Gooood morning!
There's a Kindergarten teacher at my school that shouts that down the primary hall each morning. I didn't realize just how much I missed hearing that outside my classroom door in the mornings, until I went back to school this past week. It's the little things, you know?
Are there any little things you're looking forward to when you go back to school?
I really want to share what my classroom looks like, but I think I'm going to wait until next week, because I have a couple more afternoons to work in my room.
This week, I'm going to share my top 5 takeaways from attending my first TeachersPayTeachers conference.
First off, let me say, I was pleased that they decided to do it virtually this year. I would love to go to an in person one some day, but it's so expensive, it just isn't feasible for my little store.
I think my favorite presenter was Chandra from Teacher Gameroom. She shared lots of Powerpoint tips and tricks. When I saw that her workshop was called Powerpoint 101, I originally thought I've been using Powerpoint for so long, this will be too basic for me. I'm not going to watch this session. Boy was I wrong! I'm glad I changed my mind and gave it a try. There were several simple tricks I learned.
In the Powerpoint 101 workshop, I learned about the Slide Master. I think it will become my new best friend when creating products. Often, there are things that are the same on each slide, like a border or copyright text. If you use Slide Master, you can set it up to appear on every slide, AND if you need to make a change, Slide Master will make that same change on every slide for you. What a timesaver!
Also in the Powerpoint 101 workshop, I learned some font tricks. If you decide you don't like a font that you used, Replace Fonts will allow you to change that font throughout the whole document, so you don't have to make the changes slide-by-slide.
If you decide you like a font you used somewhere on a slide, you can change another text box to have the same font using the Format Painter.
Kerry Tracy from Feel Good Teaching had a great session on things you can do to revive a product that isn't making sales. I love that she started her list by saying what's popular isn't always good and what's good isn't always popular. That made me feel good, because even though my store isn't popular, I do think I have some real gems in my store.
The most important takeaway I got from Kerry was that I need to 'clean up the basics' on a lot of my resources. That means I need to look at the cover, title, description, thumbnails, and preview to make sure I'm really selling why that product is great. Maybe there's even some way I can add a little more value to it while I'm cleaning it up.
I originally had a goal of raising my number of products to 200. After watching this session, though, I think my time will be better spent doing some cleanup.
I liked a lot of Erin Waters' ideas. For example, I definitely need to work on minding my own business. It's really easy for me to get on social media and compare myself to bigger and better sellers who aren't timid about putting themselves out there. Comparison does not help my store grow at all!
I also liked how Erin said that setting up habits are more important than creating goals. If there's something you want to accomplish, what doable habits can you set up to make it happen?
Taking Kristen Doyle's (from Chalk & Apples) session on SEO was a huge learning curve for me. I just don't know a lot about Search Engine Optimization. I know that it has to do with where your product lands in a search. Of course, this is important because the closer you are to the top, the more likely your product will sell.
Kristen talked about making the title of your product attention grabbing (like using the words 'must have') but search friendly (which means it needs to accurately describe the content using specific keywords that buyers would use when searching). When I do my product cleanup, this information will definitely come in handy.
I really appreciated that TPT made their conference accessible to all sellers this year. I really did learn some new things and became more aware of the direction I want my store to take. Honestly, I learned that I'm content with this just being a hobby, and I think that's partially because I have another business venture that I'm wanting to give more of my time to, rather than my store. Maybe someday I'll tell you more about that dream.
Did you participate in #TPTForward2020 too? What were some of your takeaways?
