I spent the last week learning a lot about how successful blogs work, and especially how teachers who create content online can market what they create. There’s a lot to learn, and I feel like I’m behind! The good news is that I have time, and it’s pretty fun to learn new things. And there’s PLENTY of blogging-about-blogging and social media – about – social media. I just have to decide who to believe.
Here are a few collected thoughts from the past couple of weeks…
Teachers Pay Teachers has changed
I first listed a couple of items on Teachers Pay Teachers a few years ago, when I moved from the classroom to the museum. I stuck my raw lessons up there for people to look at, and have sold a few things. Total income over 3 years is just about enough to pay the annual membership fee now (to increase my commission), but it’s been nice to share and has basically paid for the time I spent writing and posting those few things. Now, with the idea of generating a more significant passive income, I went back. Now, Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) is loaded with lessons that all have beautiful cover images to catch the buyer’s eye. It’s not enough to have quality content.
Content is the easy part
I know what I’m doing when it comes to science education, and I know what I think about parenting most of the time. Writing about that isn’t difficult. But figuring out how to find an audience is more complicated than I ever thought it would be. It is NOT “If you build it, they will come.” Not with TPT, not with Pinterest, not with the blog. I had to learn more.
Fortunately, people who have been successful generating a significant side income using blogs, TPT, and social media seem to LOVE writing about how they got there (especially if they can incorporate affiliate links to their favorite paid services).
By the way, I’m writing this post without affiliate links because this one is mostly for my own journaling and thought-collecting. And creating those links is too time-consuming for the moment. If you find this post helpful or interesting anyway, I’d appreciate some feedback in the comments section instead.
Cover images with no eye for design
Apparently, you can’t get anywhere online without designing amazing cover images. These are the images that catch your eye on social media and make you want to click and read more.
Canva was my first stop. Canva is an awesome tool that can help anyone make beautiful logos, social media cover images, infographics, etc… It knows the optimal size and shape for different social media platforms (i.e. square for Instagram, vertical for Pinterest, the specific dimensions of a Facebook cover image.) It even has dozens of examples of each type that you can just borrow and modify! There are enough free images and lines and shapes and illustrations to do just about anything. There are also images that cost $1 to use once and $10 to use forever, and there’s a Pro subscription. I’ve purchased a couple of images so far, but mostly used the free stuff. One of my favorite things about Canva is the way it helps me choose colors that are already in the design somewhere. It also makes it easy to pick a consistent type of cover by just rebuilding an old design.
Canva, where have you been all my life?? Really. This would have been great five years ago or more.
I showed it to my 8th grader daughter and she immediately used it to dress up her slideshows for school, which were already pretty beautiful.
Social media overload
Early on, I read that a blogger has to create accounts on every social media platform — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr… It was too much! Overwhelming. I decided to narrow that list to the resources I use, as a teacher, to connect with other teachers and find content. That meant Pinterest. And Facebook. I had some experience running a Facebook page from my work at the museum, so the learning curve is shorter. I have a personal Twitter account that I check once in a while, but for now my “work” will be on Pinterest, Facebook, and TPT. I’ll probably update that to include Twitter and Instagram soon, but only because it’s easy to automatically connect those and put new blog posts on all of them with just a few extra clicks. I know I can’t maintain a conversation on all of them at once like some people do.
I did spend half a day figuring out how to add the Social Media widget in the blog sidebar and the “Share” buttons on each post. I’m still not sure I have it exactly right, but it seems to work.
Creating vs Sharing vs Building
One blog-about-blogging blogger said that for every hour you spend writing the blog itself, you should spend FOUR HOURS marketing that content. That seemed utterly ridiculous at the time, but now I see it. Especially if you count all of this Cover Image Design in that time.
This seems to apply for my TPT lessons too. Just adding them to the store isn’t going to cut it.
Pinterest seems to be the best bet for sharing my work and ideas with other middle school science teachers, so that’s where I’m focusing. When I was using Pinterest just to collect ideas that I might use in my own work and life, I managed to accumulate about 500 followers without trying. But it’s not just followers that matter — Pinterest is really a search engine that runs on keywords and categories. People will browse and repin, but people who are looking FOR an idea will search. My most popular pin ever is one I shared a couple of years ago when we were designing a class on making aluminum foil boats. It was a lesson on Science Buddies that used those boats to teach all kinds of things. I accidentally loaded the description with keywords, and now that one lesson has been repinned almost 2000 times! That’s 3 times every day! I can learn from this.
(Note the image, btw. Dullsville.)
Focus areas for Pinterest:
- Organize boards like a business. This includes creating cover images for the boards themselves!
- Find group boards to join.
- Create new group boards for Middle School Science, Science Education Bloggers, and maybe Tennessee Science Teachers.
- Original pins need a correctly-formatted image.
- Images should be vertical, include headline text, not include faces, and include red and yellow. (Someone studied this!)
- Use keywords in board titles and descriptions, and in pin descriptions. Think like a teacher looking for ideas.
- Use Tailwind to schedule original and shared pins to appear on different boards throughout the week, not just when I’m online. (This will eventually cost money to do.)
- Is Pinterest an echo chamber of bloggers talking to each other? Not yet.
Focus areas for TPT:
- Add 1 lesson per week.
- Take the time to make lessons rich, complete, useful, and editable.
- Take the time to make a great cover image, preview pages, and thumbnails.
- Take the time to write a full description that includes links to related products in my store.
- Pay the membership fee once I reach 10 items, and try to get to 20 items before Science Fair season (February).
Focus areas for the Facebook:
- Share blog posts.
- Share about one other thing per day.
- “Follow as your page” some other science educators and suppliers.
Focus areas for this blog:
- Write about TPT products as I post them, and then share those posts to Pinterest and FB.
- Think ahead to gift-giving season and come up with some posts on how to shop for teachers and other geeky people.
Blog vs. Business
- I think I’ve decided to keep the blog (“Density Column”) as a blog, not the main page of my business.
- Cary Busby Science Education will be the thing that runs the TPT, Pinterest, and eventually YouTube and in-person professional development services. Probably should get business cards. Maybe.
- We’ll see if this makes sense. Do I need blog followers and an email list? I don’t know yet.
Income report:
- TPT: $12.60 so far in September (25 days). No new products, but I revised the 3 old ones, added covers, and shared on Pinterest. Best month ever.
- Shareasale affiliate links: $0
- Amazon affiliate links: $0