How To Give Yourself a TPT Store Audit

Kirsten 0:04

You're listening to the creative teacher podcast, a show for busy teachers looking for ways to engage, inspire and make an impact in their teacher businesses. I'm Kirsten, a teacher business owner who is all about simple and actionable tips, strategies and resources that result in wins, big or small. If you're looking for that extra spark of creativity, you've come to the right place. Let's dive in together. Hi there, and welcome to another episode of the creative teacher podcast. This week, we are going to talk about the steps to conducting a TPT store audit, I will be walking you through 13 steps that you can utilize to help you really evaluate what you could be doing to improve your TPT storefront and just kind of get a pulse check into what is going well for your TPT store and what you can improve on. So let's talk about the very first step number one is to define your goals determine what you want to achieve with the audit. Are you looking to improve sales? Are you looking to increase customer engagement? Are you trying to enhance the quality of your products or something else, think about what you want to do before even diving in to the TPT store audit. Before I go further, I do want to mention that I do have a TPT store audit that you can go through completely free. And you can go to the southern teach designs.com forward slash TPT audit, download it for free. And essentially walk through this, you know after you're listening to this episode walking through this audit on your own. So I'm just kind of giving you best practices based off of this free resource I have for sellers. So if you are interested again, go to the southern teach designs.com forward slash TPT audit. Alright, so first off, we define goals, we want to make sure we go in knowing what we want to achieve with the audit in general. The second step is to gather necessary materials. So you will need to make sure you're collecting any relevant information about your TPT store, including maybe sales data, maybe any performance data, your best sellers knowing at least your top five, just knowing a general idea of what your product listings look like and the type of resources you sell. So any other relevant metrics related to the goals you've defined, you want to make sure you have that there with you. And then also, if you're going through the TPT store audit, you want to have that audit in front of you. Preferably printed out I always like to print things out, especially as far as like audit style things like I like to write things down on pen and paper. So definitely make sure you have that. Alright, the third step is to review your storefront design.

So this is the very first section of the store audit. And in the store audit, I give it to you checklist style, you're just answering questions. So if you can relate this to your brand, and you're like okay, yes. Is your store name easy and clear to understand. Yep, I'm going to check it. And we're good to go. We move on to the next statement in the checklist. So all of these sections are checklist style. But in this episode, I'm kind of walking you through each of those sections and parts and what you do after the audit. Anyway to dig deeper into step number three reviewing storefront design, evaluate your TPT stores, storefront design, thinking about the store name, visuals, color scheme, target audience alignment, and profile information. Think about if it reflects your niche, and if it's visually appealing to your audience overall. So we're thinking about is my storefront and branding and store name, things related to that things related to my profile information. And for each section, including this first one just starting off, there's going to be a stop and think part of that segment. So the first section is reflect on the items that you did not select. How can you improve your store to include these items. So if you notice something glaring that you're like, This is best practice, but I currently don't do this very often, then I would definitely recommend reflecting on that and seeing how you can incorporate it in the future and just kind of keeping that noted. All right. Now let's go into the second section, Product Code. quality. So step number four, assess product quality, analyze the quality of your TPT products, evaluate if they align with educational standards, if your resources are fact checked and visually appealing, and if they have clear sharp images, consider if the content is relevant to your niche. And if the layouts are visual appealing overall. So we're thinking content quality, visual appeal. The fifth step is to go into product listings. This is the third section. So we're thinking about titles, descriptions and pricing, as well as visual appeal. And it'll tell you some statements. And you can select or check it. If it's something you agree with. In general, you want to make sure you are optimizing your product listings for search for the marketplace on TPT. And also just accurately representing your products so that it's not buyer's remorse. And you're adhering to those best practices with what we want in a product cover and product thumbnails, and previews and all that good stuff. Step number six, this is related to customer engagement. So this is section four of the free audit that I have available, thinking about response time, and also feedback and reviews. So thinking about your interactions with customers, and reviewing your response times to questions, inquiries, proactively approaching to address concerns rather than being reactive or defensive, your feedback and reviews how you're managing that, how often are you responding to reviews, how often are you responding to feedback, and also how you can implement that constructive feedback so that you can improve products and customer services. So this is all just really great things to think about. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, I go in more depth in the audit, so you'll see exactly kind of what those best practices are in the audit. Step number seven is the very last section in the TPT audit, and that is analytics and sales performance. So we're thinking traffic sources, performance, sales, analytics, anything related to how you're evaluating your marketing efforts, and your promotional strategies. Were thinking about social media presence, engagement with audience how you're utilizing paid advertisement options, such as Facebook ads. And also if you can think of any potential for brand partnerships, so collaborations and working with other businesses or other sellers, to expand your reach to new audiences, and trying to get more people who might be interested in your resources. So that's just kind of a rundown of the five main sections that I kind of talked about a little bit of what we want to think about in each one. And just making sure you're honest with yourself, that's one main thing is like, don't just check something you're like, I think I do this, you should know if it's something you do or don't do for the majority of your products. So that is something you know, thinking about all of the things I mentioned, your storefront design, product quality, product listings, customer engagement, and also just like overall, thinking about what you're doing to analyze your performance and your marketing efforts. Now, let's go into step eight of what you could do to conduct a thorough TPT audit, score out each section based off of the prompts that I give you. And I have a scoring system already built in. It's basically the number for each section and how many you check out of that total number and you'll have this little space to rate your performance in each section to the audit based on that criteria. You're tallying the total from each section and you'll likely see clearly what are your strengths for each section and which ones you could probably improve on thinking about the ninth step reflecting on your findings. What you want to do next is reflect on the results of the audit and identify areas for improvement. So what we could do and what is included in the audit is a SWOT analysis strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And you're just considering which parts of your TPT store performed well, where there's room for growth and refinements and also any potential opportunities based on market trends and potential through that's in your niche or industry and strategies to help mitigate those threats. All right, so we are down to what we can be doing after this audit kind of continuing on after the audits done. What do we do with this piece of paper? What do we do with all these things that I found out about my store, and how we go from there. So step number 10, is to develop an action plan. Based on the findings of the audit, you're creating an action plan to address areas for improvement. Think about specific and measureable goals. And also outline the steps you can take to achieve them include any changes that you might want to make to your store design, product quality listings, customer engagement strategies, or marketing efforts, basically anything that you could use improvement in any of those five sections in the store audit, step 11, is to implement the changes. So not just say, you're going to do it actually put a plan into action, make those necessary changes to your TPT store, whatever you need to do, whether it's updating your storefront, banners, quote boxes, thinking about a new template for your product listings to kind of align with your brand strategy anymore. Like maybe your goal is to respond more frequently to questions or respond more frequently to reviews. And also just any other marketing efforts, maybe you're incorporating more paid ads that lead directly to your store, or whatever your action plan is, you want to make sure you're implementing that. And step number 12. Going into what we do kind of maybe a month down the line three months down the line is to monitor progress, check in with yourself, do a pulse check and monitor the impact of the changes you've implemented. track key metrics such as sales, customer engagement and feedback to gauge the effectiveness of your improvements and make further adjustments as needed. And the last step that I have for you is to iterate and improve regularly revisit your TPT store audit process, to think about how you're doing progress wise. And also identifying new areas for improvement, you can always redo the audit every quarter, or maybe every six months or every year, just to kind of get like a sense of where you were when you first did the first audit to where you're at in the future or down the line. And of course, you want to make sure you're changing your action plan based on feedback and just data in general, to optimize your TPT store for success. I'm

going to share with you an example of how I've incorporated my own audit, for my own business and how I'm tracking these key metrics and goals coming in to the year. My goal was to increase traffic, it was a combination of the audit I conducted and also looking at my data from yDp, your data playbook. And I saw the potential I had the views I had in 2023. And the next level, the next bracket, I guess next, I think maybe the next couple of brackets, and I saw that what could really, really help is to increase that funnel, and get more people viewing my products. And so that's why I decided to really focus in on Section five, the marketing and I should say analytics and performance, particularly traffic sources and performance. And I have done a couple of things to kind of track this, I utilize clickup. And there is a really cool section of clickup on the dashboard is goals. And you can actually add goals and what I really love about this, you can add the goal name, and you can essentially have that main goal. And then you create targets through that you can create and they even give you a little prompt targets are specific and measurable pieces that must be accomplished in order to reach your goal. So you can click Create a target. You can write out the target breaking your goal down and the type of target it can be a numerical True or False even currency if you have a monetary goal and even task based and connecting those tasks to your clickup calendar. And just relating that so a lot of the goals I have I've color coded it of course I just that's what I do and And just let me just share with you one of them related to section five. So I have a monetary goal as far as what I am wanting to do, increasing my TPT earnings to a certain amount as measured by monthly sales on the platform. And I have four different targets. And one of them is to increase traffic views to resources through ongoing retargeting sales, Facebook ad campaigns. And another one is to complete remaining units of the smarten Simple Social Studies curriculum, increase the prices of resources through the yDp price change tracker at once a month, and I have the little numerical tracker to help me with that. So that's one of the goals one of many related to DPT. But it's a really great way to keep track. And I love how it's like there's a progress percentage as you're checking the different tasks and marking them complete. Or if they're, you know, if it's a monetary thing, you can always update that price, and it will adjust accordingly. And so it's nice to have those goals tracked in there. And I like to revisit them at least once a quarter I'm trying to do at least once a quarter, but maybe also once a month, once every couple of months, just to check in with myself. But that is kind of what I'm doing to keep track of the goals that I have, in addition to looking at the dashboard in my TPT dashboard and just kind of tracking to see where I'm at and where it was last year. And so far, so good. My views are up for the year, my earnings are up for the year. Yeah, I'm just really excited to see that the goals I have as far as driving traffic and increasing my Facebook Ad Spend as far as utilizing that rather than not utilizing it at all, is what I think is helping me with higher views. So this is just one of many things you can do based off of the results of your own audit, it's just up to you to make sure you're implementing them and also circling back to that. So you are seeing what needs to be corrected or adjusted in the long run. Hopefully, this episode gives you insight into what you could be doing. After you do the TPT audit. I know many of you have already downloaded this free audit. And if you haven't, again, you can always go to the southern teach designs.com forward slash TPT audit. And you can grab that for free. The resource or the download will be sent to your email. And I also have a 15 minute video kind of walking you through how to actually complete it with a screenshot of the actual audit in front of you. So you can see that and listen to this episode. Just to kind of help guide you even further. I'm all for helping TPT sellers accomplish their goals and just trying to be the best that they can be on the marketplace and TPT and in their businesses. And so I am more than happy to share some of my resources that I've personally used in my own business. I'm glad you've listened in and I'm hoping that you can message me let me know what you think of this episode. You can always go message me on Instagram at the southern teach dot designs. And you can just DM me your thoughts about brief and just share with me what you're going to be working on based off with the results of your audit. All right, I will talk to you again next week. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Thanks for listening to the creative teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode, feel free to subscribe and leave a review. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can also follow me on Instagram at the southern teach dot designs. Have an amazing day