The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
The Ultimate TpT Seller Checklist
Unlock the secrets to skyrocketing your Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) store in 2025 with proven strategies from educator and TPT expert, Lauren Fulton. Discover how aiming for a well-stocked store of at least 50 products can set the stage for success, but remember: quality trumps quantity. Learn how to craft high-impact, strategic bundles, with at least five among your offerings, to boost your revenue potential. Explore the power of pricing diversity, including low-cost items, to draw in new customers and build a robust, sustainable business model.
Dive into the world of strategic pricing and inventory management tailored for educational resource sellers. Lauren reveals the blueprint for creating budget-friendly products, such as $1 mini task card sets, designed for teachers in search of quick fixes. Balance your inventory with a strategic mix of prices—10% under $3, 55% between $3 and $10, and 35% above $10—to cater to a wide audience and maximize sales. Learn the game-changing technique of linking products into cohesive lines like bundles to enhance perceived value. Finally, tackle the goal of reaching 10,000 views to generate approximately 1,000 sales, and gain insights into driving traffic through effective marketing channels. Join us for actionable steps that promise growth with purpose and sustainability.
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.
Speaker 1:This is the ultimate Teachers Pay Teachers checklist for those of you who are wanting to grow your TPT library in 2025. Or for those of you who are brand new to TPT and you don't know kind of numbers you should be aiming for, how many products you should have, all of that good stuff. We're talking numbers today and I don't usually do that If you've been around here for very long. I usually don't give a lot of hard and fast numbers and while the rules if we can put that in quotation marks the rules that I'm going to share today may not apply to everyone and probably won't apply to every single person, if you're creating resources, if you follow this rule, it's going to be a pretty good strategy for the vast majority of businesses in terms of how many resources you should have, how many bundles you should have, how many views you should aim for, what price point your products should be at all of that good stuff. We're going to talk about that today, so let's dive in.
Speaker 1:If you have a product creation goal in 2025, or you're starting to stock your TPT store, the number one goal that we're gonna aim towards and this is what everybody says this has been a longstanding rule and that is the rule of 50. You need to aim for 50 products Now. Does that mean that you aren't gonna start making money before 50 products? No, does that mean, when you hit 50 products, that you're gonna all of a sudden start seeing the money pouring 50 products? No, does that mean, when you hit 50 products, that you're going to all of a sudden start seeing the money pouring? No, not at all. There's a lot of strategy that goes behind the type of products that you're creating. That will determine the strategy. The niche you're in the audience that you have or don't have will also help determine how much money you're going to make whether you have 50 products or you have 50,000 products.
Speaker 1:So just because you have 50 products doesn't mean you're going to start making money, but, in general, sellers who are optimizing their resources, who are creating well thought out product lines when they start to hit that 50 product mark. That's when they start to see some of that revenue really roll in and become a little bit more steady. And the reason is not because 50 is a magic number and TPT starts ranking you higher in the algorithm None of that stuff. That's not true. The reason is because, when you get to about that number of products in your store, buyers are going to come. They're going to see, like, oh, they have a well-stocked store, and they usually start to add more resources to their cart, and right about that time out 50 resources too you tend to have a few more bundles, so you start to get more bundle sales, which means more money, all of that good stuff. And so 50 isn't a magic number. Just means that your business is starting to become a little bit more established and that buyers are starting to spend a little bit more money because they have more to choose from. Okay, so if you're stocking your store in 2025, you're adding resources. 50 is a really good benchmark number. It's a great goal to have Now with those 50 products.
Speaker 1:You do want to make sure, though, that you have at least five bundles, so you want to plan everything out so that you're not just creating 50 low ticket items. You want to make sure that you're squeezing in some higher ticket items in there 40, 50, 100, 200, $300 bundles, just depending on the price of the individual products and so you want to make sure that you have bundled items together. So in order to create five well thought out bundles, that means you need to have those 50 or 45 well thought out individual resources so that you can pair them together or bundle them together appropriately so that you can have some of those higher price bundles. So 50 products, five of those are bundles. Now let's talk about price range, because I think a lot of people think when they first start off, they kind of fall into a couple of camps. Some people will stock their store with really high ticket items, which is great. That's awesome if they sell. But you do wanna have long-term, if you're trying to get people in, you don't have an existing audience, you don't have anyone to market this to.
Speaker 1:You do wanna have some downsell options in your store. You wanna have some low threshold offers in your store, meaning that the barrier for entry for a buyer to purchase is really low, right? So if I have to decide if I'm choosing to purchase a product from a seller that I don't know or don't recognize. Purchasing a $1, $2, $3 product is pretty much a no-brainer right Because I don't stand to lose very much. But if all they have are $10, $15, $20 resources in their store or higher, then I kind of start to pause and I go wait a second. I want to make sure that I'm doing my homework before I make this purchase because I don't want to regret it later. But when we have some of those lower ticket offers in our store, then it makes it a whole lot easier for that buyer to go ahead and say, yeah, like this is a no brainer, of course I'm going to purchase this. It's very low risk for the buyer, so it's really nice to have some of those options in our store.
Speaker 1:So if I were going to break things down by price range and again, these are not hard and fast rules, in fact it's not a rule at all but if I were going to break this down in terms of price range for my own store and I was starting brand new and I had a goal of stocking my store with 50 new resources, then what I would do is I would split it up like this I would do 10% low ticket offers. I'm talking about under $3, okay, under $3. Now, $3 is sort of that magic number if you're a premium seller where when you hit a $3, the $3 mark in the buyer's cart, then you avoid that 15 cent transaction fee. Okay. So a lot of sellers will say, like, don't make anything under $3, or at least that's what they used to say. Don't make anything under $3 because if it's less than $3, you run the risk of getting hit with that 15 cent transaction fee, and then you're just kind of losing money on that, which is a great strategy. It's a great way to think about it. If we're creating resources that are like $2, $2.50, you really do wanna start to think okay, how can I beef this up and get it to the $3 mark so that I'm not getting hit with that additional transaction fee on a resource that already isn't making me very much money?
Speaker 1:However, if I'm creating really strategically like, for example, I have a line of dollar resources in my math store and they're a dollar right I can whip those things up so fast though, because there's not much to them, because they're a dollar right. So it's not like I'm creating this full product and then discounting it down to a dollar and undervaluing the product. It's not like that at all. It's that I purposely designed the product so that it would only be worth a dollar. So, for example, I have some task cards that are like mini task card sets. They only have eight task cards. That's eight math problems. That's nothing. You guys right $4.
Speaker 1:But a lot of times a teacher wants something really quick, they want something really easy and they don't want to spend a lot of money on it. And a dollar is a really easy sell. And if you have several of these in your store like 10, for example, $10 resources or $1.50, store like 10, for example, $10 resources or $1.50, like whatever, then you'll start to see that a lot of times buyers will add multiples of those to your cart. So while they might never have purchased one single $5 item, they might add five $1 items to their cart. So you make the same amount of money or you make more money because that buyer never would have purchased in the first place. Okay, so 10% of those resources under $3, 55% should be between the $3 and $10 mark. Now, this is not a hard and fast rule again, and I'm sure somebody somewhere is listening to this going.
Speaker 1:Lauren, you don't know what you're talking about. Like I've made six figures and all of my units, or whatever, are priced at like above $10. And I don't have resources under $10 in my store. That's great and you know what that works for some people, but I think the vast majority of sellers do not make those big bulky products. We're making small things at a time, which makes a lot of good sense, because most of us are moms, because most of us are moms teachers, we wear multiple hats, and so creating a resource, start to finish, that's worth $10 or more could take us a really long time. So most of us are creating resources that are gonna take us just a little bit of time to create, and so having 55% of your store be between $3 and $10, I think, is a really solid number. Now we gotta make up the rest of that 35%, and that's gonna be resources that are, or listings that are above that $10 mark.
Speaker 1:Now this doesn't mean that you have to create resources that are priced at $10 or above. This could be mini bundles, big bundles or it could be larger ticket items inside of your store. I would just aim for having about 35% of your products be above that $10 mark. Now, having said that, if I were to tally it up, I probably do not have 35% of my products in that top range. But I know because I'm in your data playbook, I know that the average cost per product for me versus other sellers is a little bit on the low side. So that tells me that there's some room for me to grow there and that I could have buyers purchasing higher ticket items. Does that mean that everyone's path is gonna be the same? We all need to have 35%? No, like, I've gotten to where I am without having 35%, so you don't have to have that. But if I were doing it over again and I had the ability to create some higher ticket items, I would absolutely do that the second time around.
Speaker 1:But honestly, really and truly, the easiest way to do this is to create two really well thought out product lines that you can link those products together. So like notes, warmup activity notes, notes craft, something like worksheets, craft, like things that you can bundle together that are going to be like no brainer items. Like, of course you want to purchase that. Those are really easy ways to get some of those higher numbers is just kind of really thinking everything through in advance. All right, here's another number that a lot of people ask me how many views is a good number of views? And I'm going to say aim for 10,000 views. Now, I'm not going to put a timestamp on this. I'm not going to say 10,000 views a month, 10,000 views in a year or anything like that. But this is mostly just for those of you who are just starting off.
Speaker 1:For those 50 products that you've created, you want to try to think about how can I get 10,000 views? And you could put the timeframe on it. You could say a month, because that may be doable for you depending on whether or not you have an outside audience. You could say a year, you could say six months, you could say a quarter, whatever. Pick what you want.
Speaker 1:Just know that 10,000 views, if we have a decent conversion rate of about 10%, is going to be roughly 1,000 sales. So if you're wanting to make 1,000 sales and your average product in your store is worth $5, that would be $5,000 in sales and about 80% of 5,000. What is that? 80% of 5,008 is 4,000. So about $4,000 in earnings.
Speaker 1:Those are some like super rough numbers to just give you a general idea of like okay, if I want to make $4,000, then I need to get 10,000 clicks on my product. So, whether you're getting those clicks from search engine optimizing your resources, being really smart and strategic, with what types of resources you're making strategically, adding upsells, downsells, cross sells to your resources, or driving traffic through social media marketing, email marketing, blogging, pinterest, whatever through social media marketing, email marketing, blogging, pinterest, whatever. However you're getting those, I would aim for 10,000. And just think about what you would need to do to get 10,000 clicks to your products. Okay. And then finally this is more for those of you who are first starting out or for those of you who really kind of struggle to get the ball rolling throughout the course of the year I would aim for 10 note to followers. I think 10 a year honestly would probably be just fine, especially if you don't have an email list and so you're not really able to repurpose that note to followers in any way. 10 a year is fine, but even just getting those first 10 out, I think is really great.
Speaker 1:And then one email opt-in in every product you have, that is a really big one. So, whether that's your goal for the next year, in 2025, or if that's your goal for as a new seller, is just to make sure you have an email opt-in in every product. That should be a goal for every single seller is to have an email opt-in in every product. Now, this one can wait. If you're brand new and you're a little bit leery of email marketing, you haven't started yet and it makes you feel really nervous to even think about that one. That one can wait, but you do want it to be a goal. Don't take it off your list, because I promise you it can really change the game and help you out long-term for growth in your business. So that was the ultimate TPT growth checklist 50 products. Five of them are bundles.
Speaker 1:Follow the 10, 55, 35 rule, with 10% of resources priced under $3, 55% between three and 10, and 35% of your listings being $10 or above. You want to aim for 10,000 views at least. If you're trying to earn about 4,000 bucks, assuming you have a great conversion rate Send 10 note to followers, just check that off and then add one email opt-in to every single product. Thanks so much for being here, you guys. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure and check out our YouTube channel. We're on YouTube so you can see my face while I talk, which, now that I'm thinking about it, it might not really may not be the selling point that I was hoping it was going to be. But yeah, come join us on YouTube. We're going to have a lot of fun over there. I've got some tutorials and things planned for 2025. So you want to make sure you're subscribed over on that channel. Thanks so much for being here, you guys. I'm going to see you right back here next week.