This week is all about teachers! For Week One of the Six-Week Creator Challenge I will focus on Teachers Pay Teachers (which is now called TpT), which is a platform for creating and sharing lesson plans and teaching materials.
When creating the Six-Week Creator Challenge I decided to focus on ONE platform per week, to help me stay focused, and to force me to start creating content for that platform. I will then continue to create content for that platform consistently (at least once per week) once I move on to explore the other platforms. As I mentioned in Sunday’s post, I will then share my progress and metrics each week, as well as discuss the pros and cons of each platform. At the end of the six weeks I’ll do a big write up about my overall impressions and progress.
I’m not going to write about how to get started on Teachers Pay Teachers, you can read about that in this post. Instead, I’m going to share details about my overall process, as well as steps I will take to improve growth and engagement on that platform (and hopefully revenue!).
I’ve been on TpT for several years now, but have never put much time into it, nor approached it with a coherent strategy. One of the reasons I created this challenge to was to learn about each platform and make an intentional effort to improve by creating content consistently and getting to know the ins and outs of the platform’s (and my niche’s) audiences and algorithms.
Why Knowing Your Audience is So Important
Knowing your audience is essential when creating content for online platforms because it allows you to tailor your message, tone, and delivery to meet the specific needs, interests, and expectations of the people you’re trying to reach. Understanding who your audience is helps you choose the right format, language, and content strategy to engage them effectively. It also increases the likelihood that your content will resonate, be shared, and achieve its intended purpose, whether that’s to inform, entertain, inspire, or drive action. Without a clear understanding of your audience, even the most well-crafted content can fall flat.
Find a Problem to Solve
One key factor in thinking about your audience is to help them solve a problem by offering a product, tutorial, or solution that meets their needs. And to go above and beyond! (“Take my money!”). For TpT, this involves thinking about teachers in my niche, which is creating ELA (English Language Arts) content (hence the title of this blog: ELA Source).
Luckily for me, ELA teachers have a lot of problems to solve, ha ha. From worrying about plagiarism and AI, to struggling with student behavior and enagement (what to do about phones?), to finding resources on the best ways to teach reading, writing, and grammar.
Find Your Niche: Play to Your Strengths
By focusing on this audience and this niche, I’m playing to my strengths. I have a BA in English, an MA in Literature, and a Doctorate in Curriculum Design. I’ve also been a teacher at the middle school, high school, and college levels for 30 years.
Goals for this Week
This week I’m going to focus on creating products that help teachers avoid plagiarism and AI by engaging them in the research and writing process in the classroom, which I feel very strongly is the solution to avoiding AI (more on this in another blog post).
Tomorrow I will post about how I use free online tools to create and sell digital content and I’ll give you a peek at the resource I’m creating for TpT. Be sure to subscribe if you’d like to follow along for this challenge. It’s free to subscribe and I don’t share your emails with anyone. 🙂
ELA Source 
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