Grow with Angie and April: A Podcast for Teacherpreneurs

Who has some summer blogging goals? WE DO!

Read this post to find out how you can participate in our simple Summer Blogging Challenge.

This summer, Angie & I have committed to writing six blog posts in six weeks, starting June 1st. From June 1-3, we will be brainstorming our goals & post topics. Each Friday after is our deadline for a post (beginning June 8th).

Our goal is to have six quality blog posts that drive traffic to our stores or email list before back to school hits, to increase our traffic overall during BTS and give us content to share during the school year.

Want to join us? Join the Facebook group here. Find the Summer Blogging Challenge post (it’s the pinned post) to let us know you’re interested. Download our Summer Blogging Challenge guide: http://bit.ly/growblogchallenge.If you join in the middle of the challenge, that’s ok! Look for the post each Monday for the upcoming week.

Make sure that your notifications are turned on for this Facebook group. We will be posting some tips and tricks during the challenge, and weekly accountability threads (On Mondays) for you to post your completed blog posts into at some point that week.

We’re also planning on recording a podcast episode with some blogging tips. We will be asking for suggestions for the post soon. That episode will come out June 5th.

We hope to see many of you join us in this motivational challenge!

What do you send out to your email list when they are not involved in a sequence? How often do you email them? Today we are discussing just that along with a special guest, Rachel Davis, from the Elite Edupreneurs Podcast. Rachel also does TpT full-time.

Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. You don’t have to purchase them through our links, but if you do, it helps us pay for the costs of the podcast and blog! 

There are many different things that you could email out to your subscribers. We recommend testing out different ideas and seeing what resonates with your audience. Use your data to drive your future decisions.

Every newsletter should have a call to action but it can vary from email to email based on your goal for that email. It is recommended to have one call to action and to make it clear for your subscribers. Vary it from email to email. Test and re-test to see what works!

It is definitely ok to do both. Your subscribers may also be your TpT followers but not necessarily. And even if they are, that doesn’t mean that they see everything that you put out. Sometimes people need to see it multiple time to be reminded of it and to finally taking the plunge and purchase.

We are actually pretty inconsistent here. We hope to get at least two out per month but it can be a struggle sometimes. We found it works better if we do a bunch at once and schedule them out. It’s harder to get them going if you have to keep remembering to go back and compose them each time.

Last month April sent out six emails in but not all of her subscribers received all six emails. If she releases a new resource for 5th grade, she will only send to those marked as 5th grade by using tags in ConvertKit or anyone who is not tagged. Then, if they click that link, she has it tag them as 5th grade for future emails. This helps her to really send them relevant information pertaining to their grade level. This is actually one of our favorite features of ConvertKit.  Plus, we believe the more targeted you can make your emails, the better your open and click rates will be.

We think it’s ok to be on the personal side especially if it pertains to what you are emailing them about. But, again, check your data. If your audience likes what you’re doing, do more of it! If not, move on to the next idea or do it infrequently.

April had some strong opinions about this. She feels as though this is not a good idea. Sometimes when those feeds send out, they will give the whole post and give the readers no reason to click over to your blog or website. We want to people on our websites for a few reasons.

What did your first email sequence look like? What tips do you have? 

April has been using email for quite some time now, while Angie is just getting started. With April’s guidance, Angie is setting up her first email sequence. You get an inside look at what she included and how it is set up.

Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. You don’t have to purchase them through our links, but if you do, it helps us pay for the costs of the podcast and blog! 

Angie has been collecting subscribers with Mailchimp for free but recently passed into being charged. She wanted to get things set up and going but wanted to decide first on which company she would go with. She ultimately decided to go with ConvertKit after hearing from so many people how easy it was. She found it super easy to move her list over and it took less than 5 minutes! Now, she is ready to get moving on making it worth the cost.

April started on Mailchimp, as well.  Then once she reached 2,000 subscribers, she switched to ConvertKit and didn’t like it. She then went over to Mad Mimi and was happy there for awhile but it was not very user friendly. It was cheaper but she wasn’t seeing it convert to sales. She had about 6 sequences set up. She began getting frustrated with Mad Mimi because she couldn’t see the data that she wanted to see. (You know how we love data!)

She decided she wanted to improve her sequences and change up her site. She went back to ConvertKit. She reworked her site with a new theme that integrated her opt ins and resources how she wanted.  April is very happy with how things are going so far with ConvertKit.

If you’d like to try it out for yourself, you can get one month FREE by clicking here. We’d be happy to help get it set up for you. April is currently making 4 times what she is spending on her list!

Angie decided that her first sequence was going to be for her huge holiday close reading bundle. She already had a freebie for it. She decided to use the same freebie as on TpT except she beefed up the freebie to include even more enticing goodies to get people to opt-in! It was helpful that Angie was able to re-p

What data points do you check to drive decisions as a Teachers Pay Teachers seller?

We both use data frequently to make all kinds of decisions about our business. We geek out about all things data.  The more insight we have into what’s working and what’s not helps us so much. In this episode, we discuss the different data points we check and what they can tell us about our resources. We’ve even scored some awesome info from Benson at Team TpT to help you understand TpT data better.

We use data to drive all sorts of decisions about our business. It can tell us when a resource is popular and that gives us the information we need to make decisions about when to promote a specific resource. It also helps us to decide which resources to make more of. Spoiler Alert: It’s not always the ones we love the most. We may gravitate towards a particular resource that we think is great but it may not always be the best choice to be spending our time on that.

It can show us if resource line is declining in popularity or if it’s just not the best time of year for that particular topic. If we see a decrease in sales, data can help us to figure out why it may be happening.

Benson from TpT told us, “Another piece of advice (more generally about data) is to make decisions using a large set of data. Don’t run a promoted pin for only a day or two and then try to decide if it was worth it or not. Set a budget that will last you as long as you possibly can (within reason) and then use that larger set of data to make a decision. Try to always get at least a week’s worth of data before making any decisions, because buyer behavior can be all over the place day-to-day. At TpT, we run all of our tests for at least a week, and some for much much longer.”

Looking at the pin data below, we can see that the pin was more popular different times of the year. Had we just pulled a week worth of this data out, it wouldn’t really give us a clear picture of what is happening long-term with a pin.

We use our dashboard to tell use more about our overall sales, how a particular resource is selling, and even how a resource li