Things I Wish I Knew As a New TpT Seller
Branding
When I started out as a new TpT seller, I spent a lot of time creating unique product covers. I thought each cover should look different to showcase my creative abilities, I guess. After I started earning some profits, I even spent a couple hundred dollars on a big font bundle so I could use a different combination of fonts on every cover.
And then I took a blogging course. In this course, I learned about branding. Which basically means that everything you create should have a certain theme, font, color scheme, and generally predictable and recognizable appearance. Total face palm moment for me!
Branding is definitely something that I wish I had known when I started. It took a lot of time to redo all my covers to make them match, and it would have saved a lot of time upfront to use a template instead of trying to make each cover and worksheet different from previous ones.
Now I use a template, which saves tons of time and also makes my products and pins easy to recognize. Take a look at my store, and you can see what I mean about being consistent in my product covers. If you spot one of these in the search, you’ll easily recognize it as mine. 🙂
Adobe Acrobat
I hope you know that you need to be protecting your products and the clip artists by flattening and securing your documents. There’s tutorials online for this, don’t worry!
An easy way to do it is to buy Adobe Acrobat. That’s what I did – I subscribed and paid for this product. And to be honest, it worked great! It saved a lot of time versus saving my PowerPoint files as images and then making a new document with those images as the background images of each slide.
Until my laptop broke. I decided to try a MacBook this time around, since they’re so well loved by people who create and especially for running Photoshop. Except, apparently Mac doesn’t run Adobe Acrobat. So I had to cancel my year long subscription and only got half my investment back for the remaining months.
So, now I’m back to using the old way of flattening my products to secure the clip art. If you’re trying to decide whether Adobe Acrobat is worth the investment, take my experience into consideration! Mac users don’t use Acrobat, and we get along just fine. It may be more worth your money to invest in quality clip art or fonts.
Fonts and Clip Art
You’ve probably already heard that it makes a difference once you invest in some quality clip art. I totally agree!
But have you thought about fonts? As I mentioned earlier, I saved and bought a huge font bundle from KG Fonts (not an affiliate – I just love them!). They’re amazing. I use them for personal projects, teacher resources, my blog, everything. No regrets about this purchase at all!
I really think that changing to these fonts and studying her font pairing guide has made a huge improvement in the quality of my products.
Just like how a little bit of mascara can make a difference in making your eyes pop, fonts and graphics can go a long way to make a good impression and make your product look professional, and put together. As a teacher, free is great. But as a TpT seller, you definitely want to go for quality graphics and not just free downloads.
Submit to the Newsletter
Hopefully you know that you can submit to have a product featured in the TpT Newsletter.
But do you know how much of a difference it can make? I sure didn’t! In fact, I wasn’t very religious about submitting a product every week. I thought, “What are the odds?”
But you know what, one of those weeks, my freebie hit the newsletter!
That week I went from 219 followers to 337! That’s a 54% increase! I also had my biggest sale day up to that point in my TpT career.
Since then, my followers and sales have continued to increase. Don’t underestimate the power of getting your free or paid product in front of thousands of teachers! Be consistent about submitting products every week.
Blogging
So, blogging is it’s own adventure, I know. There’s so much to learn!
But even if you’re not ready to invest a ton of time into blogging, I think it’s worth every TpT seller’s time to start up a small blog and create posts going into detail on some of your products.
This gives you one more way to be found on Pinterest, plus it gives your buyers more insight into a product. It also helps sell your product because the buyers can more easily see the value in it.
Here’s an example. My Free Preschool Morning Work Worksheet is something I made for my own kids. It’s not a big product that seemed worth selling to me, so I offered it for free to try to get some traffic to my blog.
And it went viral! At the bottom of the post, I added a picture from a pack of prewriting worksheets I already had in my TpT store, and gave a few quick details about that product.
This little pack of prewriting worksheets if now the #2 product in my store because of the freebie on my blog! I’ve sold almost 300 copies of this resource in the 6 months since my pin went viral. Totally worth the effort of a blog post, even if you don’t completely dive into blogging and a mailing list and all that at the start.
Click HERE and keep reading about how to start a TpT seller blog for $3.95/month! That means if you post about 1 product or freebie, and get 2 sales out of it a month, your blog has paid for itself! Then, as you add more posts and get more traffic, the earnings just increase!
