Should You Sell Products on Teachers Pay Teachers?

I have noticed a lot of people read a very old post I had done on this topic, so I thought I would re-post about the growth I have seen in my endeavor.  I joined TPT in September of 2008.  I put a few items up which were only one page that I charged $1 for.  Every now in a blue moon one of them would sell , and so I wasn’t very motivated to work hard at this.  Last spring (2011) I started seeing the emails from TPT about Deanna Jump who had made more than her teaching salary.  I thought, “What am I missing here?”  From that point on, I got very serious about selling my items on TPT.  I got software to turn my items into PDF files.  All summer of 2011, I worked many, many hours to put materials up on the TPT site.  I think I sold one item all last summer.  Then August came and I made $11.58.  Mind you previous to this for all the 3 years I had products up, I had only made about $11.  Then September came, and I made $16.74.  It was at this point that I decided to upgrade my account and pay the $60 a year.  Previously I had the basic account where TPT takes a pretty large percentage of your sales however you pay no annual fee.  When you decide to become a premium seller, they only take 15% of your sales–which is totally worth it if you are selling $15 a month or so.  My sales only grew from there and steadily increased each month of the school year until I was making more than $100 a month.  Each time I got an email saying that I had sold an item, it just made my day.  I find it so gratifying that someone actually values the work that I do, and uses it to teach their own students.  I readily share the items with my colleagues at work, but somehow it is different when someone searches out what you did and finds it useful.

I won’t sugar coat the amount of work that went into what I did.  Selling on TPT takes work and patience.  I spent nearly every night sitting on the couch with my laptop after school working on my blog or on my products, and most of the summer that way as well.  I definitely would have made a lot more money with a part time job or doing after school tutoring.  However, the work that I do on making my products as perfect as possible helps me during the day with my ‘real’ job because I use those things with the students I work with. I just make them as pristine as possible to sell at home.  Selling an item on TPT is gratifying because the extra hours I spend working on something are actually rewarded.  I have learned SO much from this venture through blogging, through selling, through the comments on my blog, and on TPT.  I would dare say selling on TPT has given me an edge because I am learning through a world wide community which I hadn’t known was out there previous to this venture.  I am very thankful for this and for friends who encouraged me to pursue this further when I had only a small measure of success.  If you have the time to work outside of school and want to learn a lot from a community of talented teachers, then I would recommend you join the ranks of successful teacherpreneurs, too.

Click to go directly to the TPT site and begin selling now.