My TPT Store

“hello everyone i am here to update you on my teachers paid teachers store it's been a while since i've actually talked about it on my channel but i have been working on it so i wanted to give you some updates about how it's going and maybe it's something you might want to get into or maybe you want to check out my products i've been building up my store and i have some freebies so you might want to check them out [Music] so if you have not been here before welcome to my channel i do talk about my life as an online teacher and i try to give tips to other teachers who are trying to build up their online teaching career so if that's the type of stuff that you like to listen to and if you want to hear more of it then please subscribe i do put out videos regularly but in this video i want to talk to you about how my teachers paid teacher store is going because um you know i kind of let it go for a while and i didn't really do much to it but then recently i've been motivated to work on it some more and i've made some progress and i want to share with you how that progress is going and they do have a sale coming up so if anybody is interested in tpt products they have a sale coming up in april i think april 6 it is now march and so if that is if you want to go check them out go check out the sale and you can stop by my my store too to see my freebies and hopefully my products will be ready for the sale so i can have many products to offer in time for the sale and make some good earnings okay so like i said i did take a little bit of a break from working on my tpt store i started it actually in july of 2021 and it is now march of 2022 and um i really just kind of i put some things up there um i and then i just let it go and i hadn't really checked on it in a while and so about a couple weeks ago i just i looked at it to see like are people really interested in my products have they been visiting my page because you can see all the activity that happens on your your page and i looked and i was like oh people have been showing some more interest in my page so yay so if they're showing interest um then you know it is another avenue of income that i'd like to explore and put some more effort into it because i do make a lot of products for my online class um so you know as i'm making these products i might as well be putting them in a form where i can sell them for other teachers to use too and make some extra money you know so that is my plan to work on but i just have to kind of get into a routine of regularly adding my products to my store so that's just what i need to do so as i go on this journey i'm going to be putting out some videos about it so if you're interested in something like that you can learn more about it too so i'll keep you posted about what happens and when i make some money because i actually haven't made any money yet i have a few um free products and i had a couple that were for sale but they didn't sale so yeah they just um people wish listed them but anyhow people did see them and people visited like they they you can click on the product view page and they that shows you that people are actually taking interest in it people were interested in it but they didn't buy them for whatever reason so i'm learning and i've been doing a lot of research two channels that i've been um following are ones that you might already be familiar with but i'll share them with you in case you're not but that's becca davis and it's all primary it's all primary want to make sure get those names right so that can give them the credit that they deserve because they have been putting a lot of videos out about making products so it's been very helpful so if you want to learn more than what i already i'm here to tell you go visit those channels and in my research i've been trying to figure out that i'm making my products the right way so i'm not making this too many mistakes that i have to correct in the future and i was really concerned about using the proper fonts and clipart in my products so that you know nobody would have i would have any copyright issues so i had did a lot of research about terms of views for different fonts and clip art because i'm going to be doing most of my products on google google slides i know many people build their products with um powerpoint microsoft powerpoint but i don't have microsoft powerpoint so i'm going to be using google slides and i want to make sure that their fonts were okay to use and so i do search clipart on their um through google slides and there they do have some clipart that is free to use you can find their free to use clip art so i do have some that i've been using with them but i've also discovered some other websites that have allowed me to find free to use content copy free content and i'll share those websites with you one is pixabi and the other one is unsplash and there are quite a few out there but those are two two websites you can get clip art and backgrounds to use for your products not to mention all of the free fonts that teachers on teachers paid teachers offer they offer free fonts they offer clip art you know a bunch of things that you can actually find on teachers pay teachers that's free or paid so it's nice to support the teachers too if you find something you really like and it's nice to get the free stuff too so those are different ways that you can actually get the fonts and clip art but um because i'm not using microsoft powerpoint it's not so easy for me to upload it to use it on google slides so that's a problem that i was having and running into then i went into use trying to use open office because i used to use that back in the day before google slides and i did see that i can upload fonts to open office that is another option i could use in the future if i need to but right now i'm just going to go the um google slides route and canva canva you can use canva if you have a a paid subscription i don't see why not having a paid subscription will make a difference but i was given the advice that if you have a paid subscription you're free to use all their products in your um in your product you're free to use their products in your designs and use them for commercial use so you can sell them and i did read that in the terms of service so you know i have a paid subscription it's okay for me but if you're not if you don't have a paid subscription you might want to do a little bit more investigating because i'm not exactly sure if it's okay for you to use in a commercial product if you don't have a paid subscription but for personal use canva is free to use for anything canva is wonderful you can make slides on canva you can make thumbnails on canva you can make your worksheets on canva canva is awesome it's almost like why would i want to do or use anything else i'm not really sure but i'm sure that there's a lot of clip art and designs and things that people have made that are really good to use too and other sources so it's good to check them out for the future when i'm you know needing some more you know different ideas but for right now canva has a lot to offer so the things that i've made so far were um i made some alphabet cards for my classes because i do have circle time classes and we do a letter of the week and so i had some alphabet flash cards that i gave to my students for them to practice with and they have the pictures on one side and they have the letter on the other side and i thought that was a really good way for them to get down the alphabet sounds and so i offered the whole line of them on tpt where i started to offer them i'm going to to bundle them together and offer them in a bundle because bundles are where the money is with tpt yes individual products are good but when you bundle your items together i'm learning that that is really where people make more money when they bundle their items so i'm going to bundle all of those because i did design them and it did take some time for me to put them together bundle them and then sell them all together and see how that goes and i did learn that when you are selling like several sheets together you have to learn how to zip your items and put them in a zip file in order to upload them to tpt so that did take a little bit of time for me to learn how to zip my files and at a later time i will show you and demonstrate how you can zip your files with tpt but just know when you have more than one file you do need to zip them and you might need to learn how to do that but i do have those alphabet cards then i also have my find a star reward activities so if you are online teacher and if you taught with vip kids or you know another esl company where you had to have your your secondary rewards for your class then you might know about find a star rewards because those were very popular with esl teachers with some of the companies that didn't have their built-in reward systems already so there was a large bank of files that teachers would help to build up if they worked with either vip kids or gogo kids and i was able to access those but for my private tutoring and private classes that i teach on out school and other places i don't want to use those same files because those were for teachers who were creating them to use on those platforms so i didn't feel comfortable using all of those resources in my private classes so i learned how to make my own so i made find a star rewards for my students and for my students they love them they really look forward to them no matter the age that i teach i teach up to about you know like with my reading classes i have some 11 year olds and i even use them for my 11 year olds and they like them i just kind of alter them so that they they are appropriate for them and using words because i use a lot of big words um for them to practice reading when we're playing the game and then they find their star that way um so i will have 11 year olds using them and i will have my three and four year olds using them so it really covers a large range a large range of age groups in order you know who are interested in this activity and um i you know you can with my find a star rewards you can have you could display words you could display numbers you can display food it could be vocabulary words it could be spelling words i mean there's so many ways that you can use the find the star rewards so they can find a star but it takes time to put them together okay so now i kind of got it down to a science and i do kind of i create one or two each week so i have a lot of them and i love to sell more of them but right now i just have a couple on my store to share with teachers and they're free for right now um i the freebies and i'm going to add some more and bundle them so you might want to check that freebie out if that's something that you might could use in your class you might want to check my freebie out and see how it works for your class but if you do use my freebies please give me some feedback let me know how it worked for you how i can improve them and if it was very clear with the directions given and then i also did my escape room or my mystery activity sometimes it's like an escape room sometimes it's just we're looking for something it's a mystery so that is the latest thing that i offered on my tpt store and those are huge like kids love those games they love them and there's a lot of classes on out school that just are all about escape rooms so that is a really popular activity for classes that that parents and students are looking for so i've been using those in my class for very simple activities i don't have really advanced ones for like older students some people make them more complex for older students but my students are young so we just kind of like read the clues together and then we look for the clue together so that's kind of how we do it and i'm i'm controlling the whole thing and helping them read the words and you know figure out the clues and so that's how i do my escape room so it's really good for younger students if you have if you're teaching younger students and if you want just like an introductory activity for the class or um you know something to use along the way like maybe to break up your class time something in the middle it's just like a short activity just to add just to kind of use for a brain break for your class and you can also make it into a learning activity too that's fun so i'm offering those i added one last week and i got like 20 views on it already 20 views 10 page views and so not only are people scrolling scrolling past it as they're you know searching for escape rooms but they're actually stopping at it and they're looking at the product so i'm like oh this could be a good thing but they haven't bought it but for the first one it is free another freebie because i want to make sure that it is usable and um people uh like it i want to get some feedback on it so please try it out and you can let me know what it's like for you too so some things that i've learned while in this short period of time that i've been working on tpt well kind of short kind of long depending on how you look at it so one when you make your thumbnail it's got to be square shaped i uploaded a thumbnail that i made with canva and it was awkwardly shaped but it was hard to tell what shape it should be so it should be square shaped just square and the ratio i mean the i don't know the exact numbers but if you use the thumbnail on canva and just kind of like alter it so it's like one side is the same size the other that would work perfectly also uh just a description is important i'm still trying to beef up my description i've been very lazy with that i'm so excited about uploading my products that i really don't want to spend a whole lot of time in the description but i do need to spend more time in my description and and making it a little bit more uh informative so people can know how to use it they can know um you know different ways that they can use it you know kind of sell it a little bit more than just hoping that they'll click on the thumbnail and like the product yeah so workout i need to work on that i've learned that having a terms of use page is really helpful so that people know how they could use your item if they're allowed to use it online or in the classroom or you know if they have a paid class you know all those things so i need to work on a terms of use page that i could just kind of like use in everything right and i need to design some templates to make creating very easy and without a whole lot of pre-work like i just want to have a template so i can keep on creating a similar product but just changing up a little bit having templates work so i need to work on having templates both for my cover and for my products so those are just some things that have been going on with me as i've been trying to get my tpt store going it's a great side hustle if i can get it built up because people have replaced their income with use with selling products on tpt so it is a great opportunity to make some good money but with it with everything it takes time you can't expect to make you know a whole lot of money the first year just like with with you know if you're starting a youtube channel it takes a whole year before you can get a thousand subscribers maybe a year maybe more it just depends but it takes time and then you can start making money right so i have to be disciplined the same discipline i showed with my youtube channel i need to show with my tpt store and i'm sure that the more i upload the more my products will be shown to more of the people who are searching for product products like the ones that i'm offering so i just need to be consistent and take my time to build it up and i'm sure that i will make some more money just like you can make some money on tpt too if you're already creating products you might as well sell them and make some extra cash but if you have a tpt store and you've had success with it then please leave us some comments let us know what you did give us some pointers some tips let us know how it's going even you know leave your link so we can check out your products too so let us know how it's going and don't forget to check out my store get my freebies and let me know how you like them and please continue following my journey because i'm going to be keeping you posted about what happens what i'm doing i will be making a video about how i made my escape room too so if you are interested in how i made that that will be one of my next videos so stay tuned you will be able to find out how i made this fun activity i have had some other videos about activities that i've made on google slides that were similar like x marks the spot that was really fun too so that was a video i've already i've did i've done and i will do the one about the escape room too so you can see how i did that one and get an idea about how it could be done yes there's many ways other people probably did it differently but this is my version of it and it really works for my class like i said the kids always look forward to it they ask me about when we're gonna do it again they just love the escape rooms or the mystery activities that we do it's just been a lot of fun creating them so all right you guys thanks for watching and i will see you in the next video bye [Music] you”