Product Listing Series #4 – Editing and Publishing Your Listings

Kirsten 0:00

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 Kiersten, 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.

Welcome to another episode of the creative teacher podcast. This is part four of the product listing series and we are going to talk today about editing and publishing your product listings on TPT. In this episode, we're going to talk about an overview of other important components of a product listing other than the thumbnails in Preview titles and description, as well as five tips to publish your product listings on TPT.

So here are some quick things to think about. If you were going to be looking in your dashboard, and going to a product listing and clicking on Edit product listing. If you want to edit your product listing, there's two different ways you can either go on Quick Edit, you'll see there's options for adding your base price, marking it as free marking resources as featured having the ability to put in grade levels custom categories. And then going into the other part is just the full product listing editing. You'll see that at the top you'll see your required title, your files, where you're going to be uploading things, whether it's a zip file or regular PDF, you have your product previews both PDF and video files. And then if you click on Upload thumbnails, now, you'll see that there's three optional thumbnails which definitely should not be optional if you've been listening to this series, and then the product cover or main cover. Scrolling down a little bit further, you'll see the description that you can either copy and paste or just type in, there's tools where you can add bullet points bold and italics. Scrolling down a little further, you'll see the price section it's similar to Quick Edit, but you also have your tax code which is required. Most resources that we would be creating would fall under the other digital goods. But you can always check and select what is more applicable to you. Selecting up to four grade levels is important. It's always great and best practices not to go over those four grade levels and target who your resource is really for. I highly recommend not selecting grade specific on your resources unless it truly is not grade specific, such as clip art or images. Make sure also to add in your subject area in your resource types you have up to three for each. Then you'll also have your educational standards that you would be tagging whether it's common core or TEKS. Towards the very bottom, you'll see that they have a teaching duration that you can always add answer key if you have one. It's always good to add if it's included or not, as well as the number of pages and slides. Then at the very bottom towards the very bottom before you click update or publish you'll see product status, you would have to check it to make it active. If you uncheck it would be an inactive and it would not be available for people to buy. Notifying buyers is always good because if you ever add anything to your resource, you can always click that notify buyers and update on what has been edited or added. So that's a quick overview of what it looks like when you're going in and editing the product listing. So let's go into those five tips and strategies that will help you get the most potential and optimizing it as much as possible. Before we talk about this, I want you to just get a quick reminder that product listings matter. A well designed TPT storefront with optimized product listings can increase your sales and conversion rates, it can definitely happen. Of course, there are a lot of factors that go into it, such as where you're marketing your products. But even if you are marketing, and people are coming into your profile, and into your TPT store, if the TPT storefront is not well designed, people are less likely going to follow you or save any resources, despite how good the resources are inside.

All right, starting with the first tip, show your resource and action. Humans are very visual creatures, we need to see things especially if we're going to be buying them in advance. This can be done with photographs, taking some quick snaps of your resources, whether you're staging it, or they're actually used in another person's classroom or in your own classroom, make sure that you're showing what is available so that it gives a realistic perspective. It gives a connection with people who can actually see what the resource could look like in their own classrooms. And they can resonate with it and see and say like, oh, this might really work well with my student or this particular group of students. It's also current and trendy to add photographs. I know many years ago, you could get away with just some clip art or a screenshot on a cover. But today, in this day and age and TPT, you see a lot more photographs, they're more current, it's definitely something that helps you stand out, especially if you are having it in the search results in your cover versus other product covers that may not have been updated in years, you're definitely going to stand out with those. So thinking about resources and how you can put those resources in action. Now, what I don't want is you saying oh my gosh, I had to take a bunch of pictures and print everything out in my resource. That is definitely not true. We will be going into screenshots and mock ups in a bit. But you don't have to have a fancy camera. You don't have to have a Nikon or whatever type of camera, you can just use your phone. I use my iPhone to take pictures and edit and upload to make sure it looks bright. And I also hire out that could be also another option as well. You can always get natural lighting, add some props, take some pictures and edit them and put them in your product listing. I do have an episode I will make sure to link about when you are DIY your product photography. So I will make sure to link that in the show notes. If you're interested in listening to more tips on DIY buying your product photography for product listings. Another reason why you should be showing your resource in action is because it's a really great way to repurpose if you're on social media, or possibly still on Pinterest, or I mean, hopefully, if you're on Pinterest, it's still great for you. And that's awesome. It's a really great way to use your photos in social media posts, pins, blog post covers, ads, whatever you're using, people are never going to say, Oh, I saw that photo before. It's okay to repurpose and reuse the same photographs, it's actually a really great way to get in the minds of people. Of course, I cannot talk about resources and action without mentioning mockups and screenshots. Like I said earlier, it's okay if you can't do all the photographs and take all the pictures of every single page of your resource. But you might want to consider mock ups in your photos, having some staged pictures and props where you can put in a picture of your resource with stock photos. This is really great, where you don't have to, you know, take the time to print it and edit and all of that, you can just drop what you need to in a mock up and then add it to your product cover thumbnails and preview. If you can figure out a creative way to make it look like it's an action or a student is using it or it's on somebody's desk. That would be amazing. There are tons of mock ups and stock photos specifically in the TPT seller space that helps you get that realistic view with my example Enneagram for big kids, you'll see plenty of photos. I've got photographs in action showcasing the resource in my product cover and thumbnail and preview Alright, let's talk about the second way to publish your product listing. So the first one, just to recap, make sure you showcase your resources in action with photographs or mock ups or screenshots.

So the second one, the best tip is to make sure you're tagging accordingly. Common Core is currently the only standard you can search on TPT. If you look on your homepage, you'll see the dashboard and on the left hand side, you will see that Common Core is searchable. And the other standards such as TEKS, the VA standard science standards, they are currently not, you would have to manually search for them, they will come up if you put them in your description, however, I would recommend that you have your resources tagged with common core. If you have any other state specific standards such as TEKS. For Texas, you can tag those as well. If you tag Common Core, the cool thing about it is that from what I have heard, if let's say you're in Florida and your resource is tagged in common core, it will show the TEKS equivalent if there is an equivalent for buyers who are in Texas, for example. Now another thing to make sure you're tagging is grade level, make sure you're narrowing down the grade. It's suggesting up to four grade levels, as we saw before, but to be really specific, you need to make sure you're limiting the amount of grade levels don't go grade level happy. Don't tag as many as possible. Don't just say first through eighth grade, it would just be better to put all grade levels or not grade specific. Also thinking about specific categories related to this resource. Is it a worksheet, is it a printable is it clipart for TPT sellers, think about what specific categories were related to your resource, what subjects are included and what resource types they are, then just limit it to no more than three each. So in my Enneagram resource, I've limited my grade levels to fourth, fifth and sixth grade. And I've got all three subject areas filled out based on my resources, I've got the three resource types included. And then the custom category, I've also tagged that custom categories, you could really there's no limit, I think the only limit is with the subject area and resource type. And then with a grade level select up to four grades. So that is something to consider there. The other thing is sometimes I will look if a product has a good amount of reviews, you can look at the reviews tab of the listing. And you'll be able to see what people are marking of which grades they're using the resource with. So for my Enneagram resource, I actually see a good amount of people who have marked seventh and eighth grade, the most frequency is sixth grade, and fifth grade. So even though I've marked it with fourth, fifth and sixth grade, there are still obviously other grade levels using it. So you can always change that app, if you see that maybe you're not like specifically marketing it to like one grade level and you're flexible with it, you could always re market it as well. This is great for middle school and upper elementary school if you want to do that. But you still want to make sure to not bucketed into too many grade levels. So it's great for the potential buyer who's looking to see which grade level they're in and how the different people or teachers are using your resource. And then it could help inform you with how you can adjust and remarket your resource if you would like to do that.

Tip number three on publishing your product listing would be to price accordingly. One thing to think about is to do some market research, look for similar resources in the search results and price it based on what you're researching. Think about what other TPT sellers with similar products are also pricing it out as maybe you might be underpricing it, maybe you might be overpricing it based on what you're searching for, think about what it looks like in the lineup with other similar resources and how you can appropriately price it. Of course, there's no perfect formula for this. But I do have a couple of inexpensive to free ways you can price it accordingly. Think about your conversion rates. If you have a high conversion rate and you have a high amount of units sold over time, you might want to consider raising the price. If you have pretty consistent sales over time and you know, maybe at least six months and the conversion rate is super high. We're talking To, on average, the conversion rate is five to 8%. Think about raising the price a little bit more, maybe 50 cents and see what happens. If you have a low conversion rate, maybe it's lower than 5%, or one to 3%. And you have low units sold over time, a good amount of views, but not many people are buying, then you might want to consider lowering the price, you can always test it out to see how it goes. And you can change it from there, just be aware of your pricing, you don't want to change it too frequently, because you do need to give it some time, statistically at least 300 views, my conversion rates for my Enneagram resource for the whole entire year so far in 2023 is at 24%. So that is a pretty high conversion rate, I could consider raising the price. If I look at the quarter, so we're thinking quarter four, at the time of this recording, it's currently at 12%. And for the month of October, it's at 12%. I will say that it sells heavily at like more towards July, August. So I'm just kind of checking it in regards to how many units are sold compared to the time of year. And I also want to factor in the fact that I did put this on sale in the middle of the year as $1 deal. So that could probably jack up the price. Jack up the conversion rate, that's probably part of why it's so high. So I'm gonna just keep the price as is just based on that information. I think right now, the quarter and the month are a good like the 12% is good for now I could possibly consider raising it maybe a quarter or 50 cents, but I'm just gonna leave it as is. I could also cross check with your data playbook and see what it says because they do have a feature for all tiers of the product change tracker. And I can always reference that to see if I did decide to raise it up a little bit if that change worked, or if I need to lower it back to the original price.

All right, going in to the next tip is to test it out. There's a simple process to testing it out. And when I mean testing it out, I'm mainly talking about searching your resource in the search results and seeing where it lands. If it's showing up on page one, or maybe it's all the way on page 10. You keep scrolling, you can't find it, you might want to tweak a little bit in your title, tweaking up some keywords so that it's showing up and you can see where it might be. Keep in mind, if you're tweaking some keywords or you're tweaking the title, you're tweaking parts of your description, adding more content, these changes may take an hour or two or up to a whole day. So if you don't immediately see changes in your ranking, wait a bit and see how it goes. Make sure you're adding important keywords and phrases. And also consider looking for a phrase that describes your resource and compare it with other phrases you are using. You want to try to find a keyword or phrase that has a high number that can be found in the search results or something that's trending. And usually if you start typing a keyword you'll that's a good indicator that it is trending. And then if you're using something like Uber suggests, you're thinking about something that has a High search volume, low SEO difficulty or lower SEO difficulty. So something in the green or yellow. So you want high volume, low search, SEO difficulty, that's going to be kind of like your sweet spot. The main thing is seeing what your ideal teacher customer would be searching. But it could also be advantageous to let's say, if you want people searching for a specific niche phrase that not many people are searching for, then if you want that resource to land at the top based on that you can always add that into. So thinking about do you want more traffic? Or do you just want like people who are, you know, super niche looking for a specific type of resource. So maybe thinking like, I usually add TEKS in some of my resources, because more likely than not my ideal customer are. They're usually in Texas and they're usually typing in like TEKS resource or something like that. Of course that's super general. Like I'm not I'm not being specific. But yes, that is just an example of like having a super niche resource. You might want to make sure you add that in your description. So rather than trying to focus on ranking for like what a lot of people are searching for another good strategy is to get super niche if you have a good amount of people buying your resource and knowing what that term means. Alright, so Of course, testing it out, tweak it, rinse and repeat. If something's not working, you can always just try it again. Unfortunately, there is no exact algorithm on getting at the very top page or on the first page with my Enneagram resource, it's super niche, not a lot of Enneagram resources out there, especially for elementary and so all I have to really do is type Enneagram. And it's at the top just based on the amount of volume and traffic and popularity my resource has. And because there's only 120 results that pop up on it. So super niche, but people find it if they're looking for that specific type of resource.

All right, going into the very last tip to publish your product listing would be to switch it up, make sure to change up your featured resources, depending on the time of year, it doesn't need to be changed every single week, but consider changing it up every quarter or every month so that it is relevant. And people can see those relevant resources that are tailored to a specific time of year, when they come to your storefront, they will see it above the fold. So right before they even have to scroll down to see the other resources, it's a really great way to stay relevant. And it's just something that you would want to consider with of course, the time of year or maybe you have a best selling resource, or a set of resources that sell well during a specific time of year that you want to highlight. This is when you would be going in the product statistics or dashboard to look at your data and see exactly what would be really great to add to your featured resources. So going in with a diagram for big kids, it sells again pretty much throughout the year, but high traffic high volume of sales in July and August and September. So even though it's already towards the top, I always like to still add it as a featured resource to be like, Hey, this is here. Because they may not even scroll below the fold, you never know. And also on the mobile device, it bothers me so much. But even if you're like linking another completely different category, not even your overall storefront profile, it's always going to show those featured resources first. So it helps to have that there because you're going to see those featured resources, scroll down one at a time, until you actually get to your other resources that are on that first page of your store profile, it really doesn't hurt to have it as a featured resource, even if it's already near the top. Okay, so to recap those five important tips on publishing your product listings on TPT. That kind of went a little bit beyond like the five tips for publishing, it kind of goes into like managing your product listings as well. That's okay, I'm just gonna roll with it. The first one is to show your resource in action number two, tag accordingly. Number three, consider your pricing, number four, test it out. And number five, switch it up. So those are the five tips. Hopefully you got some really great tips out of when you are editing and publishing and maintaining your product listings for your resources. I have enjoyed this product listing series and I hope you have to hopefully you got some really great action tips or things you want to try out.

Alright, that's the end of this episode. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. 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.