How to Make Money on Teachers Pay Teachers
Are you a skilled teacher with an entrepreneurial drive?
If you like helping your fellow teachers and their students, why not make money out of doing so? Teachers Pay Teachers is a perfect opportunity to do what you’re passionate about while earning money on the side.
What exactly is Teachers Pay Teachers?
Read on to learn how teachers use various methods to make money on Teacher Pay Teachers.
What is Teachers Pay Teachers?
Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) is the world’s largest online marketplace for educators to sell, buy, and share teaching resources. It’s a go-to-place for educators to find the knowledge, resources, and inspiration they need to improve the quality of their teaching. TpT is created by educators who deeply understand what works in the classroom. The platform offers more than 3 million free and paid resources.
Paul Edelman, a New York City public school teacher, founded TpT in 2006. He discovered that his students were learning the most when he’s using incorporated ideas from other educators. This fueled him to create TpT to explore the massive potentials in the work and resources created by teachers. Since its creation, the platform has grown into a massive and global marketplace where educators can find inspiration, collaboration, and essential resources.
TpT is an impressive platform. Last year alone, more than 5 million teachers logging in to leverage over 3 million available resources. Additionally, about 1 billion resources have been downloaded from the platform.
While many teachers will post in their free time and offer up a small amount of resources and tool that they use, others have poured large sums of time and effort and have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars.
How Does It Work?
Teachers Pay Teachers is available worldwide and signing up offers a lot of value. You can set up your online store in minutes. Most of the materials are available in English, however other languages are very much welcomed as well.
TpT has 2 seller memberships – Basic and Premium. Basic membership is free and lets you earn 55% of your sales minus a $0.30 transaction fee. Premium membership, on the other hand, has a $59.99 annual fee. It enables you to keep 80% of your sales minus a $0.15 transaction fee on orders under $3.00.
You can set the price for your materials. Some give them away for free, others price them as little as a few cents while other materials reach up to several thousand dollars. Sellers who earn big in this platform create entire courses and lesson plans and sell the material as a licensed product.
Just like with any endeavor, you need to start with small steps first before you can take a giant leap. You can start creating small lesson plan materials and sell them for around $3.50. The opportunity for earning money is limitless, as long as you’re passionate about creating great materials and resources that can help your fellow teachers and students.
Pros and Cons
Is Teachers Pay Teachers the right venue for you to share and enhance your teaching skills and knowledge? Is it a good side-hustle platform?
Before you can get answers to these questions, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of TpT.
Pros:
- Offers flexibility in schedule.
- It creates an opportunity to give back and create a positive impact on students.
- Teachers Pay Teachers serve as an excellent venue for a side hustle, or you can turn it into a full-time online business.
- You have the liberty to set your own price.
- Creates an opportunity to sell original content created for your own classroom and make money with it.
- It provides a huge potential for passive income.
Cons:
- It takes a huge cut of 45% in your sales unless you sign up with the Premium membership and pay $59.99 every year.
- Plagiarism is not thoroughly checked. Some sellers could copy and re-package your work.
- It requires a lot of time to create materials and sales are not 100% guaranteed.
- Competition is pretty high.
- You need additional skills and knowledge in online marketing for your materials to be discovered.
How to Make Money on Teachers Pay Teachers
Teachers spend so much time on lesson preparation. They need to create a detailed lesson plan every day to keep his students educated and interested. Teachers Pay Teachers serve as resource-sharing sites where teachers can buy pre-made lessons and other resources from teachers and cut back on their planning process. TpT is a great starting point if you are a teacher who wants to start making money on the side.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can sell your learning materials and resources and make money on Teachers Pay Teachers.
1. Create your Store
Creating your store does not require rocket science. Register here and create your membership profile. Afterward, write a short description of yourself and your teaching experience.
Since you’re just starting out with the platform, it’s a good idea to start with the free basic membership. You can upgrade to a higher membership once you have established a name for yourself and get a higher cut of your sales. Payments are sent through PayPal.
Before you can start making money with Teachers Pay Teachers, it is recommended to first create materials that are free. The content can be about anything – class decorations, arts & crafts, group projects, reading assignments, etc. You should use Wordperfect, HTML, PDF or Word file format. Additionally, PowerPoint is also a great tool to create your resources. You can easily make your materials look polished and professional.
Once you have completed your registration, you will be provided with a unique Teachers Pay Teachers URL. Stand out amongst thousands of sellers by personalizing your page. Upload a logo or an image that represents your brand.
2. Find Your Niche
Finding your niche is important in building your TpT store. You must know which products would attract more sales and which products won’t. If you want to build your brand quickly, you must know how to pick the right niche.
There are tons of niches available in the platform, from emphasizing a particular subject to specializing in a particular grade. With tons of selections to choose from, how will you pick the right niche?
Here are some helpful tips in finding your niche:
- Check your competitors – Research the top sellers on TpT and check their niches. Exploring which topics receive the largest engagement can give you an idea of which niche you could sell in.
- Consider your strength and passion – Your niche is your specialty. Most of your content will revolve around this topic. Therefore, it is important that you have wide knowledge and experience in the niche that you will be choosing. You will not likely to convince your audience to subscribe to your materials when you’re not an expert and passionate about your topics.
- Narrow down your choices – Once you have created a list of identified niches that align with your skills and interests, it’s time to narrow it down. Your niche must be specific. It’s easier to target your audience and create resources that they need when you have a more specific niche.
- Check the available resources – Remember that competition in TpT is tough. It’s hard to get into a niche with oversaturated resources. Instead, look for the types of resources that are in shortage or not being offered.
- Look for ways to be different – Regardless of your niche is oversaturated or not, you must thrive to be unique and different.
3. Set the Right Price
Pricing your products on Teachers Pay Teachers can be a tedious task. If you price it too high, some won’t be able to afford it and will look for materials at a more reasonable price. On the other hand, pricing it too low may give the impression that your materials are garbage. And with all the hard work and time that you spend on this material, it’s just right to get a well-deserved compensation.
So how do you price your materials?
There are several things that you need to consider when setting a price for your product. To set the right price, try to ask yourself some of these questions:
- How many pages or slides are included in my product?
- How often will my buyers use my product? Are the contents applicable throughout the year or can it only be used once a year?
- How much did I spend on making this product? How long did I work on this project?
- What is my target audience? If you’re selling for older grades, you should probably price it lower compared to the K-1 audience.
- Should I have my product featured in the $5.00 and under store?
- What’s the cost of a similar product? How much can it be purchased from an educational book store?
- Realistically, how much would my fellow-teachers be willing to pay?
The price of your product should also depend on its popularity. You can lower it a bit if it is not selling. On the contrary, you can try to increase the price a little bit if it seems to be selling a lot and see if your sales continue.
4. Increase your Sales
Teachers Pay Teachers is a great tool to earn money, as long as you know how to play your cards right. Do you want to know how to increase your sales on TpT? Here are some of the helpful tips:
Create more products
Your buyers would be less interested in checking out your store when you have barely any products in it. Create more products so they have plenty of variations to choose from. It would take a while to achieve this but once you have uploaded more products, it’s more likely that your sales would increase too.
Get active in seller forums
Be as social and engaging as you can. Spend time navigating the seller forums and select thread topics that you are interested in. Make an effort to share your expertise or encourage other creators. By being active in seller forums, you’re trying to establish your authority as an expert in your field. It’s also a great way to get into contact with other TpT sellers and promote each other’s products.
Would you believe that Pinterest is one of the greatest platforms that can increase your sales?
It’s a great tool to promote your products to your potential customers. Pin your products directly from your TpT store. To do this, simply hover over the picture of your product. A Pinterest save button will then appear. Just click the save button to pin your product on your Pinterest board.
Pinterest Group Boards
If you want to reach out to a wider target audience, promote your product on Group Boards. Pick a board that has many followers and post your product there. Since this can be seen by a lot more people, it could potentially increase your sales.
Blog
There are a number of ways that a blog can help generate more sales. Create useful and informative content in the form of articles and post them on your blog. You can also write blog articles showing how your fellow teachers can use your products.
More businessmen are now using Instagram in their marketing campaigns. Since most of us are visual people, posting a picture of your product can catch the attention of your target market and could increase your sales. Gain followers by constantly posting content that is engaging, informative and useful. You can also post helpful tips and tricks in the classroom.
Link Related Products
Increase the sales of your existing products by linking them with your new ones. When you post a new product in your store, link some of your related existing products.
Sales and Promotions
Once you have started generating steady cash flow with your materials, you may want to consider the idea of holding a sale. Running a sale and holding a giveaway can increase traffic in your store. After all, who does not like freebies and discounts?
Collaborate with other teachers
Cross-market with other TpT sellers and share the love. Look for a teacher with great resources and make an agreement to promote each other’s products on your respective blogs. This strategy is great especially if both of you have a different niche, like language arts and Math.
Final Words
Teachers are one of the most hardworking people. They put their hearts and soul in their craft and give a huge contribution to this society.
Making money while doing the thing that you’re passionate about is not impossible. With Teachers Pay Teachers, educators can now help fellow educators by providing learning materials and resources while getting paid in return.