How to Find a Profitable Niche on Teachers Pay Teachers
Inside: These are the best tips for How to find your niche on Teachers Pay Teachers successfully, so you can start making money!
Ever feel like you're throwing spaghetti at the wall with your TpT store — hoping something sticks? You’re not alone with that thinking.
Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) is a great way to make some extra income doing what you're already doing every day. You can share your knowledge, experience, and skills with other teachers. But when you first start selling on Teachers Pay Teachers, it can be difficult–or even overwhelming– to know where to start.
It's a common saying “The riches are in the niches” and I find that to be so true on TpT. There are millions of resources available, and it's hard to know how to make yourself stand out. The truth is, niching down on Teachers Pay Teachers doesn’t mean boxing yourself in — it means finally getting known for something. And that’s how you go from one random sale every few weeks… to daily cha-chings.
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What is a TpT Niche and Why You 100% Need One
Your niche is the specific area you focus on. When it comes to TpT this means: grade level, subject area, and type of resource you create for your audience.
Your niche is the specific audience and problem your resources solve. It’s what helps your store stand out, builds trust faster, and makes everything easier — from creating products to writing listings.
You want your buyers to say, “Oh yeah, she’s the one with the groovy classroom decor,” or “That’s the teacher who makes amazing kindergarten science centers.”
This allows you to build a loyal customer base who will keep coming back to your store for more.
When you know your niche and your ideal audience, you'll be able to think of them when you're creating resources.
A good TpT niche should be:
- Specific (not “elementary” — more like “first grade math games”)
- Needed by your audience
- Something you enjoy creating over and over
4 Ways to Find Your Niche on TpT
There are a few ways you can go about finding your niche. It's not just about finding what makes you unique, because although that's special and should be celebrated . . . at first you need money.
Eventually you can go ahead and use that uniqueness to make lots of money, but at first we need to find your audience. And that means finding your niche.
Use some of these tips to find your niche!
The Spaghetti Method
My personal favorite way find your niche is what I like to call the spaghetti method.
Throw things up on your store until you find what you like to create, and what people are buying. It's a longer process and way more time consuming.
It's a great method if you really have no idea where to start.
I used the spaghetti method for my store, and now I can confidently tell you what my niche is, and what my buyers are looking for.
Look at What You Already Love Creating
What do you love creating, or what do you love using in your classroom? Some teachers are very passionate about certain ways to teach, such as the Science of Reading.
If you're a teacher with a specialty in math, your niche could be focusing on providing math resources for other teachers. If you're especially creative, your niche could be classroom decor.
Another great place to start is the things your friends ask you about. Do you have teacher friends always coming to your for a certain product you've already created for your classroom or your homeschooled child? That's a great place to start.
My first dozen products were busy books that I created for my own children when they wanted to learn more than they were learning in their preschool.
Scroll through your product library. What do you KEEP making? Are they hands-on centers? Editable worksheets? Write the rooms? Dramatic play sets?
If you could only make ONE kind of product this month, what would it be?
Review Your Best Sellers
They're trying to tell you something! Check your TpT dashboard. What is consistently selling? It might be a different product for each month. What product lines are working, even without much marketing?
ACTION STEP: Group these products into a bundle, and BOOM! You're building a niche and increasing sales.
Want help building out these best seller bundles? Here's how to batch TpT products like a pro.
What Grade Levels Are You Most Comfortable Teaching?
Teachers move around a lot in some districts, so look at the grade you loved teaching the most, and think about why you loved it so much.
If it was the content, then find a way to add that into your store.
Use Your Audience
A lot of times this isn't an option, especially when you're just starting out, but if you DO have an audience already, you can survey your audience (and potential buyers) to see what resources they are looking for.
Are your buyers messaging you for more of a certain thing? Do you get DMs asking, “hey, do you have this in a preschool version?” That's gold!
You can narrow down your focus and start creating resources that meets the needs of your target audience this way.
Interested in learning more about creating educational printables? Join my Facebook group, where I go live every week to take questions and talk about creating worksheets on PowerPoint and selling printables on TeachersPayTeachers and MORE. Click here to check it out.
What if you Like Too Many Things?
You don't have to toss all your other ideas, just build around a strong core theme. For example:
You can be the queen of centers, and still offer theme in every seasonal theme. But also make tracing worksheets if it makes your heart happy. You can be the editable template wizard who makes birthday crowns, newsletters, and name tags.
My own TpT shop is full of lots of different themes, grades, games and more. They all support playful, hands-on learning. But I love creating bingo cards, so I make them all the time.
How do you Niche Down on TpT?
Once you've identified your ideal audience, what you like to create, and how you want to make money on TpT, the next step is thinking about how you can niche down even further.
This is NOT always necessary. Sometimes just finding a general niche is all you need. You can find success by creating preschool printables exclusively, or high school chemistry.
Let's say you want to create math resources for fifth grade. Great!
But there are still a lot of different types of math resources that fifth grade teachers might need. So you'll need to narrow do your focus at first.
Maybe at first you create multiplication worksheets, or fraction games, or escape rooms. Choose a specific thing and become the go-to expert for that particular type of resource.
But don't go . . . too far.
Going too far would be like ONLY selling worksheets about point of view for 7th grade English classes.
It will do very well . . . when teachers are teaching about point of view . . . but there is a whole year you'll be missing out on.
Another way to find a deeper niche is to look at the resources you've created. What is the common denominator? What themes or topics do they all have in common? Do you tend to create a lot of boom cards or word searches?
My advice when it comes to niching down is go as far as you feel comfortable with. Once you've created all that you can about point of view, and you're ready to move on, it's okay to create lessons for verbs, or another subject that seventh grade English teachers will use.
When it comes to selling on TeachersPayTeachers, one of the most important things you can do is find your niche. By focusing on what you enjoy making and what you love, you can capitalize on that and build a successful business selling your educational printables.
Remember, you want to determine what resources are needed and focus on becoming the go-to expert for that type of resource. At first, at least. Then you'll be well on your way to TpT success!
