TPT Seller Tips: Create Products That Will Sell

As a Teachers Pay Teachers seller, or teacher-author, you want to spend your time creating products that will sell well. Not every idea that you have is going to be a best-seller, but there are some strategies that you can use to make sure that your products find their market. Here are the steps that I use as a TPT seller whenever I create a new product for my TPT store.

1. Create what you need for the classroom

Don’t just try to think of ideas out of thin air. “Wouldn’t this be cute?” or “This would be so fun!” are not good reasons to make a TPT product. A good reason to make a TPT product is that teachers need it, and if you’re a teacher, you already have a great test case – yourself!

Many of my best-selling products are things that I never would have thought to make for TPT, but that I needed for my own students. I have a rule for myself as a teacher – never buy what you can make! This takes time, of course, but this is the best way to create products that will actually sell.

Of course, you’ll need to polish your products to suit your TPT audience. Make sure that everything is clean and professional, that you’re not using any copyrighted materials, and that teachers have everything they need to use the product in the classroom. Maybe they’ll need directions for implementing an activity, or they’ll need an answer key. These little extras will also serve you well when you go back to use this product in your own classroom next year!

2. Start small to medium, not big

You may have heard TPT sellers saying that the real money comes from big bundles. Maybe that’s true for some sellers, but in my store, most of my profit comes from products that are priced between $3 to $5. There are a lot more teachers willing to pay these prices than to pay an arm and a leg for a full-year bundle.

Is your idea bigger than that? Break it up into parts! You can sell each part as a standalone $3 to $5 product, and then bundle them all as a larger product. This way, teachers who are filtering for less expensive products will still lay eyes on your product line, and maybe you’ll be able to persuade them to upgrade to the larger bundle.

3. Do your SEO research

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and this is key. The majority of sales on TPT come from TPT search. That’s the search bar on the Teachers Pay Teachers website. You need your products to rank on the first page of search, preferably the top of the first page, or no one will see them, and no one will buy them.

How do you get your products to rank? First, you need to choose a keyword that is not too competitive. Think about what teachers are most likely going to search for when they are looking for your product. Type it in the TPT search bar yourself. If it pops up underneath the search bar as a recommended search, that’s a clue that other people are searching for it, too! That’s a great sign!

Next, go ahead and click “search.” Check out the top five or ten products on the first page. TPT uses many factors when deciding which products should rank the highest, but a good proxy for these factors is the number of ratings. Products with a lot of positive ratings have been purchased many times and have a lot of good feedback. They’re going to be high-ranking in search. Remember, your new product will have zero ratings and zero purchases. If the products on the first page all have a lot of ratings, you will not be able to compete. Choose a different keyword.

You’re ideally looking for a keyword for which the top products have between 0 and 5 ratings. Better yet if they don’t use that exact keyword in their title. You have a really good chance of landing near the top of search with a product like that!

If you can’t find a keyword that matches your product and isn’t competitive, then it probably isn’t the best product to make after all. If you really need it for your classroom, you might as well post it anyway, but chances are that this will not be a best-seller.

4. Choose your product title and description with SEO in mind

Whatever keyword you found should be in your product title, preferably right at the beginning. If you prefer a cutesy title, you can put that in your cover, but the actual title that you give your product in TPT should be keyword-heavy. You should use all of the characters available to you to include as many keywords and variations of keywords as possible, while still sounding natural. This tells TPT that your product is what buyers are looking for when they search for this keyword.

Your product description should also contain the keywords, since the TPT search algorithm also takes this into account. In particular, it looks at the first 180 characters of your description, so make sure that your keyword is included in this snippet. Then, add as much detail as possible to the rest of your description while continuing to sprinkle in keywords in a natural way.

5. Flesh out product lines

Once you have a few products under your belt, check your product stats. Is there one product that is selling better than the others? Think about how you could expand this product into a product line. Could you make versions of it for other grade levels, other times of year, other skills? Use the first product as a template to easily make others. Then, you can bundle them together!

Try these strategies out and let me know how it goes!