The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
11 Summer Strategies for TPT Sellers to Boost Your Back to School Income
Ready for your most strategic summer yet? As teacher-sellers, our summer break offers the perfect opportunity to grow our TPT businesses—not necessarily because we have more time, but because we have more flexibility to focus on impactful strategies that set us up for success when the classroom chaos returns.
This episode breaks down a four-pillar approach to summer TPT growth that won't leave you overwhelmed or burnt out. Rather than attempting to implement every possible strategy, I guide you through selecting just one focus from each essential category: product creation, marketing, back-to-school preparation, and business expansion.
For product creation, discover how batching seasonal resources, updating best-sellers, or creating mini-product lines can maximize your efforts. Learn why summer is the perfect moment to capture authentic marketing content while you're deep in creation mode, and how to leverage low-effort engagement strategies that build relationships when both you and teachers have more bandwidth to connect.
The most successful teacher-sellers prepare strategically for back-to-school season, creating freebie funnels that lead to their best products and preparing all sale assets before the rush begins. Summer also provides the rare opportunity to tackle those significant business projects you've postponed—whether implementing email marketing, mastering SEO, or building systems that will save you countless hours throughout the school year.
Set yourself up for sustainable success by creating reasonable time budgets for both summer and the upcoming school year. The goal isn't productivity at all costs—it's purposeful growth that allows you to return to your classroom feeling accomplished and prepared, knowing your business is positioned to thrive even during your busiest teaching periods.
What summer strategy will make the biggest difference in your TPT business this year? Share in the comments which approach you're implementing first!
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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 it.
Speaker 1:For the vast majority of TPT sellers, summer is the time to work on your business, grow and to really push yourself for the sales goals for the upcoming school year. This is, of course, because most TPT sellers are still in the classroom, and so summer is the time where you have a little bit more flexibility maybe not more time, but at least more flexibility to kind of work towards some of those goals. So in this episode, we're talking about some summer strategies little bit more flexibility maybe not more time, but at least more flexibility to kind of work towards some of those goals. So in this episode, we're talking about some summer strategies that you can utilize in your business to help you prepare for the upcoming school year and make the most of the time you have this summer. Now I want to preface this by saying please, please, do not try to use all of these strategies. Okay, I'm about to give you a lot of strategies and if you were to try to implement all of them, or even half of them, then you would be extremely overworked and overwhelmed this summer, and that's not the goal. The goal is to relax and have a sense of accomplishment for when you go back to school, so that you can spend your back to school season, when you're back in the classroom, kind of calm and knowing that your business is set up for success and you can take a little bit of a hiatus during that busy back to school season.
Speaker 1:We're going to split our strategies up into four different categories. The first category is product creation. The second category is marketing or staying top of mind with your customer. The third category is prepping for back to school. And our fourth category is one of my favorites and that is the expansion category, and we're going to talk about that towards the end. Make sure you stick around for all four of them, because I think the last one is a combination of the most overused and the most underused strategy where most sellers kind of fall in the spectrum of either not doing it at all or overdoing it and kind of missing out on the revenue that's going to come from implementing strategies in the other categories.
Speaker 1:As I'm going through these today, I would like to challenge you to pick one thing from each category, one item from each category, and then go through those items, go through that checklist and maybe take one thing out so that you have three summer goals. If you have extra time this summer, if you are not super busy, you don't have a lot on your agenda then maybe stretch it and do four, one from each category, but let's go ahead and get started because we have a lot to cover. Number one product creation. So there are several different product creation strategies that you can use during the summer. One of them is to batch, create seasonal products. Now, you guys know I love a seasonal product, especially if you're newer to TPT.
Speaker 1:A seasonal resource or having a seasonal product line can really be the thing that kind of helps push you every single month, kind of push you a little bit closer to your sales goal. And so if you don't have seasonal resources in your store or maybe you have, you know, a Valentine's and a Halloween, but you don't have everything in between this is a really good time to kind of batch out those seasonal resources, fill in some of those gaps and go ahead and get everything bundled together, because a lot of times you kind of start maybe mid year or you know you had enough time to create something for Thanksgiving or for fall, but you didn't have enough time in the spring or to create an end of year activity. And so when you're able to kind of wrap up those seasonal resources, those seasonal items, every season that you come to throughout the year, you're going to have an opportunity to upsell that bundle, whereas if you don't have that bundle already packaged together and I do recommend packaging all the seasonal items that are alike together so that when you get to Halloween or when you get to Earth Day and the teachers are looking for those seasonal activities, they can say, oh, you know what. I want to not think about the rest of the seasons. This is a really great activity. Let me just go ahead and snack all of them while I'm here, and that is a really great way to utilize your summertime. It's just to go ahead and fill in those gaps and create that bundle. If you don't have any seasonal resources, then I would focus on some of the big ones. Maybe try to focus on one per month and try to knock those out before we get to back to school season. That way you can go ahead and bundle something together or even if you can't do one a month, maybe you do Halloween, you do Thanksgiving, you do winter or Christmas or Hanukkah or a holiday activity, and then do Valentine's Day, st Patrick's Day and then maybe one to wrap up the school year. You could also go the route of doing like back to school, fall, winter, spring into school year. You could do that. But you're going to want to make sure and do your market research in your niche to make sure that those are search terms that you could show up for A lot of times. Being more specific, like saying Valentine's day or Christmas or Hanukkah, can get you a little bit more traction in TPT search or a little more visibility in TPT search, versus using something like winter or spring.
Speaker 1:Strategy number two in this first category is to update and optimize your best sellers. So I still put this under the product creation list because during the school year I think it's a whole lot easier to go through and make search engine optimization tweaks, make preview tweaks, cover tweaks, things like that. But a lot of times there's like a whole product line that just needs a complete update. Maybe it's something you created when you were a beginner on TPT and now it just needs like a refresh and a better look. And making those big updates and overhauls can sometimes be more time consuming than starting a product from scratch, and so summertime is a really great time to go ahead and knock out all of those updates.
Speaker 1:Strategy number three is to build a mini product line. So create three to five resources with a common theme or a common skill and just bundle those three to five resources with a common theme or a common skill and just bundle those three to five resources together. So maybe focus on, instead of doing really big bundles, maybe make a mini back to school bundle where you have a back to school activity, you have a back to school craft and you have like a back to school lesson or back to school slides something like that that you could create like a little mini bundle of and you could create those like three resources. Do it for back to school, do it for team building, do it for Halloween, you could, or whatever the topic may be. You can create those little mini bundles, so it's not a huge investment for your audience. It's kind of like a really nice little built-in upsell where you're creating resources that all go really really well together and so you have three products that are all leading to the bundle, all upselling to the bundle, and that might be a really great way to make the most out of your product creation time, especially if you can only create maybe 10 or 12 resources.
Speaker 1:Then you could create, say, three to four little mini bundles versus creating one big bundle. And then you could create, say, three to four little mini bundles versus creating one big bundle, and then you have more opportunity. Plus, you can kind of experiment with having a lower priced upsell. So instead of having 12 $3 resources that you're bundling together and giving a discount and selling for, say, $25 or $28, you could have four sets of $3 resources. So each little set is worth $9 and you could sell it for $6 or $5.99 or $6.99. And you could get those little mini discounts. And so it's a little bit more of a no brainer for a buyer to go ahead and purchase those mini bundles. They're still spending more, you're still getting a higher cart total with their purchase because they're purchasing a mini bundle. But it's a little bit more of a no brainer versus a teacher going ahead and purchasing a $25, $30, $40 larger bundle For all the things that you could do for your business during the summer months.
Speaker 1:I really believe that product creation should still be a pillar of what you're doing, unless you're at the point in your business where you have five, six, 700 resources, and even then we're putting product updates under that category. So chances are, if you have 500 or more resources in your store honestly, if you have probably a hundred or more resources in your store, you have resources that need some big updates and now is a really great time to knock those out. So, whatever makes it on your ultimate to-do list for the summer, I definitely would include product creation. Strategy set number two is to work on your marketing. So staying top of mind without being online all day, and I think one of the things that is really difficult when we get into busy seasons whether it's busy season with family, busy season with work, or if it's a combination of both then it can be really stressful to be like oh my gosh, I didn't even get my email out this week, or I forgot to send a note to followers, or it's been five days since I've even posted to stories on social media and I am feeling really terrible about that, like I'm feeling super behind, but I don't know what to do about it. So summertime is a really great time to go ahead and batch out and work on some of your marketing.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean that you have to do all of it for the entire year. In fact, most of the time. I would kind of recommend not doing that, because it's really hard to stay on top of current trends, especially with social media marketing, or really keep your finger on the pulse of your business and of what your customers are asking for if you are creating content that far in advance with like zero flexibility. But one of the things that you can do is, as you are creating some of these newer resources let's say you're printing, staging, photographing them now go ahead and create a couple of reels. Go ahead and create a couple of stories. Show some behind the scenes footage of you creating the actual product and some of your thought process behind it. Create some of that B roll footage that you can use for your social media marketing. Now, as you're creating it, as you're printing it, as you're staging and as you're photographing it, as you're doing all of those things like go ahead and create some of that footage Now, edit it down and make the content as you're thinking about it.
Speaker 1:A lot of times, when we're knee deep in the product creation process, we're really thinking about some of the finer points of our resources, some of the little things that about our product that makes it extra usable, that makes it extra engaging or that makes it really valuable for a teacher or for a student. We're providing unique learning opportunities that are built into the resource. And when we get a little ways out from that product and we're moving on to creating something else and we go to market it later on, we forget some of those finer details and some of the reasoning why we did what we did or how we structured the product the way we structured it. So going ahead and creating some of those content pieces as you're creating your resources can be a really valuable asset for you later on.
Speaker 1:You can also take some of the time to think about like little teacher tips or things that you do throughout the school year, or things that you did throughout the school year that were really helpful that you want to do again. You can go ahead and film content like that If you're one of those teachers who goes up to your classroom during the summer, which bless you, if you are that person that was absolutely never me. But if that is you and you're going up there and you're prepping or you're like, hey, I've got to like work on X, y and Z, like I might as well go up to the school, have a nice quiet environment, then that might be a really good time to go ahead and film a little bit of behind the scenes content or some of those little tips and strategies that are evergreen that you can throw in throughout the year. And having even just five little reels or five little pieces of content that you can use at any time throughout the year could really come in clutch on those weeks when things are super busy and you're like you know what? I have a reel that's already ready to go. I'm just going to go ahead and post that one.
Speaker 1:Same for email marketing you can go ahead and batch create several emails. Same for email marketing you can go ahead and batch create several emails. Go ahead and write out emails that are evergreen, with evergreen tips, tricks, solutions, tried and true free resources that you use online, whatever it is. Go ahead and batch, create some of those. You don't even have to schedule them, you can just kind of have them in the queue and then, as you're going throughout your school year, you can say, okay, you know what, I don't really have anything this week or I'm not feeling it this week. Let me pull from one of those emails that I've already written and let me just go ahead and schedule that out.
Speaker 1:Strategy number five is to leverage some low lift engagement, so little things that you can do during the summer to boost your engagement on Instagram, that you might not have time to do some of those extra things during the school year or you may not even think about so really focusing on story engagement, so adding polls or asking people to reply to your stories I know I see this one a lot where, like, an influencer will say something. There's this one influencer that I'm thinking of right now. She'll say something that's like extremely controversial in her stories and rather than putting like a poll or putting a question box, she'll say and it's usually about parenting like, I don't know, what do you guys think about co-sleeping? She knows that she's going to be like barraged in her inbox with so many people with polarizing opinions, and how can a parent, like not respond to that? That obviously is going to be a major boost to her engagement, because people are then interacting with her, they're replying to her, they're giving their opinion. So Instagram is like moving her stories up the algorithm, pushing it out to more people who are then going to engage with her stories.
Speaker 1:So, thinking of some simple strategies like that that you can utilize over the summer, like I don't know you guys, like, I'm thinking about going up to the school and working on my classroom a little bit, but I'm also kind of conflicted because this is the time that I get to spend with my kids. I don't know, what do you guys think about that? Do you think teachers should be expected to have these really cool classrooms? Well, like, I want my classroom to be warm, welcoming and friendly, and I think it's so cool when teachers do that. I feel like the expectation is there, but I don't get paid to do that. I feel like the expectation is there, but I don't get paid to do that. So, like what, what do you think, throwing things out there that you know are going to be super controversial, that you're going to have people who are really for it or really against it, or maybe even people who are neutral, who are just like girl you do, you, you know, but get them to reply without putting up a poll, without putting up the question box, without doing the things that are actually easier for you. But thinking about some of those strategies and utilizing some of those strategies during the summer, when you have a little bit more time and when teachers have a little bit more time to respond, can go a long way towards boosting your engagement long-term, because those teachers are now interacting and engaging with you and building a know, like and trust relationship with you when they have a little bit more time, so that when they come back during the school year and they have a little bit less time to interact and engage, you're going to kind of show up a little bit higher in their algorithm, even if it's just for stories.
Speaker 1:Another good strategy in this leveraging low lift engagement is to recycle high performing posts. So if you have access to trial reels, which I think the vast majority of creators do now, this is a really great time to go back through, like all of your top posts from the school year and or even from last summer, and just start reposting them as trial reels. You can do this every single day, like every day. You can just repost another trial reel and then picking some of the top ones to maybe repost to your actual feed is a great strategy as well, where you don't have to actually create new content but you can just recycle the content that's proven itself in a way that can extend your reach beyond your audience. So if you're not familiar with trial reels, you should 100% be utilizing them.
Speaker 1:Trial reels is a way to take and recycle a reel or even experiment. I think initially it was designed to help you experiment and see what type of posts do better. So you can take a reel, you upload it just like normal. You do everything like normal, but at the very end there's a little toggle that says trial reel. You push that on and it doesn't show up in your feed to any of your followers. So all of your followers who are like yeah, she's posted that like a million times, I've seen that so many times it's not going to show up in their feed and it's only going to show up for people who are not following you, and so it's a really great way to extend your reach and extend the life and reachability of content that you've already created, especially content that's already proven itself. So this is a really great method to use during the summer. You have a little bit of extra time. I mean, honestly, you could use it all year round but it's a great method to use during the summer to just start reposting those every day, because normally you may not post a reel every day. But this is very low stress, very low work. You just use something that you've already created and just repost it as a trial reel.
Speaker 1:Goal set number three is prepping for back to school. So the very first strategy that you could utilize for prepping for back to school is creating a freebie funnel. So I think it's a good practice every year to put out a new email opt-in, and even if you have a bunch of them like most email marketing experts will tell you like you need at least five really solid email opt-ins so that you can kind of recycle through them throughout the school year. Sometimes we kind of just start putting things up like willy nilly, like we'll just go oh, here's a freebie, like let me just create an opt-in for it real quick, because we want people to opt in to get the free resource, which is great, but it may not be like something that's super high converting and it may not be something that's very well thought out, especially if there's no funnel built follow up with the person who signs up. So creating a relevant freebie that leads to your best back to school product is a really great strategy to utilize during the summer to go ahead and start getting people thinking about back to school and thinking about your back to school resources by going ahead and giving them that freebie and giving them a little taste of the product that you are going to be selling and really pushing during back to school.
Speaker 1:Strategy number seven is to really go ahead and prep for back to school. Strategy number seven is to really go ahead and prep for back to school sales events. I think this is a genius strategy because, honestly, back to school sales, or any sale, really kind of sneaks up on you. But a lot of teachers are already in school during the back to school season, so like they may not even have students yet. Some already have students and they're already actively teaching during the back to school season. So like they may not even have students yet, some already have students and they're already actively teaching during the back to school sale. Some are just in their classroom and they're doing their teacher in service.
Speaker 1:But when that sale sneaks up on you and you're like, oh man, like I wanted to have a specific banner, like I really wanted to have something that highlighted some of my back to school resources, I wanted to have my emails already batched out. I have my emails already batched out. Like you then have to kind of like throw something together at the last minute and that's not great. So, going ahead and thinking about your back-to-school sales strategy, you know it's gonna happen. You know it's probably going to be the first Tuesday and Wednesday in August and then somewhere towards the very end of the month, there's going to be a back-to-school bonus sale and there's gonna be another day. So go ahead and prep those emails now. Go ahead and prep the banners now. If you want to change out your store banner and focus on some specific back to school products or a specific special that you're going to be running during the back to school sale, go ahead and create all that stuff now so that you don't have to think about it then and you could set a tentative schedule, just in case. But honestly, I would just leave those emails and drafts, have those graphics created in Canva and then wait until the Make sure like for some reason, tpg hasn't decided to change their code strategy and then you're ready to go for back to school.
Speaker 1:Strategy number eight is set a time budget for the upcoming school year. Like summer is really the time or at least it was really time that I pushed myself and I really focused hard on my business so that during the school year I could be so much more flexible with my schedule, knowing that some weeks were really hard emotionally, mentally, physically, they were just draining. And I didn't have it in me always to push myself during the school year and I think most teachers don't. But setting a schedule for your back to school season where you set very reasonable expectations for yourself and maybe I'm going to work three hours a week on product creation and general business maintenance and then I'm going to work one hour a week on marketing Just setting something super basic for yourself, goals that you can easily achieve and probably easily overachieve in, so that even on those weeks that are really difficult, your bare minimum is still something that you can do this can help kind of prevent burnout throughout the school year, because I think a lot of times we really get that big momentum, that really big push during summer and we want to kind of keep that going through the school year and then we get burnt out.
Speaker 1:Or we do the opposite, where we have that really big push and then we're just like, okay, I'm done, and we take like a break and we have a hard time kind of getting back into the swing of TPT, and that's also not great. So having some sort of time budget for yourself for back to school season and honestly, even having a time budget for yourself during summer can also really help. That way you're making sure that you're getting the rest that you need, that you are taking advantage of some of the downtime that you may have and then also making sure that you are working to meet those goals. And I'm not saying that you can't do this. Okay, y'all don't come for me in the comments, but if your goal, if you have really big goals to achieve during the summer, but you find yourself every summer just kind of ending up at the pool every day, that's not a bad thing. But if you're wanting to meet your goals, you're going to need to hold yourself to them, and so setting a time budget for your summer schedule is also a really great strategy. So let's talk about that fourth category, that category that I said at the very beginning.
Speaker 1:Kind of people fall into one section or the other where they either go all in on this category or they just avoid it entirely, and that is to try some of the things that you've been avoiding or that you've been putting off in your business because it's going to take up too much time. So I think throughout the school year there are a lot of things that TPT business owners, a lot of strategies that they hear about, or a lot of marketing tips or think techniques, things that they should be doing or they feel like they should be doing or they really want to do, but they're like, if I start that right now, it's going to take up so much time, and a really great example for that is email marketing. A lot of people really want to do email marketing. They really want to get started with it or they want to do it right, but it's difficult to learn everything and to get everything set up because there's so much to learn. It's difficult to do that in the middle of the school year while you're trying to run general maintenance on your TPT business.
Speaker 1:Summer is a really great time to dedicate some time to learning and kind of working on some of those things that you've been putting off. So tackling the later list. Pick one project you've put off email marketing, blogging, pinterest strategy, building your own store or website, any of those things. Ask yourself what would make me really proud in August if I got it done right now, or what would really push my business forward in the next school year if I got this done right now. And don't dedicate all of your summer to this, but dedicate a good chunk of your time towards learning this new skill or implementing this new strategy inside of your business. This is the time where you actually have time to learn and to grow, and that brings us to our next strategy within this category, which is strategy number 10, and that is learn with a purpose.
Speaker 1:So don't just consume random content. I think that this is a rabbit hole that we kind of fall into, where a lot of times, we just like start watching all the YouTube videos or we start following all the TPT seller tips and advice on TikTok and Instagram, we start following all these people and listening to all the podcasts. This is a really great time to learn based on your current goals. So pick those goals from you know one from each section, and then choose to listen to podcasts, youtube videos, take courses that align with those goals that you have. So set a timer for 30 minutes and maybe it's 30 minutes of learning and then 30 minutes of implementation, or keep a next step document, so, like, keep a doc going to where it's like okay, I'm really trying to learn about email marketing. These are all of the things that I need to learn. Let's start with step one and let's find someone who can teach me about step one, which is choosing a great lead magnet, right, and so consume that content, learn it and then implement it and then move on to the next step and do the same thing.
Speaker 1:Right in line with that is strategy number 11, which is choosing one skill to level up. So let's say that you don't have anything necessarily new that you want to implement in your business, but you have an area of your business where you really want to level up, like I really want to level up my blogging or my search engine optimization for my website, or I really want to level up my podcast game, or I really want to level up my social media marketing and whatever it is. You can take a course maybe it's a copywriting course, or it's a course on Canva, or it's really diving into SEO and everything that you can learn about that. Summer is the time to really focus on learning one thing either learning it for the first time and doing it for the first time, or to learn how to level up in one area of your business and really go hard on it, and then you can take notes and create strategies that you can utilize all year round based on your learning, and this can really help set you up for success all year long or even make just things so much easier and save you so much time for the rest of the year. So let's say, for example, that I really want to learn time management, or I really want to build systems within my business. I can really take a deep dive and learn everything I can about systems and creating systems within a TPT business and then go ahead and implement those systems, start building those systems out for my business so that when I sit down to work, I don't have to wonder what I'm working on, I don't have to wonder where something is. I don't have to try to find something like. I can sit down and I can immediately start working and be more productive and make the most of my time throughout the year.
Speaker 1:And a little personal plug. This is why Teacher Seller Summit can be so valuable for your business is that when you have something that you want to learn and we were talking inside of the free Facebook group and this was like the number one piece of advice from people who had been to Teacher Seller Summit before and we're going again is pick things to learn that align with your goals, and you can pretty much find multiple pieces of content that's going to align with any given goal that you have, whether that's leveling up your marketing, leveling up your TPT game, starting an email list, whatever that is. So pick your summer goals and then pick sessions that are aligned with those focuses so that you don't get distracted. So if it's SEO, deep dive into SEO. We have several different sessions on search engine optimization, from a session that I'm doing called rank high sell more, to another session from one of our presenters that's talking about really understanding buyer intent when they're utilizing the search engine Super great. Or if it's product creation.
Speaker 1:Email marketing we have so many sessions on email marketing. It is going to be so much fun. Branding we have sessions for branding. Go sign up and we have like a little checklist that we sent out and you can like go and make your list of, like, these are the sessions that I'm going to attend, these are the ones that I'm going to listen to, and this is all starting this Thursday. So, like you do not wanna miss this, it's starting this Thursday.
Speaker 1:I'm super excited and if you purchase your ticket before this Thursday, you're gonna save a ton of money. So there is a free ticket that's going to get you access to all of the mini masterclass sessions. It's going to get you access to the three free workshops that I'm doing. You're going to get access to meet and greets, where you get to meet and chat with other TPT sellers. It's going to be a lot of fun. You can do all of that for free.
Speaker 1:But if you are wanting to get access to everything all the pro level sessions, the curated conversations that happen during round table discussions, or the expert Q&A calls, where you get to ask your questions to a live panel of experts then go ahead and get that pro ticket, because if you get it before Thursday it's gonna be $79., but if you get it after Thursday it's 129. So got your free ticket and you're thinking about going pro. Or if you haven't purchased your ticket yet, go ahead and grab it now, before the price goes up on Thursday. You are not going to want to miss Teacher Seller Summit, and you can find the link to grab your ticket down inside of the description. If you've heard a strategy that you plan to utilize this summer, drop your strategy down inside of the comments. I cannot wait to hear what you guys are going to be working on. Thanks so much for being here, you guys. I'm going to see you right back here next week. We're going to be talking about some simple strategies that you can utilize.