The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
First 3-Figure Month for New Store!
After weeks of battling through illness, moving, and travel, I return with an apology and a promise to reward your patience with extra content. Join me as I share the trials of maintaining a business amidst life's chaos and extend my empathy to fellow entrepreneurs feeling overwhelmed. From setting up vital systems to keep afloat during tough times to an update on my landing page and email opt-in strategy, I discuss the importance of resilience and consistency, even when the immediate response feels discouraging. Reflecting on my participation in a TPT site-wide sale, I candidly explore the challenges of managing different business aspects and the vulnerability of putting yourself out there.
Well, I think I have to start this podcast with an apology, because it was extremely unintentional but it kind of ghosted you guys, and to make up for it, I'm recording two podcast episodes in a row and I release them in the same week. That way you guys have more content to listen to. But there's definitely a lot that I want to share, some of which I might save for the public podcasts, but some of this I'm definitely just going to put here. So, basically, for the last several weeks we've been a combination of like illnesses, moving, traveling, so many different things that you can't get away from right. So you can't escape an illness, you can't escape moving, it's all consuming, and we had some long overdue travel plans to go visit some family. So the traveling part was good, the moving part, you know it's moving. The illness part, not so great. But we're over all of that now and I have to say that in the middle of all of that, if you feel very overwhelmed by life and you're trying to grow your business, I feel you.
Speaker 0:I have really felt you in the last couple of months, for sure, and I think, when August hit, so many things were happening all at once that I was just doing everything I could to kind of keep my head above water, both personally and professionally, and now I feel like I'm somewhat getting a handle on everything. So if you're in that boat right now or you find yourself regularly hanging out in that boat, just know, number one, you're not alone. We all go through those seasons and that's normal. But number two, just know that there are times in your business where you're just going to be kind of keeping things afloat and that's okay. But if you find yourself at a point where you're like, okay, I'm off that boat, I'm out of the treacherous waters and my feet are securely on dry land, make sure you're setting up systems inside of your business to help you stay afloat during those times. So yeah, I'll be talking about that a little bit more in a public podcast, but that's where I've been and I'm kind of talking to you guys first.
Speaker 0:So I want to kind of do a little bit of a recap of August, because I didn't really chat with you guys in August. So one thing that has been going reasonably well is the landing page that I created after the email opt-in, where there's the tripwire. As soon as they sign up for their freebie, they're told, go check your email. Also, if you want to go and purchase the full set, you can go purchase the full set of worksheets. That's been going decently. I haven't been doing a lot of traffic through ads. I've kind of slowed that down quite a bit. I think I'm doing like $5 a day or something, maybe $7. It's not much but that part's going well.
Speaker 0:The next thing is let's talk about August, because this was the first month that I participated in a TPT site-wide sale, sent out an email, all of that, and I have to tell you that I was so struggling in August that for the first TPT site-wide sale I didn't even send out an email to my list. So that was kind of a bummer. I really wish I would have. But for the second site-wide sale I was a little bit more prepared and I did the same thing that I did for my math list and I felt the hesitancy with a list that had been pretty unresponsive. So we had the event that this, the big collaborative sale for preschool I think I talked about that several podcast episodes ago where I was really excited because I was building my list and I was going to get to participate in this big collab sale and advertise it to my preschool audience. I sold like one preschool thing.
Speaker 0:Okay, now, granted, I only sent out one email and then I was so wrapped up in marketing the math side of things, my established business, that I kind of let the secondary business go by the wayside. I'm a little disappointed in myself for that Can't beat myself up over it Hindsight's 2020, but at the time I was like, okay, sent an email and I got one sale from it, which you know, an affiliate earnings is only like 28 bucks. But I definitely should have sent out follow-up emails and done it just to show up and just to say that I did it. But I get you know, it's been a long time since I've been at the beginning stages of growing a business and I talk to TPT business owners all the time who are like, well, I'm a little hesitant to send out an email because there are only like five people on my list. Or I send out these emails and like nobody answers, or I don't get any sales, and so I'm kind of hesitant to keep sending out emails. And I tell them all the time like no, send the email.
Speaker 0:Like send the email, show up, keep showing up, even if no one's purchasing, keep showing up. You're at least showing your face to them, right? You're at least exposing them to you, to your brand, to your products. Continue to show up until something happens. And I'm not going to lie, like I kind of felt before, like I don't really understand why you wouldn't just show up. Like, just keep showing up, just keep showing up, although I understood the discouraging part of it.
Speaker 0:But now I get it from a fresh perspective of like, oh, I see this feels very vulnerable to show up and not get any type of response, like not get a reply, not get any sort of engagement. Just see that people are opening, see that people are clicking and see that people are not buying and it makes you feel like they don't want what you have to sell. And so writing the email not only feels like a little bit of a waste of time, but it also feels kind of vulnerable. Like, oh, I'm putting myself out there and they don't care and I don't know why. Like I've been in this business for so long, I know that that's just part of it, but being on that end of it, it just felt a little bit more real this time. So I am going to tell you about a success story in the next podcast about that.
Speaker 0:But I told myself for the second sale I was going to send all three emails. I wasn't just going to send a, hey, the sale's going on day one and day two, I was going to do the last call email. I was going to do all of that and I did and going to do the last call email. I was going to do all of that and I did. And I don't have like this incredible success story of like, oh, I did this and I made like $700. That's not my story. I wish it was. I wish that was my story.
Speaker 0:But I did have my first three-figure month in August. I did send out those three emails and I made five sales. So three emails, five sales not anything to write home about. But I did do it. And what I have to remind myself is those five buyers who purchased five products from me each one of those is now a bona fide customer on my email list and they were not a customer before. Now that they felt confident enough to make a purchase, they are more likely to make another purchase in the future. So, even if it's just one, two, three sales at a time. Those small steps of converting even just a few leads to becoming a customer can really help me out in the long run, because they're that much closer to being a consistent buyer on my email list.
Speaker 0:Okay, so was really excited about that. And then, when I say a three-figure month, I made $101 and some change. Okay, so this was not like a I blew it out of the water three-figure month Again. I wish it was, but it wasn't. I felt like that was a milestone, though, and I got to tell you I had a little bit of a flashback to my first three-figure month back in oh gosh, probably 2017, 2017. Yeah, cause I left the classroom in 2019.
Speaker 0:August of 2017 was my first three-figure month on TPT. I made 160 something dollars and I was like I could leave the classroom. This is it. I'm delusional, of course, but it got me here, was so excited about that 160 something, something. And when I saw $101 in the month of August for this TPT store that, at the time, had five products only four of them paid yeah, I got really excited. I felt really good about that. I felt like something great could happen from this, just based on the fact that I have so few products and I made over a hundred dollars. So like what could happen if I continue down this path and continue to create the resources.
Speaker 0:Now, coming back to that, I missed my goal by a lot. Right, I wanted to have 10 paid resources by the month of August. But not only did life get away from me, I learned something pretty quickly, even over the summer, and that is that what I was selling was not going to sell like hotcakes, so I needed to kind of make an adjustment. So I made the adjustment and I'm going to talk about that in the next podcast. Talk about a couple of adjustments that I made in terms of what I'm selling, what I switched to still in the same niche, of course and what's doing well for me, because today I've sold five products from an email and it's not during a sideways sale, it's just a normal email that went out and I've sold five resources and I've sold several of these resources within the last week, so really excited about that.
Speaker 0:I'm going to talk about that in the next episode, but this is just kind of like my catch-up episode. This is where we're at, and in the next episode I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what's working right now, making shifts, making changes and when to say okay, that product line that I started, the thing that I thought was going to sell really well, it's not and I need to pivot. All right, so I'm going to see you guys in the next episode. Again, I'm going to release these in the same week, so you won't have to wait very long, hopefully. But thanks so much for bearing with me, and I'm excited to share with you guys what changed in my email marketing and what has changed with my products.