5. Selling on TpT: Make stats your best friend

Early on in my TpT adventure, I remember someone in a blog writing, “Make data your best friend.” I have certainly found this to be true.

On a recent forum, it was asked what a seller should do to sell more products. Most people replied that they should create more products, but I replied differently. I advised them to promote their existing products differently to make them stand out; and to check data on a daily, monthly and quarterly basis. Let’s face it, teachers always need data to track how children are doing. School leaders use this to inform them of next steps in learning or interventions needed. Likewise, for TpT sellers, it informs us about the impact of the products we sell. – are they good enough? What might be putting people off? Are my sales growing? What are the trends? Why is this product doing so well and not this one?

Here is my definitive guide to data and statistics available for TpT sellers – there is plenty of it!

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Dashboard

The best place to start is on your TpT dashboard. In the top left hand corner, you can see three very important pieces of information – the number of followers you have; and the number of pieces of feedback you have received. The higher these numbers are, the more credible you are seen to be to buyers. It’s important that these numbers are continually growing. The third piece of important info is the average rating itself. Do not settle for anything less than 4 stars. If this shows 3.8 or 3.9, you need to spend some serious time improving your products. The feedback comments may tell you where it is going wrong for you. But remember, even though 3.9 is almost full marks, it is not good enough.

Also on the dashboard are a number of other graphs that you can access. By default, it will show your earnings so far in the month you are in:

This is helpful in itself, but becomes really informative when you start playing with the drop down menus and tick boxes:

The key difference above is that I’ve toggled the heading to show views rather than earnings. You can see the other options available. I’ve also ticked a box for ‘Last Year’ which provides a clear and handy comparison for this data, year on year. I can see that the blue line is ahead of the green, so across my store I am receiving more views than last year. This data can be organised by day, week, month, year, all time or custom date. The third drop down menu, titled ‘For’ is possibly the best of all! Here, you can select all your products, or just specific ones. You may have  a product that sold brilliantly last year, but this year it isn’t getting off the ground. Then you can try to work out why and do something about it.

My Product Statistics

Another crucial section of statistics available on TpT is your product statistics. This  can be found on a menu that you access by clicking the drop down just to the left of your ‘cart’ in the top right of the screen when you are logged in to TpT. Here are mine:

I can clearly see the units sold for each product, the conversion rate and my total earnings. If I click on ‘Activity’ I can see views, previews and how many times my products have been wish listed. If I check out ‘Reviews’ I can see the number of votes and the average score of those votes – remember, accept nothing less than 4 stars! Otherwise, it’s back to the drawing board I’m afraid.

My Sales Details

The third section of data available on TpT are your individual sales themselves.

You can again filter these by date, and download them in .CSV format. I find this very useful, as you can sort the data in an Excel document and analyse trends. One of the great things about downloading to a spreadsheet is that it tells you where your buyers are actually from – not just the country, but the state as well! I found this beneficial in my Commonwealth Games comprehension – I noticed that all my purchases were from Australia, and none at all from the United States!

One feature I look out for is the category that says ‘BUYER (#PURCHASES)’ . I have rather crudely crossed out the names of the buyers, but the number in brackets shows how many products that buyer has purchased from me in total. If I click on the number, it will tell me the purchase history from my store for that buyer. Great data! I love this because I’m trying to grow a brand where people come back to me time and time again to buy reading comprehensions.

By the way, the number in brackets after the product is the total number of purchases for that product.

TpT Rank Finder

There are also a couple of websites where you can analyse your data in finer detail. The TpT Rank Finder is a very simple site that allows you to track your sales growth in comparison to the other 50k sellers of TpT . It refreshes each day. I like to see how I’m moving up!

As you can see, it gives a world rank as well as a country rank, and tells you if you’ve moved up or down in the last 24 hours.

Teachers Love Data

The other website, which is a bit more comprehensive and full of graphs and pie charts is the excellent Teachers Love Data. On the home page, it shows charts of the main movers in the sales ranks each day. To be honest, I pay little attention to this as it is not helpful. Instead, I select ‘Charts’ which is the third option on the top menu bar. This asks me to insert data from a .CSV file which I can download from my TpT site (see above). A whole world of interesting data is now available to me:

You can see for yourself the data on offer. I love the pie chart as it tells me my busiest days. As a result, I no longer feel down if I’ve had a bad sales Saturday – the data tells me that this is just a bad day for TpT sales – probably because teachers are out enjoying themselves!

The final part of this report allows me to select individual items of my store and check up on their performance over time. This tells me how much each product has made for me for each day it has been on TpT. Clearly, I can see the peaks and troughs for sales on that product. All great data!

That’s the end of my guide to data on TpT. I find it incredibly useful. I have to hold myself back sometimes from checking it every minute of the day, but by looking at it regularly, it has certainly helped to boost my sales.

Thanks for reading.

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4. Selling on TpT: How to make your products stand out from the crowd.

So, you’ve created a product that works brilliantly for your own students, and you’d like to share this with a wider audience.

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But with over 3 million products already on TpT, you can be sure that your product is not completely unique – it will have to work hard to jump out from the feed of other products.

Promoting products on TpT is something of a science. From the use of keywords in product listings to a secure grasp of working across several social media profiles, effective promotion demands some knowledge of HTML code and how algorithms work.

If I’m completely honest, that aspect of my promotion is still ‘work in progress’. Perhaps when I know a bit more, I may blog about it! What is important to me, however, is creating products that STAND OUT! I know my approach is successful because when I applied the following steps to my products, I saw an instant return in conversions (the amount of sales in relation to views of the products). In fact, this rate doubled! So here are four tips:

1) Engaging cover images

Engaging cover images are a must. Take half an hour after creating a product to showcase it clearly. It will pay dividends. Use PowerPoint to create these images, and select a custom slide size of about 6 inches (or 15cm) square as this is the optimum size to make your products look BIG on the feed. In order to change the size of your slides in PPT, select the Design tab and change to these settings:

Here are some examples of my covers:

And here is how my products show on a page. Can you see the difference?!

2) Links! Links! Links!

Make sure you add hyperlinks to other relevant products within descriptions.

If a seller is buying a product from you and they like what they see, make sure you show other similar products to them. In product descriptions, add hyperlinks to your other products. You might also include a page in your product with hyperlinks to your other work. Use every opportunity to get your links out there! Click here to see one of my product descriptions with hyperlinks to other products.

There are lots of blogs out there telling you how to insert hyperlinks, and for that matter, changing the font into bold or italics in your product descriptions. Here is one that will help you. It does involve a little bit of HTML code, but nothing too tricky.

3) Mark your helpful feedback

There is no better feeling than receiving excellent feedback. As a buyer, it’s one of the first things I look for, so as a seller, feedback is crucial. One of the great things about TpT is that you can put your very best piece of feedback at the top of the comments for that product. Simply mark it as ‘helpful’, and it will appear at the top of the comments for that product. Here is one of mine. Look in the bottom right corner:

On the subject of feedback, it’s worth replying to as many comments as possible as it shows that you as a seller value the opinion of your customers. Sometimes, a simple acknowledgment of their feedback might encourage them to buy from you again. In responding to them, you have formed a relationship.

Here are some of my responses to my ‘Mysteries of the World’ comprehension package, which was one of my first products on TpT:

4) Create full products previews

So, you’ve done your images. You’ve written a description full of keywords. You’ve added links to other products using HTML. And now you have a preview to create. These are all extra tasks on top of the product itself, and it all takes time. Many would say it is time well spent, but when it comes to previews, there is actually no need to create a brand new document. Your product images will hopefully show enough of your product to help the buyer. For the preview itself, I simply add a watermark to the entire document and resave this as a PDF. That way, a buyer can see EXACTLY what they are buying without being able to use it. There are various pieces of software that will do this. I use I Love PDF

Here’s an example:

 

I really hope that you find these tips helpful. They have made a big difference to me.

Happy selling!

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3. Selling on TpT: Why should I sell on TpT?

Do it because it’s the best marketplace for teachers!

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In the United Kingdom, there is a more guarded and suspicious attitude to teachers selling resources to other teachers. As teaching is a sharing profession, it has often been the assumption that every resource created by a teacher should be shared free of charge. While this is a noble idea, it doesn’t take into account why some teachers feel the need to do it.

For me personally, there are two main reasons:

1. To earn extra money
2. To be part of a much bigger community outside the boundaries of my own school.

Let’s take that first point first. A respected blogger in the UK wrote an article that was critical about sites such as TpT. He said that ‘Schools pay teachers, NOT teachers pay teachers.’ While this was an interesting read, I have to disagree that the government has failed in its obligation to pay teachers fairly over the last decade.  UK teachers have not had a pay rise for almost ten years and the pay freeze is ongoing. As the government seeks to ‘balance the books’, the teaching profession is seen by them as an easy target. I could write a whole new blog on this but here is the problem: I have a young family and a mortgage to pay. I am the main earner and need to diversify my income stream in order to provide for my family. Selling resources allows me to do this whilst still using what I make in my own classroom – it’s an extension of my job rather than an extra role.

Secondly, as a teacher, it is easy to feel like you’re in a bubble where your own school is the centre of the universe. Selling online provides me with contact with a community of educators around the globe. For me, selling just isn’t about creating products – it’s seeing how to develop my teaching practice through observing and connecting with others through feedback, forums, Pinterest and Twitter. There is a whole world to explore beyond my school, and I am able to empathise with the issues affecting education and children thousands of miles from my classroom.

In the UK, I have noticed in the past couple of years that a shift is taking place. Many of the publishers that have previously been used corporately by schools (OUP, Scholastic, Pearson, ReadWriteInk) are finding their share of the resources market is being reduced by individual sellers – teachers selling more targeted resources responding to immediate needs. This seems to have been happening in the USA for quite some time.

 

2. Selling on TpT: Where do I start?

The best place to start is in your own classroom!

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In recent years, comprehension skills have become a much greater focus; certainly in the UK where I teach. This was partly due to poor performance in the PISA scores.

As such, teaching and practicing these skills took a much greater emphasis in guided reading sessions. So often, however, the texts that we were looking at were just so dull.

For me, teaching a child to read should not be about tests. It shouldn’t be too mechanical and methodical. Teaching a child to read is about opening whole new worlds to them. It should be fun. It should be educational. The ultimate goal of reading is that it should be a pleasurable activity. So I started writing my own comprehensions.

I went through a spell of being fascinated by the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot; developing a comprehension pack on mysteries of the world. I was captivated by World War One for a few months when it was the centenary of the start of the war. There were some fantastic individual stories in there – the soldier who saved Hitler being a controversial but engaging favourite for many of my students. I also covered amazing stories of survival, such as the miners in Chile who were stuck underground for over a month. Amazing stories! The students loved them – and I really enjoyed writing them.

1. Selling on TpT: Why am I here?

Richard Townend Reading for Success

When I first started selling resources online about five years ago, there was some hostility from other teachers who thought that I should provide my resources for free. After all, teaching is a giving profession.

So why sell resources?

Firstly – do it to supplement your income. Teaching is not a well-paid profession. We do the job not for the salary, but so we can make a difference in the lives of children. That is why I get up in a morning. But I can’t ignore the fact that I am the main earner in our household. Selling resources gives me a chance to do the job I love and pay the bills. What’s more, my students benefit greatly from my products.

Secondly – do it because you enjoy it. I like nothing more than getting my head into some serious research about a topic that I may have been blissfully ignorant of. I was completely enthralled when reading about World War One, particularly some of the individual actions of heroic soldiers. One of the great things about teaching is that we are also on a journey of learning!

Thirdly – do it because you can offer something different. For me, it’s reading comprehension activities. After falling behind in the PISA international school tables, the UK has put a great emphasis on comprehension skills, but the content on offer is so often dry and uninteresting! I started writing because I wanted to excited my children through the comprehensions we were looking at.

That’s why I do what I do what – and why I am writing this right now.

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