7 TPT Seller Secrets for the Top 1,000 | Tips & Tricks E86

Summary:
This video shares seven advanced strategies designed specifically for the top 1,000 Teachers Pay Teachers sellers. The creator explains how to protect your competitive edge when using ChatGPT, manufacture instant social proof with email-driven “recent views,” and weigh the SEO trade-offs of selling via WooCommerce versus TPT.

He also covers optimizing Facebook ads using TPT’s purchase pixel data, encouraging wish lists and downloads as likely conversion events, and using keyword tools more strategically. The takeaway is to intentionally leverage TPT’s signals and systems to fuel a “snowball effect” in your rankings and sales.

Video

Transcript

Hey TPT sellers, this video is for the top 1,000 sellers on Teachers Pay Teachers. I have seven secrets to share with you that work at your level of the game. I guarantee there’s at least one thing in this video that you haven’t heard before. If not, just email me directly and prove me wrong.

I make lots of content for TPT sellers. I’ve made over 181 videos and recorded over 58 hours of free content to help the community out. Recently, I did a yearbook survey where I talked about three lanes.

There’s the starting lane for people who made under $100 last year. There’s the building lane for people who made between $100 to $12,000. And then there’s a scaling up lane for people who made over $12,000 in 2025.

In my YouTube community, my email community, and the pro community, I asked you what you wanted me to create content for. People want content for the scaling up lane, specifically the top 1,000 and top 100. So, here you go.

When I talk about rank, I’m not talking about the monthly rank that you see on your TPT dashboard. This is about your yearly rank in 2025. Here’s how to check it. Go to teacherspayteachers.com/tpt-yearbook Let it generate your yearbook page. Then right click on your browser and click inspect. Click the network tab. In the filter bar, type the word stats. Then reload the page.

You should see something called GraphQL. Click it. Click response. Scroll up or down until you see store rank. My store rank is 2335. That means I’m the 2,335th biggest seller on TPT based on last year’s earnings. If your store rank is between 1 and a,000, these secrets are for you. If your store rank is higher than a,000, you’re still welcome to watch, but understand that some of these ideas work better at scale.

Okay, here are seven secrets for the top 1,000 sellers on TPT. The moment I share something that you didn’t know, can you please hit like?

Secret number one is to change the default privacy setting in ChatGPT. I talked about this in my last video. I talk about this in the pro community. I talk about this on my calls with the top 100. I talk about this everywhere because most people don’t know this. We need to change the default privacy settings on ChatGPT. Otherwise, our private chats might be used to help your competition.

Go to chatgpt.com and click your profile at the bottom left. Then click settings. Then click data controls. There’s an option that says improve the model for everyone. Chances are the default setting is on. That means your chats can become part of the training data for future versions. If you have conversations with ChatGPT that you wouldn’t have with a competitor or spam store, you should change that setting.

But Mike, does this really matter? Yes. Yes, it does. Here’s why. Journalists have shown you can directly influence what AI says. You feed it niche information and then you ask it very specific questions that it doesn’t have many other answers for. Thomas Germaine from the BBC hacked ChatGPT and got AI to say he was the best hot dog eating tech journalist. All he did was posted on his personal website some fake news to prove how easily AI chat bots could be tricked.

What this shows us is that when people start asking very specific niche questions like what should I make in a specific niche, in a specific grade on a specific platform like Teachers Pay Teachers, the algorithm will cite whatever limited knowledge it has about that topic. So if your private chats are part of the training model, it’s fair game to be shared when sellers ask very specific niche questions.

By the way, even if you turn off this default setting, there is one innocent move that you can accidentally make that will still leak your private chat to help train the next model. Even if you turn the privacy setting off, go visit SEOTpreneur.com/exclusive to find out what that accidental move is so you don’t make it. If you learn something new, can you please hit like?

Secret number two is about instant social proof, and it’s one of the weirdest signals TPT shows right now. I’ve pointed out this flaw to them, but big corporations can take time to make decisions. If you click on a product on TPT, you might see a blue bar that shows how many people have viewed it within the last 24 hours. That’s not just a number. It changes how buyers feel.

When people don’t know what to do, sales psychology tells us we look for cues from what other people are doing. If you’re a top seller with a large email list, you can manufacture this social proof with the click of one button. Here’s how. I was chatting with a TPT seller and we noticed that they had a product with 900 plus views in the last 24 hours. That’s awesome. But what was odd was they had two other products with the exact same number of recent views. Three products with 900 plus views each. That’s unusual.

It turns out they were all in a recent email newsletter. And that’s when it clicked for me. Get it? Clicked. These were autoclicks. School district email privacy systems are autoclicking on all links in an email to check for spam. These bots are artificially inflating recent view metrics.

Now, I emailed TPT support and asked them instead of doing views in the last 24 hours, could they consider switching to 20 plus carts like Etsy does to provide a more reliable social proof trust signal? TPT support passed over the idea to the product team. Great. In the meanwhile, if you’re a large seller, you can manufacture social proof. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself.

In your next email newsletter, include a PS with links to three products. And then the next day, look at those product pages to see how many recent views they got. If you’re a large seller with a list of 30,000 email addresses, and 10% of school districts use privacy email software, that’s a spike of 3,000 recent views in 24 hours that you can generate just by clicking send. If you didn’t know that secret, can you hit like?

Secret number three is about WooCommerce. If you have a WooCommerce store, consider adding a link to buy on TPT. Lots of people start a store as an insurance policy. They don’t want all of their eggs in one basket. They want to diversify their income. I get it. There’s nothing wrong with having a WooCommerce store. Some teachers aren’t allowed to purchase from TBT. So, this becomes another way to meet customers.

But, there is something most sellers don’t think about. Every sale you make on your WooCommerce store is a sale that didn’t happen on TPT. And when it doesn’t happen on TPT, you lose a little TPT SEO ranking signal. Here’s what I mean. Imagine you have a product. People buy your product. So, you get a boost in your TPT SEO score, which helps you rise a little higher in search, which means you get more visibility, which helps you get more sales.

So, your TPT SEO score improves and your rank goes up, which helps you get more sales. I call that the TPT snowball effect. Now, consider the opposite. What happens if you stop getting sales on a product? Your TPT SEO score drops, so your ranking drops, which means it gets harder to be seen. So people buy less, so you drop more, which means it’s harder to get seen. I call that the TPT toilet bowl effect.

So every sale that happens on your own store is a sale that isn’t happening on TPT. Are you heading towards the snowball effect or the TPT toilet bowl effect? Let’s say you diversify. You make $10,000 in a month. $500 came from your website and that might feel like a win, but that’s $500 of conversion events on TPT plus whatever extra sales you would have gotten from ranking higher.

I’m not telling you to delete your WooCommerce store. I’m saying let’s be honest about the trade-off. Understand that you’re either in the TPT snowball effect or the TPT toilet bowl effect. And every sale you make off of TPT is a sale that could have helped you rank higher on TPT. If this is a new idea for you, can you please hit like?

Secret number four is about how you run your Facebook ads. I work with top 100 sellers who spend thousands of dollars per month on ads. There are two strategies we use. Sometimes we create Facebook ad campaigns to make money-making machines. We are literally printing money. For every dollar spent on Facebook, we make three or $4 dollars on TPT. And sometimes we run ads at a slight loss because there’s a TPT SEO boosting strategy and we’re trying to kickstart the snowball effect.

If you ran Facebook ads years ago, the game has changed. Back then, common wisdom said to go after cheap link clicks by optimizing your campaigns for traffic. 6 cents per click, 5 cents per click. That number can be a trap because when you optimize for lead traffic, Facebook finds you people who click the ads, not necessarily people who buy your products.

TPT quietly changed the setting on their platform and they now send purchase signals to your Facebook pixel. So, when someone visits your product page, TPT tells your Facebook pixel they looked at your product. If they add the product to the shopping cart, TPT fires the Facebook pixel. If they add the product to your wish list, TPT fires the Facebook pixel. And now, when they purchase, TPT fires the Facebook pixel. And this information includes how much they spent.

If you run Facebook ads, here’s how to see all of the information in your Facebook ads account. Go to Ads Manager. In Ads Manager, click columns, then click customize columns. Search for purchases. Add purchase return on ad spend, ROAS. Add purchase total cost and value. Search for cart. Add add to cart total. Search for content views. Add content views total. And then save this custom view as something like TPT. Now you can see how well your Facebook ads are really doing.

Find the ROAS column. If you have a return on ad spend of one, it means for every dollar you spend on Facebook, you made a dollar on TPT. This is good if you’re trying to get conversion signals on TPT to kickstart the TPT SEO snowball effect. What you really want to do is create Facebook ads that are optimized for sales. And if you’re a big enough store, you can even tell Facebook to focus on people who spend the most money and buy the big bundles. This is way better than telling the algorithm to find people who just click the link.

Here’s my own small store. Today I spent $5 on ads. I got two purchases of this product. The value of those purchases is $10.16. My return on ad spend is 2.03, which means today for every dollar I spent on ads, I made $2 on TPT. But not only did I get two purchases, I also got seven add to carts, which would have helped with my TPT SEO ranking.

Now, before you get too excited, let’s look at the big picture. I’ve been running ads this month, and the system is still trying to learn who to show the ad to. If I look at the entire month, I’ve spent $42 on ads and I’ve made $40. So, my ROAS is 0.96. So, I’m close to one, but my ads are running at a slight loss. I’ve lost $2. But look here, I got 43 add to cart signals, which would have helped my TPT SEO ranking. So, overall, I’m happy with the direction my ads are heading in.

Be super careful with Facebook ads. It’s easy to do it wrong. It’s easy to get scammed and hacked. It’s easy to lose money. So, if you have questions, reach out. The reality is there’s only so much you can do with keywords. You put the keyword in the title and you’re on page four. If you want to move to page one, you need more sales and more conversion events. You need more horsepower. Sending traffic from your email list can do that. Running ads can do that. If you learn something new, can you please hit like?

Secret number five is that add to wish list is probably a conversion event that you can encourage. Here’s the idea. Pick a few products that you want to boost during an upcoming sale. Let’s say three products. Then send an email to your newsletter that says something like this: Here are three products that are really popular right now. If you want one of these, add it to your wish list and hit reply to tell me which one you wishlisted. I’ll put your name in a random draw for a $10 TPT gift card.

I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Always talk to a lawyer about contests in your area. But from a TPT SEO perspective, here’s what happens. A bunch of people click from your email to your product page. That creates recent views for social proof. Then a bunch of them add to wish list. That probably creates conversion events which help with TPT SEO rank.

And you can supercharge this strategy by saying if you already bought this resource, awesome. Download again and hit reply because downloads are probably a conversion event. Then later when you pick a winner, you send them the prize and you can do one more thing. You can say something like, “Congrats, you won the gift card. By the way, this product is on sale for 20% today.” And then you link directly to that product.

Now, the person is thinking, “I already wishlisted this because I wanted it. It’s on sale and I have a gift card.” So, the chance of a purchase goes up. Here’s the full loop. Email traffic creates views. Wish lists create conversion signals that boost ranking. And then, even if people don’t win the gift card, it goes on sale for 20% off, which helps create a purchase event. And from a sales psychology perspective, we got them to take a small action by putting something on a wish list, which then makes it easier for them to take a bigger action later on, like purchasing during the sale. If that’s a new idea for you, can you please hit like?

Secret number six is about keyword tools. I am tool neutral. This means I don’t have a preference of tool. I make tools, so for obvious reasons, I haven’t used other people’s tools. But I chat with enough TPT sellers that I think I have a pretty good idea of how they work. In an alternate universe, I would probably use all of them because they all have different strengths and weaknesses.

I make tools, other people make tools. Some people love YDP. Some people love Seller Spy. Some people love my ProTools. Great. Use what works for you. It’s like teaching. Different students will connect with different teachers at different times. That’s awesome. We need a variety of tools. The problem is not the tool. The problem is how people think about keywords.

There are a lot of people who are hopping from keyword tool to keyword tool hoping that one tool has this magical list of keywords that nobody else has. But here’s the flaw with that logic. All keyword tools go to the same well for water. We all pull our keywords from the same TPT autosuggest list. The tools are not magic. They’re just different ways to collect water and view the same source of information.

The real difference is this. Some keyword tools are live and some keyword tools are historical and they both have pros and cons. A historical keyword tool might crawl the TPT website once a week and collect search results and keywords. And this can be useful because keywords that showed up in the past will probably show up again. And this is important because even evergreen topics are really seasonal.

For example, fractions is an evergreen topic, but no one teaches fractions at the start of the school year. We teach fractions later on because it’s a harder concept. So, a historical keyword tool can show that kind of spike and help you plan. But just because a keyword shows up in a historical database, it doesn’t mean people will search for it again.

TPT autosuggest doesn’t show every phrase that teachers type in. Otherwise, you’d get a lot of spam. Each phrase has a popularity score. That score is based on how many people searched for it in the last 30 days.

If not enough people search for it, TPT just doesn’t show it in autosuggest, but that minimum threshold can change. A while ago, it looked like the cutoff was around 20. More recently, it got as low as three, but right now it seems higher again. So, TPT can change it sometimes.

When the cutoff was very low, it picked up sellers who were searching up their titles in TPT. So these long phrases showed up in autosuggest even though it was just a TPT seller doing keyword research. So if you ever see a super long keyword in a historical tool, be careful. It might be real or it might just be noise from sellers doing keyword research.

Now let’s talk about live keyword tools. These tools show you what is actually showing up in autosuggest right now based on search traffic for the last 30 days. They’re powerful because they’re real time.

And we know from experiments that if you add a keyword to your title, your product can start to rank for that keyword within an hour. So, you don’t have to launch your product a month before the season to get enough TPT SEO juice. You can change your title today and see instant results within an hour.

But live keyword tools have two main problems. First, they don’t tell you what’s going to be popular later on. For example, many people start searching for Christmas in November. But if you do keyword research in October, Christmas doesn’t show up yet. And even if it did, you don’t get a sense of how big that keyword will get in December. So historical keyword tools can help because they show how popular a keyword is in future months. So you can decide if it’s worth going after.

The other problem with live keyword tools is they can be more work. You might have to go keyword by keyword. You might have to play the alphabet game. But live tools can reveal something that historical tools might miss and that sometimes TPT autosuggest gives us synonyms. Here’s an example. If you type Chinese New Year word search, a historical database might only show you keywords that contain that exact phrase plus or minus a few words.

But when you search on TPT, the live suggestions might show you a synonym like Lunar New Year word search. And seeing that synonym might spark new ideas and that synonym would show up in a live keyword tool as well. So the real strategy isn’t which tool is best. The real strategy is, do I understand what my tool can and cannot do?

If you find a keyword unicorn and your product already has thousands of reviews, you can move fast. I’ve done this on enough calls to know it takes about 30 minutes for a new keyword in a title to produce a change, and the client is always amazed. If you learn something new, can you please hit like?

Secret 7. I’m saving for the top 10,000 sellers. I was talking with a top 100 client the other day and they told me they like working with me because I’m constantly trying to figure out how TPT works. Then I showed them something that blew their mind.

If you’re in the top 1,000, go back to the start of this video and take a screenshot of your rank in the 2025 yearbook. That proves you’re in the top 1,000. Send me that screenshot from your work email and I’ll tell you the secret.

If you’re not in the top 1,000, don’t worry. I’ve already talked about this secret in another YouTube video. You’re not missing out. Just watch all of the videos on my channel and you can learn everything I know about TPT SEO.

But if you’re in the top 1,000 and you don’t have time to watch all 181 videos, just email me [email protected]. By the way, if you’ve made it this far and you’re not in the top 1000, don’t worry. My next video is for everyone. See you next time and bye for.