Brooke Allison
So you’re a teacher and you spend tons of time pouring over lesson plans, activities, and resources for the young minds you’re teaching.
Whether you’re the super creative who does this daily or an occasional designer of a worksheet here or there, you have the potential to make some side money.
How you may be wondering? On one website, teacher-authors have made over 175 MILLION DOLLARS since their founding.
Around three million members browse their site for new materials for their own classroom. Teachers from any school can upload their materials to create their own small business.
How to Side Hustle
The best thing about this side hustle is that most of the work has already been done. All that’s left is a quick upload after registering with Teachers Pay Teachers. Membership is free for the basic seller but for even higher royalties, sellers can pay around $60 a year for the premium membership. You can put as much effort into your store, descriptions, and teacher instructions as you want depending on what kind of return you hope to see.
By uploading documents, lesson plans, and even teaching planners, teachers have the opportunity to make some sort of income out of this side hustle. It’s also important to keep a record of income and expenses incurred for tax purposes.
The simplicity of this website is what makes side hustling even more appealing. Each teacher gets a store (think Etsy) and can promote their store on their social media pages. Also, any of the current members can happen upon the store as well.
For the driven hustler, sellers can place ads that will appear on prominent places of the website to drive even more traffic and promote their materials.
It’s for The Whole School
Not only can individual teachers buy different resources, but the website offers services to the whole school.
This is attractive to different schools because they can set a budget and buy different materials fit for each grade and intelligence level to help students achieve where they need to be.
Teachers Pay Teachers does a great job of offering services that focus on the student and the teachers themselves as well. It’s an added bonus to work with a company that advocates for your line of work.
Through multiple licenses, great material has the chance to be bought for a whole grade or as a resource for all of the teachers in one school district. This creates a serious stream of income for the chosen seller.
What to Sell?
Almost every teacher is going to have something to contribute.
The website offers a wide range of products including physical goods. If you sell any of the following, it may be time to open up a store.
- Lesson Plans
- Task Cards
- Worksheets
- Classroom Décor
- Activities
- Teacher Planning Calendars
- Hard Educational Goods
- Printables
How to Build Up Your Store
If you want to take your side hustle up a level, you may want to start marketing your store. One neat way to bring more people to your store is by providing free resources and printables. Many side hustlers do this in whatever career course they are on to bring attention to what they offer.
If people like what they download, they may come back to buy more. Plus, who doesn’t like helping out a fellow teacher.
Another creative way would be by creating a business Facebook page for your store and updating it with new materials. A great way to generate likes or follows is by creating a contest.
Not only does this have more people seeing your new material on Facebook but also gets the winner onto the Teacher Pay Teachers site. The hustle part of side hustling is promoting your products and getting your name out there.
It’s always good, as mentioned earlier, to promote your store on any of your social media channels. There are different Facebook groups as well to join where you can share links to any of your stores or product pages. Try searching for anything “teacher resources” related and be sure to check the guidelines for posting etiquette.
Some of the top sellers for TPT treat their stores as more of a business than a side hustle and have amazing marketing plans in place. If your store starts to really take off and people love what you’re creating, you may have the potential to create your own business. Top sellers tend to utilize Pinterest marketing and run their own blogs as well.
Why Side Hustle?
The best part of side hustling is that you’re self-employed. You decide how driven you want to be and the hours you want to put in. Whether you want to upload occasionally and let people find your store to adding content daily and promoting like crazy is up to you.
Even an extra $100 a month can sound appealing to several people. There are numerous teachers who are extremely successful selling their content as well who can make thousands a year.
It’s truly up to the side hustler on what they want to achieve. Usually what you put in, you get out of it.
