do have an email list.

Speaker 3: 3:23

So I'm really working on trying to be more consistent with that grow in that area, not only providing resources for my store, but again also kind of tips and strategies and just helpful information for all teachers out there. I would like my business to kind of be more I don't know if manageable is the right word but to have a lot more systems in place that it's not like me every weekend, like okay, I got this long list to do. You know, I would like to kind of be able to batch things and get it more structured and in place, not that it's not structured, but having more of those systems in place so it's kind of a little more easy flowing, if that makes sense, yeah absolutely so more systems in place in 2024, more structure within your business, but also you really want to extend your reach and reach more teachers.

Speaker 2: 4:11

Awesome, I love it. So one of the things that we can do to reach more teachers is we can leverage our TPT store to reach more teachers. I love the direction of the conversation and I definitely want to talk about this in a minute where you're talking about, like, collaborating with other teachers, growing your email list, all of that. We'll talk about that more here in just a little bit, but first I do want to take a look at your TPT store, because I think that that one of the best first places to start, because obviously, at the end of the day, even with extending your reach, growing your audience, all of that kind of stuff, I'm assuming that, while you definitely want to help teachers, you also want to be compensated for helping them, right? Like you want to make sure that your business is growing, yeah, so we're going to take a look at your TPT store together and if you're listening on the podcast, obviously you won't be able to see the audit. You can listen and you can see the audit that we're about to do on YouTube.

Speaker 2: 5:03

We'll come back here in just a second. We'll just do like a little recap of what we see instead of her store and how ways that she can move forward to leverage her TPT store traffic and to leverage her growth on TPT to help her grow in those other areas off of TPT. But we're going to go ahead and take a look at your store real quick. Let me share my screen with you. That makes sense. It's not like, oh, that one's more expensive and I feel like it seems like such a small thing but it can really make a difference. So just kind of looking at those things.

Speaker 3: 5:30

No, totally yeah. And I'll be honest, like pricing is something I've always been, like I have no idea. I think I've even asked you a couple of times, like I have this product, can you tell me, like, what to do? So I've always been like I just don't know what I should price this. And I try it and I'm like, well, I've gotten a couple sales, but even looking at those notes, I'm kind of like, yeah, that does seem maybe like it's a little too pricey. I love that feedback, because I'm always just like I don't know what to do with the pricey.

Speaker 2: 5:57

I totally feel that and I think sometimes too, like if I'm coming out with a new product and I'm like, well, there's not necessarily say, other collect and fines on the market for this particular topic or in my particular niche or whatever, it's hard to know, even though I feel like, well, my resources cooler than, say, pixel art, maybe, like I think this is more interesting or more engaging than pixel art, like you know, just kind of comparing the two.

Speaker 2: 6:21

At the end of the day, the way that they're going to find it is by looking for a digital activity, more than likely. And so then kind of looking at what's showing up for the keywords that are going to lead them to me, and just kind of looking around at those resources. And it could be that you create a resource that's like definitely needs to be priced higher. Just making sure, then, that that's justified, that price is justified on the cover, whether that's saying you know a complete lesson or teacher slides plus notes in practice or anything that just kind of really make sure that they can read and see what is making that price higher than the other resources that are around them.

Speaker 2: 7:00

So yeah those are the only things that I. Those are the only notes that I would have for your store. If you're watching this and you want to hear the entire coaching call that we have with Alyssa, you're going to want to make sure and check out the link down inside the description. So, coming back, we just took a look at your store, which? Your store looks amazing. Your covers are beautiful. Everything looks really great.

Speaker 2: 7:17

One of the things that we talked about was really taking a look and doing some market research when you're pricing your resources to make sure that your resources are priced competitively to other resources on the market. So one of the examples that we gave was really just taking a look at a digital activity that you had where there weren't any other digital activities that were showing up in TPT search that were exactly like yours. But buyers who would come across your resource in TPT search would likely be searching for a digital activity for that particular topic and really just taking a look at the digital resources that were around it and saying, okay, your resources priced a little bit higher than theirs. So how can we either, number one, justify why our resources priced higher or, number two, what can we look at in terms of pricing adjustments and making sure that our resources priced competitively, and so we just kind of talked about the importance of doing that market research, seeing how our buyers coming to us how are they finding us in TPT search, what specific keywords are they typing in that are leading them there? And then making sure that, once they see that product in search, that our price is either justified based on what we're putting on our cover or our resource is priced competitively, so that if we're priced higher, we've justified it on the cover. If we're not priced higher, then we're not priced higher, right. So those are a couple of things that we talked about.

Speaker 2: 8:42

And again, if you are listening to this via podcast right now and you want to check out that, dive into her store, you can find that on YouTube.

Speaker 2: 8:50

Just go to Lauren Fulton and you'll find that on the channel. So let's talk about getting people from TPT or TPT store into your network of your audience, because you talked about really wanting to make sure that you're reaching more teachers. So obviously one of the first ways that we can reach more teachers through our products on TPT is just getting them into more hands, right, and so that was one of the reasons why we took a look at your resources and how can we get more people to actually click on them from TPT search. How can we get more views? Because the more people who purchase your resources, the more people are being impacted and the more you're being compensated for the value that you're giving to the community. But one of the other things that we can do is we can really make sure and I want to ask you like, within your products, are you putting because you mentioned growing your email list are you putting any kind of a lead magnet in there to incentivize them to join your email list from your product?

Speaker 3: 9:47

Yeah, so I've actually been working on updating like all of my resources pretty much in the covers. So the ones that you showed on the YouTube, one towards the end, those are more the updated, but then I've been redoing my preview. So all of my previews now, like the last page, has ways you can connect with me Instagram, facebook, and then I have a link to a lead magnet that's one of my most popular ones to my email list. So I'm working on updating all my resources to have that, but most of them, should include that by now.

Speaker 2: 10:17

Let me make sure I'm understanding correctly. So you're putting that in your preview or are you putting it in the product itself?

Speaker 3: 10:23

I think I put it in the preview and then I have also in the product page like, once they actually get it, the like credits and the thank you and all that. I put it in both places. I don't know where I heard somebody was like you should also maybe put it in your previews so they can see it there too. But yes, it is also in like when they actually purchase it. It's in my like terms of use credits. Thank you, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 10:45

So after they've downloaded it, I would give it its own page in your product. Just because most of the time we tend to like just scroll right on past that terms of use page credits. Like we just kind of scroll right up past that, I would give it its own page. I actually would not recommend putting links to social media, to a free resource for joining your email list or anything like that inside of your preview, just because it interrupts the buying process and we've got them right there. So we really just want them to add to cart. I don't want them to get distracted and be like, oh, let me go send it for this freebie real quick or oh, let me go check this out real quick. So obviously it's your business, it's your choice. Like it's not to say like that's a terrible idea. But I do personally discourage people from linking to anything other than an upsell in your preview.

Speaker 2: 11:32

Yeah, no that actually totally makes sense. We're keeping them in that state of I want to buy something. But yeah, definitely put a big page in there. Another thing that you can do and this is particularly helpful if you have a lot of followers on TPT is you can actually put a lead magnet page and advertisement for joining your email list inside of your free resources. That is really, really important. Make sure it's in all of your free resources, and you can even send a note to your followers on TPT and tell them hey, by the way, I've got these new freebies, or I've got.

Speaker 2: 12:03

If you haven't checked out all of my freebies, you can go check them all out here and if you take a look at page two, inside of any one of those free resources, you'll find an extra special gift just for you, and that'll kind of give them that hint to know like, okay, not only can I get a free resource from her store right now, but once I get that free resource, I need to go and look for a way to get another resource and kind of incentivize them to join that email list through there. That's something you can do on a fairly regular basis. I'd say I would do that like maybe twice a year, direct them to your free resources and tell them specifically to look for that lead magnet or that opt-in page within that free resource. So that's a couple of things that you can do to kind of help broaden that out. Beyond that, we're looking at collaborations and other ways to grow your email list.

Speaker 2: 12:51

So you mentioned earlier you said you're collaborating with other teachers. I assume you meant collaborating with other teacher authors. Is that right to help grow your email list? Yes, perfect. So where are we at with email list size right now? About 2,000-ish.

Speaker 3: 13:05

I just did like two recent collabs with other math teachers, so that kind of jumped it up, but now it's getting the people to stay and then I'm hoping to do another one in December.

Speaker 2: 13:17

So we've got email collabs going, we've got those down, so that's good. For sure you want to have other ways to grow your email list besides just collaborating, but that is a really great way to put the accelerator on the fire. So maybe even just creating some pins on Pinterest for those landing pages and directing some Pinterest traffic to those landing pages. That's a good way to do that. If you have a blog writing some blog posts about a particular freebie that they can get by joining your email list, it's another great way to get some organic traffic. And then creating pins on Pinterest for those blog posts, just kind of really hitting that and trying to get as much organic traffic as possible. Facebook ads is another really great way.

Speaker 2: 13:57

If that's something in 2024, if growing your email list is something that you really want to do, I would say spend the first six months of 2024 really focusing on email marketing and making sure that your current list is converting for you, that you're seeing that income, you're seeing that revenue come in from your email list and then, once you see like, okay, this is working, then moving on into Facebook ads to help grow your list.

Speaker 2: 14:24

If I think about how much it costs me to get a lead on my list. It usually costs me less than 50 cents and I'm going to make about 10 cents per lead each month. So within about six months I've made my money back and I've started to turn a profit from pulling those people into my list and I know that that's about how well it converts, and so I'm able to kind of say like, okay for sure, like I can invest X amount of dollars in this, and while it's definitely more expensive to acquire those leads through Facebook ads, I think you'll find that it's really important for the health of your list overall for you to have people who have joined your list a little bit more. I mean, ads are not organic, but not through a collaborative event where you don't just have like everybody on your audience is shared with like multiple people, kind of thing. What questions do you have for me about growing your email marketing list and extending your reach in that area, or even making sure that that list is converting?

Speaker 3: 15:24

I think my biggest struggle. I've been more consistent. I'm trying to batch more emails. I've tried to go like a couple months out, but you know, full-time teaching in mom-y hood kind of it's hard to do that. But my biggest struggle is not my biggest, but one of my struggles is trying to. I don't use UTM codes. I know I should but like I just never remember. Oh, I should have put a UTM code on that. So I like don't really know where I'm getting the traffic from. I'm assuming it's more email because I'm on Instagram and I'm on Facebook, but I don't feel like that's what's really pulling me in. So I guess also, how do you set up those systems to know where your audience is coming from and like who's actually buying it? I've looked on the TPT dashboard and stuff and that can be helpful.

Speaker 3: 16:06

But trying to do a better job at that, so I know where I should maybe be focusing more of my time.

Speaker 2: 16:11

Yeah for sure, the UTM codes are not super reliable and I can say now that I'm using my email to specifically like, only send traffic to my Shopify store versus sending it to TPT, and I can tell that more revenue than I previously thought is coming from my email list than what a TPT was reporting or what I was saying through UTM codes. So I would always assume that whatever you're seeing on UTM codes is probably a little bit more than that. But having the UTM codes to me as a start even if because I've talked to people before who are like it's just not worth it, like it's not accurate, so like why would I even do it One of the reasons why I like to use the UTM codes anyway is because when we're talking about setting up systems in place in your business, one of the best things that you can do is write weekly emails for six months consistently, and even better than that would be to have an entire year of emails that you've written weekly consistently. And the reason for that is every year, when it comes time for me to do my email marketing, I'm not starting from scratch. I literally go to my dashboard, I check out my UTM codes and I look at my top performing emails from that month the year before. I then go back to those emails and I pick the ones like which ones perform the best, which ones got me the most clicks, which ones got me the best open rates, which ones earned me the most money, and I'm reusing those emails again. And I do that not even just like last October to this October. I might look at six months ago.

Speaker 2: 17:36

What email did I send out in the month of March that did really well. This email advertising this particular product really resonated with my audience. Well, if it resonated with them, then it's going to resonate with them again. So I can just take that, repurpose it and kind of tweak it. So when we're talking about setting up systems in our business to make everything more sustainable, being consistent for a lengthy period of time for email marketing is like one of the best things that you can do, because then, after you've done that for six months, I can then go back and pull and instead of this month me having to write four or five emails for the month, I only have to write two emails because the other two are already written, and so then it makes the upkeep so much easier because I just make the little tweaks and changes and I just schedule those right in. It's also something that later on you can even have a VA do for you if that is something that you wanted to do, where you could say like you go look at the emails that performed well, you make a couple of tweets to the title or change a little bit of the copy here and there and then you schedule it and you know it's going to be a good email because it's already proved that it's a good email and you're not having to.

Speaker 2: 18:44

I don't redo the UTM codes every year. I use the same UTM code that I used last year. So it makes everything, the whole process, just a whole lot quicker. Even though it's hard in the beginning, it gets easier after you get those first several months under your belt. And then taking a look at okay, this email performed well this month, so how can I take my top performing email this month in terms of that? This email brought in at least $100.

Speaker 2: 19:12

Right, what's specifically resonated with those people? And then I backtrack and I say, okay, let's go look at that email. So then I go back into MailChimp or into ConvertKit or into FloDesk or wherever my email marketing platform is and I look at open rates and click rates. If my open rates were really high, perhaps it was the subject line that really resonated with them. If open rates were just normal but click rates were really high, something in my copy resonated with them.

Speaker 2: 19:41

Was I short, sweet to the point? Did that resonate with them? Was it a new product? That just the product really resonated with them? Did I tell a personal story, like really kind of backtracking from there? So I would say like batch out six different emails and just say and you don't have to do it all in one sitting either. When I say batch it out, I don't mean like all in one sitting, I just mean like make a goal to do six emails six weeks in a row and then try to make each one a little bit different. Maybe this one's a little bit longer with a story, maybe this one's a little bit shorter. Maybe this one is advertises three different products within the same product line. Maybe this one just focuses on one particular product within the product line and just kind of experiment.

Speaker 2: 20:23

Use your UTM codes, look at the data as a whole. Even if your UTM codes are showing that it wasn't that successful. Did you actually just? Did you make more sales that day? Did you see traffic going out from your flow desk account or your convert kid account? Really just looking at everything as a whole and then picking three of those emails out of the six to say, okay, the next three emails I do. I'm going to model after these three and try to like replicate that success.

Speaker 2: 20:52

It sounds really complicated and it sounds like that's going to be really time consuming, and it's not really what I wanted to hear, because I'm looking for ways for this to get quicker, faster, right. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that if you do that work in the very, very beginning, that's what makes writing emails faster and easier, because you're not wasting your time writing a really long email that nobody's gonna be interested in reading and you learn pretty quickly what your audience resonates with and what they respond to. And once you know what they like to hear and how they like to hear it, it makes your job of writing emails so much easier. My audience is like no nonsense. They just literally want you to just get to the meat of things. Like if you have a tip to share, tell me the tip, don't tell me I don't need a story, I don't need any of that stuff. If you have something you wanna tell me, just tell me what's for sale and where I can go get it. And that makes writing emails so much easier for me because I'm not having to worry about digging out a personal story from my childhood and telling them about the time I broke my leg when I was like six years old. Right, I don't have to worry about that. Not that any of that stuff happened, but just making that up. But like it makes it a lot easier and less stressful for me.

Speaker 2: 22:01

So picking a time range and giving yourself that time range to do the experiments, write down what you notice and then set a timer for writing those emails and just be consistent with it. I know it's hard but there are some ways to make it easier. So you can use chat GPT to give you ideas. You can use chat GPT to write some subject lines for you. You can use chat GPT to take a list like an outline that you have for an email, like three ways to increase student engagement. Can you write an email in 500 words or less or 300 words or less, like a short email, and you can kind of use that to get an outline, get some ideas and then just tweak it as you go. Anything that makes the process easier for you I'm a major fan of, until you can get those six to eight emails done and just see how your audience responds to it.

Speaker 3: 22:53

Yeah that makes a lot of sense and kind of makes me feel a little bit better, because I always hear like you have to write a story and you have to get them hooked right away. And I'm like sometimes I don't like that. Sometimes I just like you said, I just like what do you want? Where can I get it? Or like what are you gonna tell me? So that makes me feel a lot better that I can. Granted, I like a story here and there, but like every time I'm like I can't think of that many things that happen in my life. It's not that exciting.

Speaker 2: 23:17

Absolutely not. And if you do like the six emails or whatever, you can be like two of them. You can try a story and the rest of them just be like two stories leading to a sale, two tips leading to a sale and then just two emails that are just straight up here's my product and here's where you can get it Like, maybe try like that format and see how it works for you. Yeah, I like that All right. Well, this has been a lot of fun and I can't wait to talk to you next year and see where everything is with your email marketing, see how everything has grown for you. Where can listeners find you if they wanna connect with you or check out your store?

Speaker 3: 23:49

Yeah, so my I am on Instagram and Facebook and some TikTok not very often HinspireYou is the name and also I do have a blog. So I have a website where I have a blog and kind of other areas that you can connect with me hinspireyoucom. And then you can also join my email list through one of my freebies on the blog and I share a lot of teacher tips and just strategies and good resources that are helpful in the classroom.

Speaker 2: 24:14

I love it. Well, thank you so much, and we'll link to all of that down inside of the description. Thanks so much for being here, alyssa, and you'll have to check back in with us in a couple of months and let us know how everything goes. Sounds great. Thank you, lauren. Thanks so much for being here. If you wanna connect with Alyssa, you can find a link to that down inside of the description. And if you're listening on podcast and you wanna check out that TPT store audit, don't forget, there's a link to that on YouTube down inside of the description as well. If you're not subscribed to the podcast, make sure that you are subscribed, because we're putting out more of these coaching call episodes and you do not want to miss them. Thanks so much for being here. You guys, I'm gonna see you right back here next week.