How to be successful on Teachers Pay Teachers, TPT advice from successful seller, how to TPT 

Wow, thank you so much, M Rotteau! 60 items?!! Holy smokes! You just bought my groceries+ for the week. 😇

@@laurarandazzo1158 Well I started buying in 2015 according to TPT. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is my favorite back pocket lesson when I have a surprise class.

@@mrotteau7989 Oh yeah! That's a good one. 😀 The kids really dig those aphorisms. My fav? "Diligence is the mother of good luck." - B.F.

Aw...that's so kind. ❤️

Thanks for this, pinkroses912! It's been a journey, for sure. 😂 Glad you're still here with me!

My pleasure, Brie. Now, let's get busy and build something! :)

Love it! And just think of all the teachers you've helped along the way. If you love building stuff, keep going! Even after all these years, it's still a fun diversion for me and (I hope) it's helping to make the world a better place. :)

Love learning from you, too, Jenn! What advice would you add?

And you are very kind. :)

The longer I do this, the more I realize my experience is far from unique. Glad you're here with me!

Welcome to the creator's journey! It's a long, winding road that I'm enjoying. :)

He's definitely my biggest fan/cheerleader. ❤️

Ah! I love this so much! Science teachers are the best and I know you appreciate a good pun. This is one of my favorites: "There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who get binary, and those who don’t." 😂

Same over here, Julia! I'll often be working on my laptop, smiling or softly giggling to myself over a teacher's comment or a nugget I'm adding to a product. My husband will notice and say something like, "You'd still do this even if you never made a penny." #yup #goodtimes #soulfood

Aw, thanks, Lauren! They just come from my hamster-wheel brain. I also try to think like a 16-year-old student when I look at the texts and think about what they'd find gross, interesting, compelling. 🧐

Aw, you're so sweet! I hear you. The journey seems overwhelming at first. The good news? You can actually make time bend to your will. When you first fall in love with someone, you find the time to be with that person, right? You fit them into your schedule. You go the movies, make a fancy dinner, stay up all night talking about everything and nothing... Well, the same sort of thing happened here. I fell in love with curriculum creating. (I've also had insomnia for nearly 20 years, so you could say I found the upside of that. There were MANY 3 a.m. work sessions in my first few years.) Next, your first few items are guaranteed to make you cringe two years from now. Go ahead and make them anyway. Make them as great as you can today with your given skill set. Post them and let the market tell you what's good/not. Later, you'll revisit those items with fresh eyes and more experience. I've deleted/discontinued probably 80+ items over the years as I've learned to do better along the way. The learning (and cringing) is part of the fun! Finally, TpT University has a whole section on copyright that'll help keep you out of trouble. I've messed up with that, too, especially early on when I thought I could just grab any ol' image off a Google search. Um...no. Trust me, every mistake can be fixed. :) So, I hope this is the push you know you need. Make one thing this month, eh? Post it. See what happens. ❤️

@@laurarandazzo1158 Thank you so much for the encouraging reply! I had read through the section on copyright and I think that was what initially overwhelmed me (as I thought of how many of my resources I had to redo to sell vs. just using in my classroom). Then I moved to a new school and had to transfer all my keynote to google slides and rework formatting and realised, hey, I could just do this with images to be in the clear. I appreciate the pep talk! I have my store all set up and ready to go so I just need to do it. This summer is as good a time as any. Take care and enjoy your summer, too! x

@@laurarandazzo1158 First of all, I just found this video and you're simply amazing! Your video was so relatable and not boring at all lol I watched it from start to finish and I hope to watch more even though I'm an Elementary ESL teacher. Your advice above almost made me teary-eyed. I was already feeling emotional reading Abroad on a Budget's real post because that was ME! I just want to say thank you for your encouraging words and to the young lady (I wish I had her contact), keep going! Most importantly, try not to be too hard on yourself or compare yourself to others. :)

@@jamillaparris4349 So glad you found my channel, Jamilla. Welcome! And, yes, lately my new mantra for myself has been, “Be gentle with yourself.” I’m finally starting to talk to myself with the same love and compassion that I’ve given to my students and my own (now adult) children all these years. It definitely helps.

Hi Keith! Tell me more about this digitizing process? Most teacher-authors on the site turn our existing curriculum into PDFs or Google Drive-enabled pieces without hiring a separate company/adding that extra layer.

Good question! I have a commercial license for Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Drive, so I'm not sure about the rules for Microsoft. TpT has a great sellers' forum where I'm guessing someone has posted the answer. You can access the forum with a free sellers' account. Hope this helps you find your way! :)

Great that you've begun your journey! For files, you can "compress" a bunch of individual PDFs into one folder that you'll upload to your TpT listing. If you want to see what that looks like on the customer's side, you can download this freebie from my shop: www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/First-Day-of-School-Stations-Activity-Icebreaker-Middle-High-School-FREE-3254153 For copyright protection and to make sure I'm following font/art licensing rules, I also make sure my PDF pages aren't editable, but I include editable answer boxes on the Google Drive-version of student handouts. That way, students can't change the core material, but the worksheets are still easy to use. Hope this makes sense. Finally, TpT has a forum and TpT University section on your seller's dashboard. Well worth investigating those resources! Lots of answers that you're not the first person to wonder about. :)

Great question, Marie! Gary Vaynerchuk's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook left a strong impression on me when I was getting started. It's old now and probably a bit out of date, but the overall sentiment/philosophy was helpful as I switched from teacher-brain to creator-brain. I'm certain your public library will have a copy. :)

@@laurarandazzo1158 ok I ordered it. It sounds exactly like what I need, as I’m trying to learn more about how to use social media to attract attention to my business. Thanks Laura!

Gotcha. I have just one account that allows me to post things as a seller and buy/download things as a buyer. 👍

Sorry, Donna, I don't have a good handle on the health/science teacher market. Questions to ask yourself, though, include how hard would it be for a teacher to make a similar slide set? How much class time would this slide set fill - 10 minutes or 10 days? Is it something a teacher could use with multiple preps or is it specific to just one class? In the end, trust your gut and go with that figure. You can always adjust it if the market results tell you that you went too high/too low.

Yes, Julie, you have that right. If you don't hold rights to an image (or copyrighted text, for that matter) and it isn't in the public domain, you'll want to replace it before you add your product to the marketplace. #lessonlearned The good news is that it's pretty easy to find high-quality images you can legally use. First, there are lots of sites where you can purchase stock photos with a commercial use license, like shutterstock.com and stock.adobe.com. They cost a few dollars, but I do use those options once in a while when I can't make my own or find a good public domain image. There are also free public domain photo websites you can use, like pixabay.com, unsplash.com, and pexels.com. WikiMedia Commons also has a bunch of options; some need attribution while others are fine to use without attribution. If you look through some of my free items on TpT, you'll see how I handle the attribution when required. I'm obviously not a lawyer and can't offer legal advice, but I've found plenty of options I'm comfortable using in my products so don't let that stop you! Go for it! 👍

@@laurarandazzo1158 thanks for all that info and those suggestions! Maybe I’ll make this a summer project once schools out. (In NYC, we go till June 25th! 😭😭😭)

@@Momba_Jules JUNE 25th??!!! Ohmygosh, you guys go so late. Stay strong, my friend! 👊

@@laurarandazzo1158 I know!!! 😭 Lol. Thanks!