Hi TPT Sellers! What if we shared our TPT Seller Data to learn better ways to sell on TPT (what used to be called Teachers Pay Teachers)?

Things have changed a lot in how we talk and share information compared to when we were younger. We need to learn how computers decide what to show and what to hide.

Crowdsourcing TPT Seller Data to learn more about how to sell on TPT

Crowdsourcing is when you have a group of people sharing information.

Crowdsourcing is the collection of information, opinions, or work from a group of people, usually sourced via the Internet.

Source: Investopedia

Here are some of the current questions we’re exploring:

Why does TPT Seller Data matter?

Creating awesome lessons that your students love is no longer enough to be successful as a TPT Seller.

  • You could create the best lesson ever, but if no one knows about it, you won’t sell it.
  • If you started selling in the early days on TPT (back when it was called Teachers Pay Teachers), you might be discouraged today when you publish new resources because they might not sell as well as your early products.
  • It’s not necessarily a reflection of your product, or a changing market. It could simply be because today there’s much more competition in your niche.
  • Yes, yes, everyone likes to say the market is oversaturated. But that doesn’t mean we still can’t innovative and find a way to reach our target audience.

If we improve our understanding of how our individual TPT businesses work and the mechanics behind the TPT Marketplace, we can make better business decisions.

Remember, our TPT journey is both towards financial freedom as well as personal growth. Selling on TPT is NOT easy.

  • What if we could separate our sense of worth from our TPT business?
  • What if obstacles and disruptions could eventually be a good thing that leads towards innovation?
  • What if one individual doesn’t have to know all of the answers; what if as a collective of TPT Sellers, we could share our learning without having to be an expert?

If we want people to see our products, we must understand how computer programs, called algorithms, work.

Whether it’s Google or TPT search, when a computer sorts through lots of things, it uses a special, secret method.

Only the engineers work on TPT search really know their own secret formula.

Please note: people who work on the public facing side of TPT are not the engineers. The support staff at Team TPT can only share what they are told about how TPT search works. They don’t have access to the formula themselves which is likely constantly changing.

Just because we hear something repeated over and over again in TPT land doesn’t mean it’s true.

(It doesn’t mean it’s not true. It could have been true, but no longer applies. Or maybe it’s more of a generalization that has grown into a rule.)

We might never fully understand the TPT Search Algorithm. But we each know a little bit. If we put our knowledge together, we might figure out how to sell more on TPT.

This page is growing. Stay tuned for more experiments and crowdsourcing research.

For those of you who play Pokémon Go, the goal is to conduct independent research like what was done on The Silph Road. (Sorry to see the end of an era. Happy to hear the Silph Research Group will continue to research game mechanics on their Discord server and share findings on the subreddit.)