The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
Do You Want to Create a Second TPT Store? Let's Chat
Curious about the untapped potential of running multiple Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) stores? Discover how you can strategically expand your TPT business by separating niches, targeting distinct audiences, and exploring new revenue streams. Join me, Lauren Fulton, as I share my personal journey from leaving the classroom to mastering the art of diversification, all while navigating the challenges of 2020. Learn how starting a second TPT store can not only enhance your brand clarity but also allow you to experiment with fresh ideas without the hassle of rebranding your existing store.
In this episode, I uncover the secrets of leveraging existing resources, such as virtual assistants, to efficiently manage and grow a second TPT store. By tapping into the momentum of your first business, you can fuel the success of your new venture without starting from scratch. Get practical advice on balancing growth with efficiency and find out how to set up a secondary store that requires minimal attention, enabling you to focus on your main income-generating business. Tune in for insights into strategic decision-making, optimizing SEO, and maintaining productivity through batching techniques. Don’t miss this opportunity to diversify your business ventures with confidence and creativity.
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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 2:Let's talk about starting a second Teachers Pay Teachers store. You might be thinking, lauren, why do I want to start a second one Still working on my first one? And for some of you guys, this is not going to be the episode for you, unless you really want to just kind of think about, dreaming about the future. But I talked to a lot of TPT sellers and I was shockingly surprised, after I started my second TPT business, how many people came forward saying I've been thinking about starting another store too because I have this other area of interest. Or if you're someone who, in the very early stages of your TPT business, found yourself creating multiple different types of products or needing to maybe create one type of resource or have one kind of niche, but your passion is a totally different audience or in a totally different niche, then you might want to start thinking about maybe having two different TPT stores. Now, first we're going to address the big question that is do I need two different TPT stores? If I have two different niches, two different areas of interest, do they need to be in different stores or can I put them all in the same store? And I think overwhelmingly, the TPT community as a whole has always said you don't need two different stores. Put everything in the same store. I don't disagree. I don't think that that's bad advice, but for me personally, I really like to have things separate. So if I have two separate audiences for example, I have preschool resources I don't want to be sending preschool traffic to my established math store. Where they're going to go there, everything's sorted by bestsellers. How do I feature products? How do I choose which products to feature? How do I create a store banner? How do I try to appeal to both types of people? How do I set up my store in such a way so that when I'm driving traffic, my buyer lands on my TPT storefront and says yes, this is me, this is where I'm supposed to be, this is exactly who I need to follow? How do I put all of that in place if everything is all under one roof and I have two totally different niches like middle school or secondary math and preschool, basic counting and literacy resources?
Speaker 2:So for me, it made a whole lot more sense to separate them. There are a few exceptions to this rule where I'd say, like, when you're selling clip art and maybe early childhood resources, I think those things can go together really well because there's gonna be some good overlap there. A lot of sellers are gonna be really understanding because they get it Like they get having both things in one place and they kind of know how to navigate the site really well to get to where they want to be, like to your clip art or to your fonts. But then also a lot of elementary teachers get it because they create their own resources and they create things with clip art and fonts, and so it's going to kind of make a little bit more sense for them. So some different audiences, I feel like, can all kind of live well under the same roof. But a lot of times having them separate can be really nice, especially when you're driving traffic and things like that and you're first getting started.
Speaker 2:So why would you want to have a second TPT store? For me it was really easy. Like I wanted a new challenge. I want to do something different. I'm homeschooling my preschooler right now, and so creating resources to meet her needs and to help other busy parents was something that I was kind of passionate about and interested in, and that's why I started the second TPT business as really more for fun, like it's just fun, it's a fun experiment. I'm in the TPT coaching world so of course it makes really good sense to share that journey out and to kind of go through the whole process again, as I'm teaching other people how to go through the process for the first time, just kind of re-familiarize myself with a lot of other things, with a lot of the new things and a lot of the new changes, and re-familiarize myself with really just starting over and starting from scratch, because that's a really big deal.
Speaker 2:But for the average seller you might want a second TPT store If you have, like I mentioned before, a passion project, like you have something that you're really passionate about, but then you have resources over here that are selling, and so you could have two different stores, two different businesses. This is my passion and this is what's selling, and if you need to keep them separate, you keep them separate and so you kind of get to work on both. The other thing that I think is really helpful for having that second TPT store is obviously it's a different stream of revenue and so having that second store kind of diversifies you just a little bit. So, for example, if you want to make clip art and fonts and things like that and sell to sellers. But you also want to have your store for secondary history or secondary social studies. You can have both of those worlds. You can have both of those things, run them separately, serve two different audiences, generate more money, generate more traffic, generate more revenue, et cetera.
Speaker 2:The other thing is that, without having to rebrand, I can try something out. So if I want to expand to offering which I don't, but if I wanted to expand to offering, say, elementary math resources, but I didn't want to rebrand myself because I've been secondary math for so long, then I could create a second store. I could test it out, see how it works and then ultimately, if I want to put it all under one roof, I can but I don't have to and do all of that without having to rebrand and I can give it the spotlight that it deserves on it in its own proper store, without having to mess up what I've got going on over here. Do you see what I mean? So, second store, more opportunities for diversification, ability to extend your reach beyond your current niche or audience and then, obviously, the opportunity for additional income without it messing up anything that you currently have going on. So that's one of the reasons why you might want to start another store.
Speaker 2:But let's talk about some pros and cons. So pros and cons to having two stores versus one store. Obviously, as soon as you open a second store, your focus is going to be split between two stores, and you could do a 75-25 split. You could do a 50-50 split. It doesn't really matter how you split it. To some degree you are splitting your time and you're splitting your energy and you're splitting your efforts. One of the things that I heard recently at a business mastermind event was that it's just as easy to scale your business to 2x as it is to scale it to 10x. You just have different priorities and different focuses. And I think sometimes when we decide to take on like a second business venture, like the second TPT store or like a course or membership or something like that, when we start to split our focus, we're looking at 2xing versus like 10xing. You can take the time to diversify and 2x your income and your revenue, or maybe even 10x it. Or if you really sit and you focus on doing the things that work in your business and give that one store your full attention, you could 10x that revenue and never have needed the other business.
Speaker 2:To begin with and I think about this a lot in my personal journey because, as you guys know, I'm really big on diversifying A lot of that comes from my background in selling on TPT, where many of you guys know, as soon as I left the classroom in 2019, less than a year later, we had 2020. And my income just like dropped dramatically because I didn't have any digital resources and the whole world went digital. I was able to recover pretty quickly, but that happening while I was pregnant and had a baby on the way it just honestly it stirred up a lot of fear and anxiety in me concerning my income, concerning my business and the future of my business and really protecting my income. And so I started to try to diversify as much as I could, and that strategy has worked for me. But when I do sit back and look, sometimes I look and I think, okay, I am where I am and I'm happy with where I am, and certainly I'm making more money now than I would have, I believe, if I had just poured all of my efforts and energy into that one business. But what if I had just poured all of my efforts and energy into two revenue streams, I might be making way more money than I'm making right now and having like half the headache, half the stress.
Speaker 2:So sometimes you do kind of have to sit back and just be like okay, do I wanna start the second store because it really would make me a lot more money, or am I going to be starting it just for fun? Is it worth splitting my attention and splitting my focus? You do have to consider that. But some of the pros are you get to run an experiment and so if you've wondered like, did I pick the right niche? Did I do the right thing? You can try, I mean risk-free. The only thing you're spending is your time and maybe a little bit of money. But you get to try some of those things out and see, is there another niche that I could really make it big in? Or can I have this incredible creative outlet for this passion project that I have, for these resources that I really want to create and bring in a little money to help offset the cost or make it worth my time? You have the ability to be able to do that as well. So those are some of the pros to that.
Speaker 2:And then, obviously, as you're diversifying, stepping into a new niche, stepping into a new audience. You never know what doors might open up for you in that world later on. So, for example, my business partner and I run summits for my teacher seller audience and my math audience, or our teacher seller audience and our math audience. We run summits for those audiences. But by expanding out to this homeschool niche, there's the potential later on down the line to have a new summit for a new audience or a new membership for that new audience, which is another revenue generating tool. It can open up more doors and more ways to diversify and you just never know what kind of opportunities might come from expanding out to a different audience.
Speaker 2:But here's what I want you to think about. If you're thinking about starting a second TPT store, here's what you need to do. Before you start it. You need to make sure that you know what you're doing. In your first TPT store.
Speaker 2:You guys, I can tell you like I know what I'm doing when it comes to TPT. I know what I'm doing. Do I always do it right? No, sometimes I do things the easy way. Sometimes I have my VA upload things for me. Sometimes my SEO isn't exactly on point. I don't always do everything right for myself every single time, but do I know what I'm talking about 100%? I can tell you that. And even then, even with me knowing how to set up all the landing pages, how to set up a Facebook ad to generate traffic and to grow leads and grow my email audience, even knowing how to write an email sales funnel, even knowing how to do market research and all the things that are learning curves when starting a new business, even with me already knowing all of that, it was a lot. So if you don't know what you're doing and you don't have things dialed in and honed in, you don't know how to grow an audience, you don't know how to do marketing, you don't know how to create effective covers and previews, you don't know how to create high quality resources and you don't know how to search engine optimize your products. If you just take that lack of knowledge and move it over into a new store, you're just going to be doubling your problems. That's really what you're going to be doing. So you really need to make sure that you have everything down for your current store before trying to branch out and do another store. Otherwise, you're just going to have twice the amount of problems and with a split focus, you might not even have as much revenue as you would have had if you just focused on one. Okay, so you definitely want to make sure before you start that second store, that you know what you're doing in your first store and that your first store, hopefully, is a little bit more on autopilot, you're not having to create a whole bunch of products for it. Still it's in a really good place.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about number four, and this is the really big one. If you're thinking about setting up a store, one of the things you might want to think about is setting up a store that doesn't require very much from you. So this is kind of if you're in that phase of business where you feel like your first store is in a really good place, you don't want to completely split your time 50-50. You want to continue to focus on that first business and give it priority, because it's what's making money for you. But you do want, like the idea of having another store and kind of investing and seeking out and expanding your audience and growing and all that kind of stuff. You can set up a store that requires very little from you.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I do in my second store is I have my VA create the vast majority of my products. I lay out the template for her, pick out the clip art and then I send it to her and I batch it. I say, okay, like here's what you're going to be doing for fall, here's what you're going to be doing for Halloween, here's what you're gonna be doing for Christmas, and like all that. And she creates them because and you can't do this for everything, but in my, in this particular case, these are elementary resources and so it's not, the cost isn't very high to hire out to have those done, because you know we're talking about alphabet tracing, letter recognition, number recognition, accounting and things like that. Right, it's mostly clip art once you've got your template down, and so she's able to do that. No problem. She also has a background in education, so she, she knows what she's doing, but I'm able to send all of that stuff to her and she's able to create the resources, create the covers, create the previews. And if I wanted her to, right now I'm still trying to really look at keywords and SEO and so I'm forcing myself to upload them. But if I wanted her to, she could upload them to TPT, so she could be doing all of those things and all I would have to do is focus on marketing and, once a month, send her the list of items that she's gonna create.
Speaker 2:So there are a lot of ways that you can do this. You can hire writers to really help you create some of those resources and get resources on your shelves. You can pay for Facebook ads to bring in leads so that you're not having to constantly plan or participate in collaborations to grow your email list. There are so many things that you can do to help set up your store. If you have the collateral from your first store, there are so many things with your second store that you can do. That makes it so much easier. So it's not like, yeah, you're starting from scratch in a lot of ways, but you're not starting at the same place that you were when you started your first business, when you were like you know, scraping quarters out of the couch cushions to, you know, pay for gasoline, right?
Speaker 2:You're in a different spot, you're in a new place, you have a little bit you're able to use to leverage the funds in your current business to help you really get the second business off the ground and that can honestly really help to get you some of those reviews that you need right away, to get those purchases right away and to kind of help start to build some momentum for that business in the very early stages, rather than just having to do like a whole bunch of front work and start from scratch. A lot of us do not want to do that Like we don't want to go back to trying to figure out what kind of products am I supposed to be making, what am I supposed to be doing, and trying to relearn everything from scratch. And so if you like the idea of having a second TPT store but you don't want to go back and start over, that's where you can really use that first business to leverage and help you build the second business by leveraging some of the revenue or the cashflow from that first business to help you get that second business up and going. So if you're wanting to start a second Teachers Pay Teachers store. Hopefully this episode gave you some ideas. Maybe it was a little bit helpful.
Speaker 2:If you wanna learn more, I have a private podcast that documents my journey from starting a second Teachers Pay Teachers store to where I am today, where we are about four months in and I've had consistent three-figure months. I've had three-figure months for the last two months, so like not a ton, but I only have a handful of products. So if you wanna learn more about that some of the decisions that I've made in growing that second business and starting a TPT store from scratch you can check out that private podcast. It's $5 a month and I usually try to put out two to four episodes a month, just depending on what all is going on in that second TPT store. And I take the money from that private podcast and it goes towards helping cover the costs of providing this free podcast, covers the cost of the platform that hosts it, covers the cost of the editing and all of that great stuff. So if you're looking for a way to support the podcast, subscribing to the private podcast is a really easy way to do that, because you can learn more about starting your TPT store from the very beginning and trying to grow it a little bit more strategically, some of the pitfalls and things that I've fallen into and just kind of catch up on all of that while still supporting this podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks so much for being here, you guys. Next week on the podcast we're going to be talking about your TPT beginner's guide to batching. So make sure you're subscribed and you tune in for that episode. You do not want to miss it because this is a fantastic episode for beginners and those of you who are seasoned but way overworked. Batching can be your best friend. All right, so we're going to be talking about your guide to batching and how to set up a batching schedule right here on the podcast next week. See you then.