Product Listing Tips and Tricks
This blog post will list frequently asked questions on product listings at a recent Live Q&A at a retreat. I shared some common mistakes that TPT sellers mostly make relating to product listings. I also shared with you my mistakes that I’ve made a lot along my journey as a TPT seller. Then I talked about some tips on product covers, thumbnails, previews, titles and descriptions.
One of the main things to know is that how you showcase your resources is gonna make or break a sale. That’s just what it comes down to. If people are in the search results and they like what they see, they will click, or if it’s intriguing to them and is exactly what they’re looking for, then they’re going to click on it.
It’s really hard to see the pictures of what’s in the resource or it’s not descriptive enough. It’s gonna be very hard to convert buyers because they’re not really sure what they’re getting. So that’s why I’m a big fan of how you showcase and attract your ideal teacher customers.
What advice do you have about optimizing your TPT store appearance over time?
If you’ve been around and heard of TPT back in 2013 or 2014, the product covers looked very different. The style looked very different. There was more chevron and there was more polka dots. That is not as prevalent now. As a business owner, you’re always trying to stay current and and relevant.
Think about big brands out there like McDonald’s and Apple. Over time you’re not gonna see the same logos. If you look pretty much everywhere, there’s a lot of different ways you can stay on top of the trends by just being informed about what’s appealing to customers.
If you’re seeing some Chevron covers in your TPT store, you might have to take a look at changing things up.
What I do personally, with my store has to do with stuff that appeals to me. I look around and see that bright colors stand out as a buyer and seller on TPT, so that’s what I want to implement in my own way.
It all depends on the trends of what is appealing and what’s not, that is going to kind of drive what I’m gonna change. Don’t always think, okay, these are my covers for my brand. This is the style I’m gonna go with. It’s set in stone. I’m done.
Eventually there’s going to be a time that comes where you’re noticing that it’s a little bit out of style, or it’s not really relevant design-wise, and that’s when you’re gonna have to take a look at updating it. Maybe your brand is going in a different direction. Make sure to update it to reflect the fonts and colors of how you want your brand to be.
How do you stay consistent with TPT brand colors and product listings?
Let’s way you can’t seem to settle on a color scheme and you tend to change up your brand every month or every quarter. It is kind of tempting to like always wanna always change things up all the time. Sometimes I have to restrain myself!
As tempting as it might be to change all the time, it’s best to stay consistent with what you have for now until maybe it just doesn’t look as current or relevant or it’s not standing out as much. Maybe it’s looking a lot like a lot of other TPT stores.
There are a few ways to keep consistency in your brand. Describe your brand in general. What problem or who is your niche? Who are you targeting? Are you targeting high school teachers or are you targeting primary elementary teachers? And then based on that, think about what colors might attract your ideal teacher audience.
In general, your brand colors shouldn’t really change very often, but the style, your design of your product covers might change or your previews might change. Keep your brand colors a little consistent, but maybe in a few years you can revisit the colors you want to use. Maybe you wanna add colors, take out colors.
How much time would you give an update before you feel like your store is too mismatched?
It really depends.
I don’t really like to spend too much time making sure my product covers are matchy matchy. I’m still improving and getting better in how I create my product listings for my store, and sometimes I switch. I don’t have one set cover template for my store. I sometimes have a product line that looks different than another product line. What is in common are the fonts and colors that I use.
Some people like to have one template for all their resources and that’s fine too. Just think in general, a lot of people are going to find your store through the search results. Unless somebody follows you and has a set of resources they wanna come back for and buy, it’s not something really to worry about as far as being mismatched as much, but it just depends on your style.
The one thing that does matter is if it isn’t matched. How does it come together as a whole, holistically, but in general, I wouldn’t worry too much about like being super mismatched because most people find your resources in the search results anyway.
How do I fix blurry thumbnails in my product listings?
TPT compresses the images to make their site run more efficiently. It’s also to prevent people from trying to take a screenshot and printing out your resource. So there are a couple things that you can do to kind of alleviate the blur, but it’s not gonna a hundred percent go away.
One thing is just to make sure your thumbnails and covers have enough contrast. If you have a white background, typically a white background with a really bright or a dark color like black or hot pink.Adding contrast can help the blur not as bad.
Another thing is to make sure that images you upload are at a 300, at least 300, um, dpi. High resolution is important. If you are a PC user, there is a way to change your export settings. Check out this tutorial in how to change that.
It’s a little bit trickier with a Mac because the way that they store files is a little bit different. So what I’ve been doing is creating a PDF of my PowerPoint, opening it in the Preview app, and exporting the file page by page as a jpeg at 300 DPI. It takes awhile but it gets the job done!
What advice would you give us about things you learned since you’ve been selling in TPT to increase followers?
I’ve been on TPT since 2013. I would get some sales every month, get some money here and there. And then it wasn’t until 2020 when I started taking my business seriously, and I actually started putting some effort into it.
When I started my active selling mode in 2020, I think I had maybe 48 followers and less than a hundred reviews. My best advice is just to be just putting yourself out there. I put myself out there on social media. I put myself out there by applying to have my resource featured in seller spotlight. There was a lot of ways that I was trying to market myself, my brand, and that kind of helped.
Another thing that helped is not trying to churn out more resources. I didn’t have the time to do that. I was still full-time teaching, but just making sure my product listings were optimized as far as when somebody’s typing a resource that they need – where does it show up in the search results? Does it capture their attention? Do people wanna click on it? So that’s another thing.
Another piece of advice is just know the type of resources you want to sell or not want to sell, but should be selling that your niche is looking for. One way to do that is just to take a look at what has been selling well in your store. Think about how you can create similar product lines along those lines, because it’s obviously something that people are interested in.
Over time it will lead to more followers and more reviews of your resources.
Think purposefully based on your data what’s working well in your store. You’re never gonna know unless you put it out there.
