The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
8 Years Selling on TPT: What I've Learned With Two Stores
Ever wondered how to transform a side hustle into a flourishing business? Join me, Lauren Fulton, as I share the secrets from my eight-year journey of selling on Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT). This episode is your treasure map to unlocking the potential of a TPT store, packed with six invaluable lessons that can guide you whether you're a homeschool mom, teacher's aide, or Sunday school teacher. Discover how a modest start with low returns can snowball into substantial long-term gains and explore the myriad business opportunities that a TPT store can open, leading to multiple income streams. Learn my personal strategies for balancing time and financial investments to optimize growth and efficiency, making your venture not just sustainable but thriving.
Email marketing is the unsung hero in the world of TPT, and this episode will prove why. After eight years, it's still my go-to strategy for maximizing returns with minimal effort and cost. I break down why email marketing surpasses other methods like SMS marketing and Facebook ads, offering tried-and-true advice for newcomers and seasoned sellers alike. With actionable tips and real-life insights, you'll be equipped to leverage email marketing to its fullest potential. Plus, join our community on Instagram and our free Facebook group, "The Rebranded Teacher," where we continue the conversation and support each other's TPT journeys. Get ready to elevate your TPT business to new heights!
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https://www.youtube.com/c/laurenfulton
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. So, six things that I've learned well, six of the things that I've learned after eight years of selling on Teachers Pay Teachers and two stores later.
Speaker 1:If you're new here, I've been selling on Teachers Pay Teachers since the summer of 2016. But this year, in 2024, may of 2024, I started a second TPT store and I have learned a lot over the years of selling on two stores. Number one thing that I've learned is that anyone can do this, and I mean anyone. If you're a homeschool mom, you're a teacher's aide, you are a former teacher or a Sunday school teacher, you can. I think sometimes people feel like it's only, it's a space that's only for teachers, and if you are a homeschool mom like maybe that doesn't count, or if you teach Sunday school but seriously, anyone can do this. Whether you create clip art, fonts, decor, anything like classroom decor, anything like that, you can absolutely sell on TPT and you can make money doing it. Trust me when I say that if I can do it, anyone can do it, and I've done it now successfully twice, so anyone can do this.
Speaker 1:The second thing is the return on time investment in the beginning is low, but in the end it's really high. The amount of money that I make on my store that's been around since 2016 is grossly disproportionate to the amount of time that I spend on it. I mean, I basically write emails for that store and I also have some writers who help me create resources for that store, but for the most part, my time investment on that is very, very low and I definitely out earned my teaching salary my old teaching salary but in the beginning it wasn't that way and the way that it is right now with my new TPT store, it's not that way. The amount of time that I spend writing emails, blogging all of the things, creating resources, all of that stuff, the return on my time investment is like below minimum wage. Do you know what I mean? So like there's a lot of time and energy that goes into it on the front end, but you should anyway. If you do it right, you reap the benefits on the back end, where you're making the money and you're not really having to spend a lot of time on the business. So definitely an investment in the front end, but you get a good return on the back end.
Speaker 1:Number three is that starting a TPT store can lead to a lot of different business opportunities and this is something that even if you had told me in the very beginning it's not that I wouldn't have believed you, I just wouldn't have thought that it would have happened to me because my goals were really, really small. But as time went on and I started to learn a lot about selling digital products on TPT, you really are able to take that knowledge and expertise and I'm not going to say easily, but more easily extend out and expand out into different directions. But more easily extend out and expand out into different directions. And that has been one of the most lucrative things for me and for my business is expanding out. And so knowing and understanding that I think you kind of feel like there's a ceiling or a cap on how much money you can make with selling these resources and what's going to happen if TPT goes away or all of the what-ifs, but just understanding that there's a lot more stability than you might think in the industry as a whole can be really comforting to know, because once you start creating and selling and marketing digital products to sell on Teachers Pay Teachers it's a much smoother transition into creating other digital products or selling those same products elsewhere. At this point, I have over 10 different income streams and I had no idea when I first started that that was even something, that was a possibility, and it all just kind of started with TPT, so it can lead to many other business opportunities.
Speaker 1:Number four if you don't invest money, you are going to have to invest more time. You have some choices when you first start out. You can create TPT resources. You can create TPT products without spending any money. You can create them with spending just a little bit of money, or you can really invest a significant amount of money into growing your business.
Speaker 1:When I started my first store in 2016, I didn't have a lot of money to invest and, honestly, I was really leery of doing that because I didn't know if it was going to go anywhere. I didn't know if I was going to make any sales off of it, and I was just kind of doing it for fun, just to kind of make a little bit of extra money. So I didn't spend a lot of money at all. I think I maybe spent $18 to create my first couple of resources. So not much at all. I didn't even have to spend that. I think I just had to spend $8 for PowerPoint and the $10 was for some sort of stock photo that I purchased to put on a cover, and I didn't even need to have that. So you can spend as much or as little money creating resources as you want to. But now I actually invest, you know, a few hundred dollars a month in Facebook ads to grow my email list so that I can move things forward a little bit faster. You don't have to do that, but it will cost you time. So I choose to use Facebook ads because it saves me a lot more time than working with other sellers in my niche to network and to collaborate, to do collaborative events, to grow my email list, and I just don't as much as I would really love to do that right now. I just don't have the time to invest. So I invest money and you can do either one. Whichever one works best for you. You can invest some money, you can invest more time, it doesn't matter, but there are some things that you can do. Either one, whichever one, works best for you. You can invest some money, you can invest more time, it doesn't matter, but there are some things that you can do. If you are investing money in your business, you might be able to write off. So talk to your tax expert.
Speaker 1:Don't take my word for it, but like, for example, I'm a homeschool mom. I homeschool my daughter. She's in preschool. I create preschool resources and I am able to write off the books that I purchase to like, look through to find some good fall items or to find some good seasonal books to recommend to my audience. I'm able to write those off. And, yeah, because I do that, I have to let the toddler or let my preschooler test those books out. So I read them with her and we test them out together to see which books are good ones, which ones are going to make the cut, which ones are going to be on the recommendation list, and I'm able to write off the cost of those books. And so I'm looking at a stack of over a dozen fall books that are sitting on my desk right now for my preschooler a dozen fall books that are sitting on my desk right now for my preschooler. She gets to test out and get exposed to a lot of books that I wouldn't ordinarily purchase, but because I'm purchasing them for the business, I'm able to do more for her, write them off as a business expense, and so while it is a cost, it's something that I'm able to write off. There are a lot of other things that I'm able to write off as well in terms of school supplies, because I use them for staging. I take pictures of her while she's working sometimes not all the time, but every now and then I do and so when I'm doing that, like those are all tools inside of my business, and so I'm able to write off some of those things as well.
Speaker 1:So there are some things that you can do if you are investing money on the front end that you can write off and it can still be a benefit to your family, like the examples that I just gave. Number five you can make as much money or as little money as you want. So right now, with my new TPT business, I'm only making around $50 a week, which I'm really happy with. I could stop there. I could create a few more resources and kind of stop there and make a little bit of hobby money and keep it as a hobby, because I honestly don't put a lot of time into that. My focus is primarily on the other businesses that I have, on my membership for teacher, authors and things like that. That's where my primary focus is. So I could stop and just be like you know what, I'm just gonna keep this kind of hobby money and make a few hundred dollars a month and be really happy with that. Or I can say I'm gonna scale this and I'm gonna make multiple five figures a year or even try to scale this to a six figure business on TPT.
Speaker 1:That's not currently my plan. My plan currently is to get it to where it's a five figure business and it's something that I'm able to do as sort of like hobby, but a worth it kind of hobby. You know what I mean. Because I want to be able to create resources for my kids that meet their specific needs, as I'm homeschooling, and so this is a way for me to be able to do that, justify the time, justify the expense, as I'm paying other people to help me create these resources for my child and so I don't need for this to be a full-on business, but it could be so you get to decide how much time, how much energy, how much effort you want to put into it and how much money you wanna make. So there's really no ceiling. You can make as much or as little as you want, which is really nice, because it doesn't have to be a full-time job. It doesn't have to be a full-time job. It doesn't have to be something that takes up all of your time and sucks up all your weekends, like it doesn't have to be that. You can stick to hobby money, fun money and things like that. You can have different goals for your business. Finally, email marketing. After eight years of doing all the marketing I've done Instagram marketing, I've done Facebook ads, I've done text message marketing. I've done all kinds of marketing Email marketing is still the goat Like. It's still the greatest of all time. It's still going to give you probably the number one return on your investment.
Speaker 1:I love email marketing. I love how hands-off it is. I love how I don't have to show up and have makeup on my face every day. I love how I don't have to show my face aside from the pretty picture that's already. That was taken, you know, five or six years ago. I, five or six years ago.
Speaker 1:I can show up, I can build relationships with people, I can sell my resources and be a benefit to my audience and make money with email marketing and it's very, very low maintenance. So email marketing after eight years, doing all the things, still number one, a thousand percent, although I will say SMS or text marketing and Facebook ads are really close second, really close second. The only thing that I don't like about those and why email is better, I think, is the low cost investment. You can do email marketing for free or near free, but SMS marketing and Facebook ads, they're both kind of a pretty significant investment upfront, although I do find that I make my money back over time or with SMS marketing almost immediately, a lot of the time, but email marketing still number one.
Speaker 1:So if you are new to TPT, selling on TPT, or you've been selling on TPT for a while and you're still not tapped into email marketing, here's your sign. I'm telling you right now get on it, because it's not going anywhere anytime soon and it definitely brings me the greatest return on my investment by far. All right. So that's six things that I've learned after eight years of selling on TPT. Thank you so much for being here. You guys, if you have a recommendation for a podcast episode that you would like for me to talk about, shoot me a message on Instagram at the Lauren Fulton, or comment inside of our free Facebook group, the rebranded teacher and I would love to hear from you guys. I would love to answer your questions and teach you the things that you want to.