How do you make more sales on Teachers Pay Teachers?

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Today, I’m working on how to make more sales on Teachers Pay Teachers.

One of my projects to make money online is around the sale of digital products. Basically, I create teacher resources, and then try to sell them through a third-party marketplace.

This year, as of today (Mon Jun 3, 2019), I have 16 products for sale on the site, and have made $214 USD.

If we look at the traffic for the site, I can see that most of my sales come from within the Teachers Pay Teachers marketplace. This means teachers who are already on the site, and then find my product in some search listing, and then buy it.

I’m not entirely sure how the TpT search algorithm works. It’s a black box mystery to me about how they decide which products to list at the top of their search page results.

I wish they would show us the click-throughs and the conversion rate so we had an idea of how well that traffic converts.

But, I also know from this data that 44 people have come to our TpT store from our Educircles website where we talk about our Growth Mindset Posters PDF and other resources.

I think around 1 out of 10 people who visit our TpT store from our Educircles website buys a resource. (9.09% conversion rate.)

This made $18 (USD) of revenue! Woo-hoo!

Screenshot of our sales this year to date from our Teachers Pay Teachers store.

So, right now, one of the things I’m trying to optimize is to focus efforts on increasing traffic from Educircles.org.

I know that there’s more money right now from people buying from the TpT site itself, but here are 3 reasons why I want to focus on building traffic from Educircles:

Educircles is our WordPress website so we have complete control over the way content looks and how snippets appear in Google. (When we write our product listings on TpT, you’re limited to what you can do / link.)
If we’re able to create an email mailing list on our Educircles website, then we’ll be able to communicate directly with our buyers and followers, instead of being limited on TpT where you can only communicate with your followers once a month.
It’s nice to connect with other like-minded educators who believe in teaching the 6 Cs with their classroom

So, right now, my goal is to try to build more traffic to my website

I had a peek at our SEMrush data and it suggested a few organic keywords that we should consider optimizing our webpages for.

The SEMrush app lets me easily have a peek at how we’re doing. Check out the two screenshots below:

This page about Growth Mindset Posters (PDF) is the one that I’m tinkering with right now.

Originally, the page was talking about posters I made about common classroom obstacles, and 40 strategies to overcome them.
I put these perseverance posters at the back of my classroom on a gigantic bulletin board.

But, the SEMrush data suggested that people search for “Growth Mindset Posters” around 170 times per month.

I figured it’d probably be easier to target the longer tail keyword: “Growth Mindset Poster PDF” and try to get traction for both keywords at the same time. You know, two birds, one stone.

So, I’m slowly trying to target that keyword. Little tweaks – adding it to the Headers, the image alternate text, and a few variations, etc, etc, etc.

Actually, as I write this post, a better keyword to target is probably might be “teachers pay teachers growth mindset posters” because people searching this are intentionally looking for resources on that marketplace… and they’re probably more willing to pay.

The big question is whether I try to direct traffic for that keyword to my own website landing page, or my teachers pay teachers store.