Should I Be Blackballed By The TPT Seller Community? Free TPT Seller Data Tools – Master Class 5

One TPT seller told me what I’m doing is “the quickest way to get blackballed by the TPT Community” Agree? Disagree?

Watch this video to find out why I think we can find a solution where everyone wins.

Link to free TPT seller data tool!

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VIDEO TABLE of CONTENTS

• 0:00:00 I’m sorry
• 0:00:31 Introduction: Working towards a win
• 0:02:01 How a better TPT Seller Dashboard will help
• 0:15:08 Agenda for a controversial topic
• 0:16:30 Part 1. The need for Courageous Conversations
• 0:22:26 My Bias: About Mike Fuchigami
• 0:25:32 Part 2. The problem with the current TPT Seller Dashboard
• 0:37:34 Business Intelligence Tools
• 0:39:42 What is Fair?
• 0:44:48 Part 3. Why not choose a different name?
• 0:48:36 Response from TPT Sellers – Negative
• 0:50:46 The quickest way to get blackballed by the TPT Seller community
• 0:52:38 Power and “You Get What You Deserve”
• 0:56:35 I’m sorry
• 0:59:49 Response from TPT Sellers – Positive
• 1:00:50 Part 4 – A call to action
• 1:02:43 Action #1. Be a “First Follower” (if you can)
• 1:10:01 Action #2. Ask TPT to do a Seller Survey
• 1:12:36 Final Thoughts

Video Transcript

(00:00:00):
But that sentence about blackballed by the TPD community, that sentence opened my eye because I realize now that there are some sellers, like to the sellers who are uneasy by this drama and controversy. You’re uncomfortable with what’s going on, you’re upset by some of the things that maybe I’ve said or pointed out. And you’re caught in the middle, right? So to these sellers, I’m sorry. Hey, TPT Sellers, this is a deep dive into why TPT needs a free seller tool to help TPT sellers like you and I sell more on TPT. Here we go. So, ooh, that didn’t work. Here we go. So the goal here is about advocating for better free data analysis tools from TPT and IXL learning, and I’m trying to work towards a win, win, win win, win win solution. I’m not looking for win-win, I’m not looking for win-lose. I’m trying to come up with a solution where everyone wins.

(00:01:09):
So here’s what I’m thinking. If IXL improves the TPT seller dashboard, it becomes easier for TEACHERpreneur like you and I to improve our resources to get in front of the right person to make the sale. TPT sellers, you and I, we win because we can make better business decisions based on the information we have, and then we can take advantage of opportunities to reach new buyers to make sure they don’t bounce away. I think teachers win when they come onto the TPT platform and they’re able to find the resources that solves the problem. Like no prep, no time, got to get stuff done. I need something to teach. So we help ease their pain by providing resources. Now, this is not hyperbole, this is not exaggeration, and I’m going to walk you through how a better TPT seller dashboard can actually help teachers and teacher sellers get together and do what we need to do.

(00:02:04):
So here is the TEACHERpreneur myth, and this is based on Michael Gerber’s book, the E Myth. So the TEACHERpreneur Myth, the entrepreneur myth is that just because you are a good teacher doesn’t mean that you are a good teacher seller. And that’s because teaching and selling are two completely different skill sets. So just because you can bake doesn’t mean that you can run a bakery. And that’s the point that Michael Gerber’s book makes. It’s fantastic, the entrepreneurial myth, definitely check it out. So I’ve learned the world’s simplest business plan from Dan Meredith and his simple business plan is this one. You find a group of people who are in pain or need. Two, you spend time interacting with them, researching their need. Three, you create a product that serves that need, and then four, you sell it to them. Let’s apply this to TPT Land.

(00:03:03):
We find a group of people who are in pain or need, and that’s us, that’s teachers. Teachers have too much to do, not enough time. The job is constantly changing. More things get added to us. The curriculum changes and we need to teach. We are in a group of, we’re in a position of pain because we have too much to do, not enough time to do it. We need stuff to teach. Alright? Spend time interacting with them, researching their needs. We’re teachers, we know what we need and we’re creating resources that we would use in the classroom ourselves, but we just don’t have the time so we know what the problem is. So then the next part is create a product that serves that need. Well, we’ve already done that. We’ve already created an awesome lesson that was fantastic in our class. It went great, our students loved it, and maybe other teachers could benefit from this lesson as well.

(00:03:53):
So now we need to sell it to them. The challenge is great. Lessons do not always sell well right away. This is the need for a growth mindset because it’s a game. It’s a puzzle to figure out how to crack the code so that your great lesson can get in front of the right people. So when do people buy? And this is what I’ve learned from listening to Alex Ozzi, dude has a hundred million dollars in his net worth apparently, and he has a book, a hundred million dollars offers, and the subtitle is How to Make offers So Good. People Feel Stupid Saying No. So that’s the premise of his book. I highly recommend it if you’re a TPT seller. But basically he says, succeeding in business means getting prospective customers to trade us money for our services. And as a TPT seller, we’re talking about lessons.

(00:04:45):
So the trade is money for our lessons. And this is part of the mindset shift that we need to make as TPT sellers when you’re getting into the game, which is as teachers, we share our resources for free with the teacher across the hall. We like sharing and we’re uncomfortable with this idea about asking for money for lessons, for resources. But if you listen to Alex Hermo, if you read his book, the idea is we have to get comfortable with understanding that this is a value exchange. We are trading money for lessons that we created. And he says the only way to facilitate that exchange is by making the prospect an offer. And in TPT land, this is called the TPT product page. That’s the sales page where we propose a price for our lesson. That’s where we make the offer. The value exchange is basically a trade of dollars for value.

(00:05:39):
The offer is what initiates this trade. And so to put it in TPT speak, the TPT product page is what initiates this trade. So whenever you have a value proposition, you have perceived cost of the resource, like what the teacher perceives it to be and the perceived value of the resource, how much they think they’re going to get from it. And this is about perception. So you set a price for your TPT resource. And I’m not saying whether it should be low, I’m not saying whether it should be high because it doesn’t matter. What matters is the comparison between the perceived cost and the perceived value of the resource. So if the perceived value of the resource is low compared to the cost of the resource, then the teacher is not going to buy it. There is no sale because it’s not a good deal.

(00:06:26):
So the question now is how do we communicate value to teachers? And we do that through the TPT product page. So we communicate value through the covers that we make. We can do this through the words that we choose to put into the TPT product title. We communicate value about what’s in the lesson when we write that product description and that preview that we upload. It doesn’t matter if it’s APDF or an MP four or both. The question is how do you communicate what’s in your resource so that the prospective teacher will be like, yeah, this is exactly what I need. So you decide how to do that with your PDF, with your MP four, and then you set the price. And there’s nothing wrong with setting a low price or a high price, but you’re communicating value through price. Because if you set it too low, you’re communicating that the price is not worth it.

(00:07:18):
There must be a reason why it’s low. I’m not saying everything should be high. I’m not saying everything should be low. I’m simply saying that there’s value a associated when you communicate things for a price and if you give away things for free, well, there’s evidence that shows that free stuff people don’t always value. And sometimes if there is a cost, well then they are more likely to use the resource. So we can communicate value through price, and then we communicate value through reviews or more accurately how we respond to reviews. Not everyone’s going to love your stuff. Some people are going to have great reviews, some people are going to have constructive feedback, but the way that we respond to the reviews is a public thing that we can control. So this is how we communicate value to teachers. Great lessons do not always sell right away.

(00:08:09):
Growth mindset right away, it might not sell. So we’ve got to crack the code and the CSV download data. We can download product stats, we can download our seller data to see where in the funnel we lose people if you know how to use that CSV. So if you fix the cover and title based on where the numbers are at, you can increase the perceived value. Someone might look on the TPT on a search engine result page on TPT and realize, yeah, that product in the title, that’s exactly me. So for example, me, I’m trying to reach Ontario language 2023 curriculum teachers, teachers who have to do that. If I put that in the title, then that speaks to my perspective, ideal customer avatar. So now the perceived value of the resource increases. And then if I realize, yeah, the TPT data is telling me in that CSV file, I need to work on my product description and I write that product description so that the teacher on TPT realizes, yes, this will help them solve whatever problem they have, I can increase the value of my resource.

(00:09:10):
And then in my preview, if I realize the CSV data is telling me, actually, I need to improve my preview because not enough people are converting for whatever reason. So if I can find a way to communicate exactly what’s in my resource through a preview PDF or through the MP profile, then all of a sudden the perceived value of my resource has increased even though I haven’t touched the cost. And now because you are getting so much compared to how much it costs, you would be crazy not to buy the resource. And this is the value proposition. So the communication part we can do as TPT sellers is remove the risk of buying. The challenge is that CSV file is confusing, which means that a lot of TPT sellers, especially new TPT sellers who are at the beginning of their journey, they don’t understand how to use the data to increase the perceived value of their resource.

(00:10:06):
So we lose people, they bounce away. But what if we had a better TPT seller dashboard where it was easy for everyone to know, oh, okay, this is red. This means I should improve my product preview. Oh, this is red, this means I should probably work on my description or my title or my cover, right? In that case, all of us have information. We need to increase the perceived value of our resource, and that helps close the sale. I think if IXL improves, hold that thought. There we go. I think if IXL improves the TPT seller dashboard, it becomes easier for us as TPT sellers to communicate the value of our resources to the teacher. Okay, so what do I mean by that? So I think teacher sellers win because now the teachers who landed on our product page who bounced away, if we can communicate better about what’s in our product, then we don’t lose the sale and they stay on the, instead of bouncing off, they stay on the product and we make the sale.

(00:11:13):
So we win as TPT sellers. But teacher buyers, they also win because they landed, let’s say they found the product TPT product page on Google, and they landed on your TPT product page, and then they’re like, oh yeah, this doesn’t really meet my need. And they bounce away. TPT just lost that sale. It was a bounce away. We didn’t keep them. But if the teacher lends on that product page, and because the TPT seller was able to understand the data and realize what they needed to fix, then the teacher seller, the TPT seller, was able to communicate exactly what was in this product. So the teacher landing in from Google is like, yeah, this exactly has so much value compared to what they’re asking for. This is a no-brainer to buy. So then the teacher buyer wins because now we have presented the solution to their problem.

(00:12:02):
Whereas in the past, we all know that when we first started on TPT, we didn’t realize that you needed to make product covers. We thought that PDF like image preview was okay, and it is okay sometimes, but we can do so much better. And so that’s the value of data. So teachers don’t bounce away, we win. They win if they don’t bounce away from a TPT product page because they found what we needed. Because that TPT product page through the product cover, through the description, through the product preview, it communicates to the teacher, this is what you need it remove the risk for them to feel comfortable to buy that product. If TPT IXL improves that seller dashboard, the students win, right? Because hopefully teachers are less stressed out. They have this resource and students have a less stressed out teacher. But more practically speaking, the beauty of TPT, the beauty of TPT is that teachers who have a resource that sells well, you can help other teachers who are like you, who have students like you, well, they’ll probably enjoy your resource as well.

(00:13:07):
And so now you’ve helped not only your students, but you’ve helped other students benefit from your lessons. So the students win because they get better high quality lessons as opposed to something that the teacher just had to whip together because they needed to because they didn’t have time to find anything better. So students win. I think the TPT platform wins because at the end of the day, IXL is a for-profit company. If TPT helps us increase our conversion rate, the pie gets bigger. If the pie gets bigger, their cut of the pie also gets bigger. So the platform wins and they can reinvest that in however they choose to. They grow the business. I think TPT seller coaches win. They continue to provide high-end premium coaching to their clients. It’s not like having a better TPT dashboard will magically solve problems because there are people today, the TPT sellers, there’s still lots of sellers who don’t know how to use the current TPT dashboard.

(00:14:03):
So there is lots of space here for TPT. They could even hire other TPT seller coaches to make these premium videos that TPT then offers to everyone. And even if they don’t do that, even if TPT doesn’t hire them, TPT seller coaches, there’s lots of them who have premium paid Facebook group communities. And that’s fantastic because if you’ve paid to get in there, then you are with other like-minded TPT sellers who are also willing to pay that price point to get in there. And then you’re able to network with people and figure out what’s working and share your best practices with your private group that TPT seller coach has facilitated. That’s awesome. They’re going to continue to win. And yes, I win. So SEOT preneur wins. I talk the talk, I walk the walk, and my big thing is active citizenship and critical thinking. So this helps me if I’m successful in getting a better TPT seller dashboard for everyone that helps build my personal brand, my business brand of the kind of resources I make and the kinds of things I do.

(00:15:08):
So I apologize and I recognize that this is a controversial topic. And controversial just means there are strong opinions on both sides, on many sides of the coin. And there are strong opinions because there are multiple stakeholders. So what I’m going to invite everyone to do if you’re still watching at this point, is to keep on watching and at the end, make an informed decision or more informed decision about this controversial topic. You might come in here watching this video and you love what I’m talking about already, or maybe you don’t love what I’m talking about. I’m going to go through some more things and maybe that’ll change your opinion or maybe it won’t, right? But this is an invitation to get to the end of the video, see what I have to say, and then join the dialogue. So here’s the agenda for today.

(00:15:55):
This is a conversation about courageous conversations to make the world a better place. And then I’m going to go into the problem as in why do we need a free seller tool.com? I’m going to talk a little bit about the controversy behind why I chose one name and why did I change the name and why didn’t I choose a different name? And then I’m going to talk about a solution, which is a call to action to help make our world and the world a better place. So part one, courageous conversations. I firmly believe that if we want to make the world a better place, we have to have courageous conversations. So we have to have brave topics, brave chats about difficult topics that help move our communities that we’re a part of that help move them forward. And this is just about citizenship. So being part of the TPT Seller community isn’t simply being a TPT seller, it’s also about participating in that community to help make it better.

(00:16:56):
We’re not all going to agree, but there’s no doubt in my mind, and this quote, I love this quote by Margaret Mead, but the idea that a small group of people can spark that change to make the world a better place. I love that idea, but it’s also about critical thinking, figuring out if something is right or wrong, and then when you figure out if something is right or wrong, also taking the time to look for the opposite point of view to make that informed decision. And I don’t know, I’m presenting this slideshow with my point of view, but I don’t know what I don’t know. And so part of me in this journey has to be trying to have conversations both publicly and privately about what I’m missing in this conversation. And that’s a key thing here as you watch this or as other people are saying they’re things, the question is, well, what are we missing?

(00:17:43):
That’s where this slideshow is trying to take us. I love this idea about active citizenship, which is if you see something wrong, say something. And we see that with the TPT seller community. We saw that with Virus Gate back when TPT shut down some seller accounts because of potential virus concerns, and the TPT seller community responded loudly and TPT rolled back some changes. And we see that, right? And that’s fantastic. If you see something wrong, say something. I love that. It’s important to be an active bystander and being an active bystander, we know, we know from social psychology research, if no one steps forward, then sometimes that just encourages people not to step forward. But if one person stepped forward, it encourages other people to be active bystanders. But being an active bystander doesn’t necessarily mean confrontation. I taught grade eight for a long time, and so everything I see is from the framework of a grade eight teacher.

(00:18:38):
So I’m going to give you an example of active bystander strategies. If you are a grade eight student, so let’s say we’re in grade eight, I’m teaching a lesson, we’re doing small group, I’m working with a small group over here, and you’re a grade eight student in that far corner, and in your group, one of your classmates makes a racist comment if you’re an active bystander. If we don’t do anything, we kind of give permission for that kind of behavior to continue. But if we take action, we can help make our little community or our spaces a little bit better. And so if you’re that grade eight student, you might choose to make a public comment. If you have that kind of personality and the strength of character, and you’re okay with this and you’re at that mental health comfort zone, you might say, dude, that’s kind of racist.

(00:19:23):
Why are you saying that? So you might actively publicly say something, but you could be an active bystander in a private way. So afterwards, at lunchtime or whatever, you could go to the person that was the target of the racist comment and privately check in with them, Hey, are you okay? Or How are you doing? And that’s still being an active bystander. Being an active bystander doesn’t mean you have to take action immediately. And it doesn’t mean your action has to be public, it just means you take action. So the action can be direct. It could be you’re friend of the person who made the classmate who made that racist comment afterwards, you can be like, yeah, no, you can’t really say that. And privately you can sort of have those conversations, or it could be indirect action. So you’re that classmate, you’re not really a loud kind of person, and you don’t really know any of these people.

(00:20:14):
And maybe the person who made the racist comment is kind of like a bully. They’re the class bully and you don’t want to get targeted by them. So then indirect action might be like you’re walking to the teacher and you just say like, Hey, you might just want to check out what’s happening over there. That’s still indirect action. So I love this idea about active citizenship and critical thinking. This is my jam, right? I think this helps us make the world a better place. And I think if we want to change things, we as a society, as a community, as a group of people, whatever, we need to take action. And that’s us taking action from the bottom up. But it also could be supporting something that you see, yeah, this is actually going to make our community better. Supporting from the bottom up is important, but even if you have a lot of support from the bottom, let’s say teachers want to do something, if the principal says, yeah, that’s not going to happen, right?

(00:21:04):
Nothing happens. So you also need top-down action. But just because you have top-down action doesn’t mean things will happen. Think about the last time at school where your principal or your school board had a top-down initiative where there was no support from the grassroots people in the classrooms. Think about how well that initiative went forward or could have gone better if there was more support maybe. So I’m a firm believer that you need support from The top and support in this context is from people who work at I-X-L-I-X-L learning, people who work on team TPT. They are within the system and they can enact change to make the world a better place if they choose to. So I think to facilitate change, we need support from the bottom from us and support from the top, from whatever powers that be, whether it’s IXL learning, whether it’s the people who have power within Facebook groups, I think we need both.

(00:22:00):
And if we have this sandwich, we can help make the world a better place. We can help make TPT sellers the TPT seller community a better place. But all of this, remember, is just my perspective. We’re always watching. Some of you already agree with what I’m saying. Some of you disagree with what I’m saying, but the question for me is always, well, who benefits if this message is accepted and who is at a disadvantage? And that’s kind of a theme for this slideshow. So I’m going to talk about some of the biases that I’m aware of, but there’s always unconscious bias. So maybe there are things that I’m missing. Maybe there are things that I’m choosing not to say here, but I’ll talk about me. My name’s Mike Fitch. I’m the host of the SEOT Premier community, the YouTube channel. And yeah, I create SEL resources based on my experience as a grade eight teacher.

(00:22:49):
I don’t teach in the classroom anymore. I create SEL resources. And these are 21st century learning skills, transferable skills like character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, digital literacy skills. I do all of this and I try to create resources that amplify voices of people whose perspectives we don’t hear a lot. That’s the kind of resource I make for middle school, and I sell them on TPT. I love TPT. I love the idea, the fun of being a TEACHERpreneur, a lot of personal growth because things don’t work right away. There’s lots of opinions. You can do everything and nothing happens and so many pieces of the puzzle. And I think there’s a lot of personal growth that we can go through, and if you figure out a way to crack the code, you can make your way towards financial freedom. I think that’s a fun game, and I love this.

(00:23:44):
I love chatting with TP sellers. Just this is fun for me. And I think if you can find joy in this, then you can sort of find the way to keep on going until you win, right? Because if you don’t stop, eventually you’ll get to where you are going. I help small businesses grow. So I help brick and mortar stores in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada grow, whether that’s through digital marketing, whether that’s through lead generation. I help online businesses as well. Some of them are in Ottawa, some of them are outside of Ottawa, some of them are TEACHERpreneur, some of them are solopreneurs. And I now have started a web hosting company because I realized the tools that I need to make my website and to make my brand and presence online, and these are tools that TEACHERpreneur need as well and other solopreneurs need. So I help small business grow.

(00:24:33):
And finally, this is how I earn a living. So I’m not in the classroom anymore. I hope to be in the classroom again once I make a million dollars and some things have been resolved. I think that would be awesome to teach grade eight at my old school, just with that experience and just to work with a small group of grade eight students and yeah, okay, well, sharing my experience, hearing from their experience about how to make the world a better place. I think that would be full circle to my story. I would love for that to happen in 10 or 20 years, but that’s not today. Right now I earn a living through the internet, okay? So that’s my bias. And obviously I have biases I know and I have biases I don’t know about. So the question is always, well, who benefits and who’s at a disadvantage because Mike does benefit from this slideshow, but Mike is also at a disadvantage.

(00:25:23):
So what are some of those things? But likewise, as we go through the slideshow, think about some of the other players in this game who benefits and who’s at a disadvantage. Okay, part two, the problem or why do we need a frees seller tool.com? Okay, so this is the current dashboard in October, 2023. I love this dashboard, but there are a few things that I wish would change. I love how the dashboard, you can click on that four section my entire store, you can see your entire listing of stores. I love that blue histogram that lets you see visually how much each resource can make, and you get a quick sense that some resources make more than others. This is fantastic, this is good. And I love how you can look at trends for specific products. So I can click on, I can select all and then unselect all to clear the board and just click a couple of products and narrow down to see earnings or units sold or whatever conversion rate.

(00:26:19):
So this is good. I love how you can isolate this graph. So if I wanted to track the progress of one resource, I can just isolate that resource and just see how the sales have gone so far based on that. But I wish the TPT dashboard could do this, and this is a mockup image. This doesn’t happen yet, but I wish there was a button somewhere that said, show me location. And if you click on that location button, I wish it would break down your top countries where people buy your resources. Even if you could drill that in top countries would be awesome, but also top states, but top countries for simplicity, because then very quickly you can see where in the world people buy your stuff, but you can’t look at trends by buyer location right now, which means it’s harder for TPT sellers to know if niching down by state or country is working.

(00:27:12):
And if we don’t see it’s working because it’s hidden by other factors, we give up, okay, where am I going with this? Well, we could actually help IXL learning expand TPT into other countries because TPT is already an established marketplace with a lot of credibility. Yes, it’s in English, but you have the star ratings. It’s not like a new competitor teacher seller platform with spelling mistakes or not as much clout. So if I wanted to expand or narrow down into a specific area, I can help TPT expand the pie. So I know one of my top selling countries is Australia, and I don’t create Australian resources because I am not from that area. I’m not from that culture. But if you do, then you could hyperfocus on that platform. And I’m sure there are Australian marketplaces, I’m sure there are European marketplaces, I’m sure there are lots of other marketplaces.

(00:28:09):
But if TPT the TPT dashboard, let me see if I could see, for example, I’m trying to niche down to Ontario, and if I could see from this graph where my sales are in Ontario and if they’re growing or not, then I can help TPT get more customers in Ontario or Australia or New Zealand or wherever it is in the part of the world. You are now important caveat, I’m not saying translate your resource into another language to try to enter into a different marketplace. Because I think I know from listening and chatting with other TPT sellers at the last TPT Ford, someone shared an example of that going poorly because language is just so culturally specific and nuanced, and if you get a bad review, it’s hard to recover from that bad review. But if you are naturally fluent in a different language and you create resources in that language for your community in a place where TPT doesn’t sell already, well right now you can’t tell from the dashboard if you’re selling more in that community, you can from the CSV data and I can do it, but it’s just more time and it’s like I have to upload my data.

(00:29:15):
I have to be able to create, if it was easier, it would be easier to expand the pie. Why does Mr Beast dub his video? It’s because you can reach larger markets. And so if there’s less competition, I know from working with Enrika and where I’m helping her set up a TPT blog to target Italian teachers, because to rank for a math word like algebraic expressions in English in the US is incredibly hard. I think it was like 4,000 views per month with a difficulty of like 70%. But in Italy, to rank for the Italian phrase for algebraic expressions, it’s the same search volume, but the competition is like 20%. So we can help expand the pie and help IXL learning get into markets where it currently isn’t, right? So that would be wonderful if we had this kind of data. Problem number two. So this is the current TPT dashboard right now, and we can see conversions and we can see the conversion rate.

(00:30:18):
And this is good if you have a low conversion rate, you work on the previews. What do I mean by that? Here’s the value proposition. Again, we know that the product page is where we communicate the offer, the value, the perceived cost is what a teacher thinks it is, and the perceived value is how much they think they’re getting out of this resource. So a prospective buyer lands on your page. So we’re talking about conversion rate, how we know conversion rate. A prospective buyer has landed on your TPT product page, which means it’s counting as a page view right now. And conversion rate is units sold divided by Pageview. So they’ve landed on your product page, but they decided there’s not enough value in your product page. So they left, they didn’t buy. Okay, if we know from conversion rate that we need to, I thought I talked about this later.

(00:31:11):
Do I not talk about, I’m pretty sure I talked about this later. I’m going to come back to this part, but if we could sort by conversion rate, if there was that clickable button right here beside conversion rate, there is for the other parts of this table. So it makes you wonder why have they chosen not to have that ranking button? Outliers are interesting. Why is this conversion sorting missing a sort button, but if we could click the conversion rate, so if the conversion rate is low, it means I need to work on my product descriptions or a product, whatever, why can’t I sort this so that I can quickly prioritize what I need to work on? I wish we could do that. So this is a mock of vision. I wish we had the up and down button, but we can’t do this right now, so it’s harder to prioritize, right?

(00:31:54):
Problem number three is the product previews. This is good. We have product previews as a whole count. So in this top resource, 67,000 page views and 8,000 product previews. That’s good to know. We know how many people look at the preview, but I wish this section about wishlisted was a little bit different. It’s okay. So in theory, the funnel and the sales page is they land on your TPT product page, they read your cover, they look at the covers, they read your product description, they decide, okay, I want to buy this. And then they look at your product preview, and then either from the product preview, they’re like, yeah, I want this. So they either purchase it right away or maybe they wishlist it because the cost is a little bit too high, but on a sale it’ll be a little bit lower. And then the value of the resource is this.

(00:32:48):
But on a sale, the price of the resource will drop down. And so then it becomes a no-brainer to buy, right? So that’s the idea behind wishlist. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe people wishlist on mobile to print later. Either way, I wish that the TPT dashboard could do this. So right now it says wishlisted, but I wish it actually showed us preview conversion rate as a percentage. So the percentage of product previews divided by the total page views, because the percentage preview conversion rate tells us more information than just the whole number. If you have a low preview conversion rate, improve your product description. So let’s look at the funnel. Here’s where we’re going to go into the funnel where I’m going to break it down. So this is the TPT sales funnel. And right now, if you know how to use that CSV file from TPT, you can use that TPT data to see where in the funnel we lose people. So the cover and the title, if I improve the cover and the title, I can get more people landing onto my TPT product page and I can increase the perceived value. So in the cover, I might put keywords, Ontario language 2023 curriculum, so that a teacher looking at that from Ontario will be like, yes, this is what I’m looking for. So I increase the value of my resource to those people.

(00:34:11):
Alex Ozzi says that he trains his sales staff by explaining the pain is the pitch. So if I increase the description where if you’re reading this and you’re like, this is exactly, you are describing what I need. So teachers in Ontario, we have a new language curriculum and some school boards have, it’s just anytime there’s a new curriculum, how do I teach this? How do I address it? What already connects to that curriculum? And if they read my product description and I’ve done a good job of explaining how it meets the new curriculum, and they are worried because they’re, how do I figure out if I’m teaching the new curriculum or explain to my principal or parents or stakeholders that I’m doing the new curriculum, but my product description explains that pain point, then they see how my product eases their pain and they’re more likely to buy.

(00:35:03):
So I’ve increased the perceived value. So if my product preview rate is low, then I need to work on my description, cover and title because it means I need to get more people looking at my preview. So I’ve improved my description because the product preview rate was low. That means that they’re on the page, they’re page view, but they didn’t actually look at the product preview. And so I knew I had to fix my description. So now the perceived value of my resource has increased a little bit. And then if I do a really good job in that preview, and for me, what I’ve decided to do is to do a watermarked full preview of the entire PDF in a low resolution file to try to remove the risk of buying. So you see exactly what you get. And also in the comments, not everyone’s going to love your stuff.

(00:35:53):
We know this from buying online on Amazon or wherever else, but they can see how you reply to negative comments. And if you reply in a constructive way where they feel like, okay, if I have a problem, I can trust that this buyer is active and is going to address my problem, and I can see that, then that also helps remove the risk of buying. So if we remove the risk of buying, we can increase the perceived value of our resource, and then boom, they’re more likely to buy. But if they’re not getting to the preview, well, we need to improve that product description, and that’s information that we tell from the preview conversion rate. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we have preview conversion rate and they just highlighted like a gradient? So your worst preview conversion rates were in red, and your best conversion rates were in green, and it was just the gradient that you saw within the TPT dashboard that you could click on sort and then decide if that’s a resource you want to fix.

(00:36:47):
That would help all of us improve our TPT products, improve the value equation, and make it so that TPT sellers win because they make more sales, they increase the conversion rate, and they make it so teach your buyers win because they find the resource right away the first time they click on the resource. Yes, this explained why I need this, right? This is what I think we need to do. Problem number four, I wish the TPT dashboard could do this download to Excel button. This is good because not all platforms do this. Not all platforms do this. Did I just lose? No. Okay. But not everyone knows how to create a pivot table to analyze the data, and that’s where things could improve. So that’s the problem. There’s nothing wrong with problems. We know that the world’s simplest business plan is find a group of people in pain TPT sellers who don’t know how to use ACSV, learn what they need.

(00:37:48):
Well, we know because we know how hard it is to you as ACSV create a solution to that problem, which is called business intelligence or business analytics and then sell it to them. That’s a business model. That’s a third party solution. There’s nothing wrong with that business model because not everyone knows how to create a pivot table to analyze the data. And we have solutions from other TPT coaches, and now we have a solution from a free seller tool.com, right? Business intelligence is a huge thing. It’s not something new created by TPT sellers. So in the real world, in the outside world, we have Google Analytics, Google Looker, and these are free tools at least free to start with because Google makes money from a different way. They’re not making money from Google Looker, they money from paid ads. That’s where the revenue comes from.

(00:38:38):
So this is just an add-on for their business model, but there are other services like Tableau or Adobe Commerce. And to put this in context for TPT sellers, if I’m an enterprise business and I want to have one employee have access to Adobe commerce where we put in all of our data and then create these spreadsheets and dashboards so that business people can make decisions, one license for the cloud version is $40,000. So there’s big money to be made here in business intelligence, but the difference in our scenario is Adobe isn’t a marketplace, whereas TPT is the marketplace. So TPT by providing us with business intelligence tools would help improve the marketplace. That’s what I’m arguing. So my question for you is, when was the last major update to the TPT seller dashboard? And since I’ve been selling for the last couple of years, I don’t know that I’ve seen major changes, but some of you have been selling for a while and you’ve told me, yeah, actually things haven’t really changed in a while.

(00:39:42):
So now let’s have a conversation. Let’s pause the conversation and think about what is fair. And there’s a classic image here that I’m going to break down here. And this is already a controversial issue because not everyone agrees with the idea about fairness. And this is an image from the Interaction Institute for Social Change. And Agnes McGuire is the artist, and they published Photoshop versions of this image so that people could remix it and talk about social fairness in their context. But their point is there’s a difference between equality and equity. And equality is where everyone gets the same inputs. So in this case, they all get the same box, but in the equality side, that purple shirt person can’t see the ball game. The idea with equity is you don’t get necessarily the same thing, but you get the same outputs. So in this case, rather than having equal inputs, you have equal outputs, which is being able to see this game.

(00:40:41):
So grade eight teacher connection would be, I might give a certain amount of time for someone to do an assessment for the class to do an assessment, but I might recognize that some people might need extra time to demonstrate what they could do. Having the constraint of time prevents ’em from showing what they can do. And maybe that’s because they have a learning obstacle. Maybe that’s because they broke their hand and they’re trying to write whatever the reason might be. Or another example would be, I need glasses in order to see. It would be ridiculous to say to everyone, okay, we’re going to give everyone glasses because we have to give everyone the same thing. It could be where, okay, we’re going to give some people glasses so they’re able to have an equal outcome or rather an equal opportunity at outcome. Not everyone agrees with this, but after this was posted, someone named Andrew and this was found on Facebook, did their remix of this, which is a comment on reality.

(00:41:39):
And their mix is like some people have so many resources that they are just stacked up to the sky, whereas other people, purple shirt, well, the reality is some people are in a hole in terms of the distribution of resources. You may agree, you may disagree, but the last piece of this puzzle is the Center for Story-based strategy worked with the Interaction Institute for Social Change, and they came up with this third panel about liberation. So had equality, equity, liberation, and then they had a challenge. What’s the fourth panel to sort of start to think about these issues of social fairness and liberation is the idea is, well, why don’t you just get rid of the fence, change the system so you have a fence. I’ve seen other versions where there’s still a fence, but it’s a chain link fence so you can see through it.

(00:42:20):
But this is interesting. So the critical thinking in me always thinking about who benefits and who’s at a disadvantage, and I like transferable skills. So then I start to wonder, can I apply this image to the current TPT dashboard? So here’s my attempt at applying this to the current system and tell me what I’m missing. So let’s pretend that this is a group of TPT sellers who are trying to know the’re trying to see the game. And if you can see the game knowing what to improve, then you can play the game better. And right now, purple shirt can’t see the game, red and blue shirt can and well, if we’re talking about TPT, then these boxes were standing on their CSV files. So Purple Shirt does not know how to use that CSV file that they can download from TPT, whereas red shirt and blue shirt, they know how to use the CSV data and they’re able to figure out what to improve so that they can communicate the value in their resource.

(00:43:17):
So who benefits? Who’s at a disadvantage? Now what if we have some really expensive data tools that give some TPT sellers an incredible advantage to be able to see what they need to improve, who benefits, who’s at a disadvantage? What if we have a free seller tool where now it helps us use that CSV file to be able to make business decisions to realize, okay, it’s color coded red and green, I need to be able to work on this or that. So now person in purple shirt here on the right hand side, they’re able to use the CSV file to make business decisions. On the other hand, there will always be people who thanks Mike, but I don’t even know where to start with this Google Sheet. Just because you had that free seller tool like a Google sheet, doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to be able to use it.

(00:44:11):
So that’s part of the problem here. There’s still going to be people who cannot use the data that TPT is providing to figure out should I fix my product cover, my product description, my product title, my product preview? But what if I XL changed the TPT seller dashboard so that everyone could very quickly simply know what to improve? So if this happened, who is at a disadvantage? Who benefits? Okay, what am I missing? So that’s my take on that image and applying it to TPT world. What am I missing? Part three, why not choose a different name? And this is an important question. So on Saturday, October 21st, last week I published this under the name, you’re a free data playbook. And the question of course is, well, why not choose a different name? Because there’s already your data playbook and now you’re calling it your free data playbook.

(00:45:14):
And you’re saying, what are you saying, Mike? Okay, well first of all, your data playbook doesn’t appear to be a registered trademark, right? So I did a search, it’s not a registered US trademark. So there’s that. Okay, so now this is a question about copyright. Does copyright apply? I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal information. This is just edutainment. But in the states, in Canada, in many places, in many jurisdictions, there’s this idea about fair use, and this is the one from the us. But basically you’re allowed to use limited portions of a work, including quotes for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, scholarly reports. And the reason why this exists to my understanding is because we need as a society to be able to have discussions about things like whether it’s public or private. We need to be able to have dialogue about things, whether you agree with them or disagree with them or whatever it is.

(00:46:17):
Because otherwise, if we didn’t have this sort of fair use doctrine, then it means someone criticize what the government is doing or what this company is doing, and then the company or the government says, okay, that’s copyright. You got to take that down. Then there would be no dialogue about things. So we need fair use doctrines. So the reason why I chose your free data playbook is to make a comment commentary about the data tools that the average TPT seller has access to. What’s the comment? Why do we need to ask TPT and IXL for a better TPT seller dashboard?

(00:46:59):
I think we need to have courageous conversations. That’s where I’m coming from to make the world a better place. We’re not all going to agree, and that’s okay. The point isn’t that we all agree. The point is that we have these difficult conversations that might start to help things get better. It might not. There’s no guarantee, but it’s only through action and difficult conversations that things might start to change. So Mike, why not say this in a face-to-face meeting? That’s a great question. So I did have a conversation with Team TPT and it was fantastic. We talked about data and we talked about optics.

(00:47:41):
I did invite the leaders of YDP at Boston. I invited them to dinner at TPT Ford in Boston, and you can see the video, and I was all excited because I invited them out to dinner. It didn’t happen. But life is busy, right? And life is busy. So why communicate on Facebook or YouTube or wherever else? Why not go to the TPT forums? And part of that is because communication has changed in the 21st century. So yes, I can go to TPT forums and talk about things, but not all TPT sellers are in the TPT forums. Same with different private Facebook groups, because there’ll be a Facebook group admin who’s in charge of that. So the question is, well, how do you engage all TPT sellers if you’re not TPT, right? And I think part of that is through social media and YouTube.

(00:48:36):
So on Saturday, October 21st, 2023, right, your free data playbook, the response from some sellers was immediate because they saw something wrong and they said something right? And that’s fantastic. They were active citizens, they were talking, they made the determination that this is not right, and they shared their opinion and that’s good. They were not bystanders. They were active bystanders and publicly or privately, directly to me or indirectly within whatever they’ve taken action. And that’s fantastic. I’m not in the TPT forums, but I know people who are, sometimes things come to me, sometimes people emailed me directly. And so the response that I heard were things like unethical, dirty, no consent against copyright, blackballed by the TPT community. And these are all valid opinions. I love it. I love that people are engaging in the conversation. But this is also about social change and social change.

(00:49:49):
It requires public discourse and it requires critical mass. And if enough people are talking about things, then eventually you get a movement. Eventually that critical mass helps create the political will to help spark that change. Because governments and politicians and corporations and businesses, whatever it is, we’re all human. And sometimes maybe you don’t want to do the change, or maybe this isn’t a big priority for you, or maybe you don’t realize this is a big priority. So this is the beauty of public dialogue and social change in that together as we come together with active citizens, you share your opinion, I share my opinion, and eventually we get critical mass towards something. And society changes for the better or for the worse. It’ll always be for the better or first depending on who you are, right? Different perspectives. So again, we’re not all going to agree.

(00:50:43):
That’s okay. The point is to get this conversation going. I thought this sentence, this is the quickest way to get blackballed by the TPT community. I found that a really interesting comment because I realize that this is about power, and I wasn’t thinking about it this way, but I am now. And this is about the power to include, the power to allow people into your community, the power to exclude people within your community. And it makes me wonder who has power? Do the people have power? Do large groups of people have power? Does a single person have power? It makes me think about the power that people have to work towards change to make things better, and the power people have to stop change. So if we’re talking about power, you have to recognize we have many different aspects of our identity, and in some aspects we have a lot of power in other aspects of our identity, we don’t.

(00:51:37):
So for example, I am a cis male middle age up in North America. I live in Ottawa. I have power. I’m a visible person of color. I have a power. In some areas of my life, I have disadvantages or less power in other areas, that’s true for everything. So if you’re a TPT seller, you might have power because you’ve been around for a long time, or maybe you’ve been around for a little time or I don’t know. But if we think about this through the lens of power, if IXL improves the TPT seller dashboard for everyone, it becomes easier for all teachers to help increase the pie, right? Because we can improve the value. We know what to, we’re going to burn out. There’s too much to do. There’s never enough time to do it all. But better data lets us focus on important things.

(00:52:29):
And if we figure out what the important things are, then we can focus on that to create value. This is the value equation. I love it. But if we’re talking about power, I love this image from Bob Manko who used to be the New Yorker as a cartoon editor. And so for those of you who are looking on a small device, it’s a picture of three fish, a small fish getting eaten by a middle-sized fish getting eaten by a large fish. The small fish says there is no justice in the world. The middle-sized fish says there is some justice in the world. And the large fish says, the world is just right. And I love this image. And so Bob Manko gave in an interview sort of talking about his perspective on humor, which is to get along with other people to cope with difficulties, to diffuse tensions.

(00:53:17):
And that image of his, I’ve seen a lot as a commentary about social justice and social fairness, and it’s often brought up with conversations about just world hypothesis or fallacy, depending on where you are. The just world hypothesis or fallacy is this idea that you get what you deserve. Think about that for a second. You get what you deserve. Are there historical injustices in the way the game has been set up so that some people got more than others and the snowball just continued, right? Does that exist in TPT? I have no idea. I’m just asking questions because now we’re talking about power. So my question is, does this cartoon transfer to TPT land where there is no justice in the world? There is some justice in the world. The world is just, and remember the idea is behind this or the comment is you get what you deserve.

(00:54:13):
Okay, so if I try to transfer this to TPT land and I replace world with TPT seller dashboard, is this a scenario where some people are saying, are there patterns in who’s saying what? There’s no justice in the TPT seller dashboard. There is some justice in the TPT seller dashboard or the TPT seller dashboard is just maybe, maybe not, but let’s look at a pie chart, right? This is TPT platform revenue. This is the pie, literally how much money the TPT platform makes in a pie chart form. And maybe there are people who make a tiny sliver, small TPT sellers who make a fraction, and maybe there are some sellers who make a little bit more of the pie, and maybe there are some TPT sellers who make a large portion of the earnings that TPT makes. And this is parody. This is commentary. This is an exaggeration because I’m sure no single seller makes that percentage of the TPT platform.

(00:55:09):
But if we try to transfer this cartoon to TPT land, does this apply? There is no justice in the TPT seller dashboard. There is some justice in the TPT Seller dashboard. The TPT seller dashboard is just maybe not. What I’m trying to say though is regardless of where you are in the stage of the game, if I improves the TPT seller dashboard, I think the pie gets bigger for everyone. So because the pie gets bigger, because think about this, people are searching on Google. We know that Google accounts for I think in one of the first masterclasses, it’s like we looked on SEMrush, I think it was like 30%. It’s not insignificant. So let’s say it’s 30%. Let’s say 30% of people land on TPT, on a TPT product page from a Google search. They land on it and then they bounce away. They couldn’t find what they were looking for.

(00:55:59):
But TPT makes a better TPT seller dashboard so that you and I know exactly what to fix so that we’re not wasting time on the little stuff. Oh, okay, this is my top seller and whoa, the product preview rate is low. I got to work on my product description. So we change it or whatever the theory is, and we change that so that the buyer, the teacher on Google search finds our product page, they view our page, and rather than bouncing away, they stay there and buy. We just made a sale that we couldn’t have made before the pie got bigger. So that’s what I think TPT and IXL can do by improving that seller dashboard. But that sentence about blackballed by the TPD community, that sentence opened my eye because I realize now that there are some sellers to the sellers who are uneasy by this drama and controversy.

(00:56:54):
You’re uncomfortable with what’s going on, you’re upset by some of the things that maybe I’ve said or pointed out, and you’re caught in the middle, right? So to these sellers, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I have sparked this conversation about power and about the TPT Seller dashboard, right? I’m sorry if you’re caught in the middle. Yeah, that’s tough. I apologize if you’re in that place. So based on that feedback, I’m separating the tool from the social movement. And so now the tool is just called a free seller tool.com. The old website is still up, and that’s important from the social movement perspective because I’m a big proponent of honesty and transparency. Okay, well, what did he say? Well, let’s go see what he said, right? So people can still see the original content. Remember, I’m biased, but part of the bias is I love this personal growth.

(00:58:03):
I love this part of the game. And for me, when I think about my own personal growth here, did I make a mistake? Maybe I know some of you think I did. I may have made a mistake. Am I still making a mistake with the choices I’m making in this video? Maybe. I’m sure some of you still think I’m making a mistake. Time will tell. Am I acting in good faith? I’m trying to come from a place to try to help everyone improve. And I recognize that this is a hard conversation and I apologize for that.

(00:58:41):
Am I trying to keep in a growth mindset? I’m trying to, right? It’s a choice. Whether you’re in a fixed mindset, in a growth mindset, I don’t have to be perfect. I’m not perfect. Live and learn is what one TPT seller told me. I think you made a mistake, but live and learn. And I’m still trying to learn what the mistake is. Is it a mistake? And this is the kind of thing that time will tell, right? So personal growth, love it. Personal growth for TPT sellers at the beginning of the journey is like, I love it. It applies to everyone because at the beginning we all say, I don’t know anything about business value proposition, value exchange, conversion rate funnels. I don’t know anything about business and none of us did when we first started. We just learn along the way and we try to stay in this growth mindset and we just add the word.

(00:59:32):
Yet, I don’t know anything about business yet. I don’t know if I agree with Mike yet. I don’t know if I need a new seller dashboard yet. But that idea about choosing to look for other answers I think is a huge part of the game. And that’s why I love selling on TPT and for completion, the response from some TPT sellers. I also got responses like this. Thank you once again for your hard work. Wishing you all the best in your efforts to start the change necessary to move forward, showing kindness and sharing what we have with others. It’s a tiny contribution. Some people do it by volunteering. Some do it by donating money. You are doing it by sharing a tool with someone who might need it.

(01:00:20):
I just downloaded your tool and OMG, it’s amazing. Thank you. So my apologies to people who are blindsided by some of the strong responses. My thanks to people who decided to still, despite knowing that there were some strong responses, decided to still post it. I know about some of you who you are. I don’t know about everyone, and my apologies to the people that I’ve set. Yeah, part four, a call to action. So where do we go from here, Mike? What’s the end game right now? At least last week, things blow over in a week. I don’t even know I’m not in the forum. Let me know if this is still a thing right now. As I understand it, some people are like, check out this amazing tool I found. And it’s like, and then off the record, I get emails, things like wishing you all the best in moving.

(01:01:18):
This starting to change. That’s where we’re at now, after you watch this video or after I publish this video, I’m hoping there’s dialogue. He makes a good point, right? About who benefits, who doesn’t benefit. But he didn’t mention, and I don’t know what I didn’t mention because I don’t know what I don’t know, but maybe, right? So the idea is to spark this conversation. And I’m hoping that one day in the future, I don’t agree with how he did it, but we do have a better TPT seller dashboard. Now that’s the end game. So to help get to the end game, which is specifically IXL improves the TPT seller dashboard so that we can all make business decisions to improve the value of our resources. I’m going to ask you the viewer to do some things. And I recognize change is hard, but I also recognize if nothing changes, then nothing changes.

(01:02:21):
And if we want things to change, then we have to change to make that change happen. So I’m going to ask, I’m propose two things for people to do. Number one is to be a first follower. And I’ll explain what first follower means in quotation marks. And the second one is everyone can do this, which is ask TPT to do a server, a seller survey. So what’s a first follower? Again, back to grade eight land. I love this video. If you teach middle school, high school, if you do social empowerment kind of stuff, this is awesome. This is Derek Sives who’s doing a commentary on this video at some music event, some festival. I’m going to play it here

(01:03:02):
First. Of course, a leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so

(01:03:07):
Simple. It’s almost instructional, the low nut. You must be easy to follow

(01:03:11):
Message. Now, here comes the first

(01:03:14):
Follower’s crucial role.

(01:03:15):
He publicly shows everyone else how to follow

(01:03:18):
Notice, leader him.

(01:03:21):
So it’s not about the leader anymore, it’s about them plural. Notice how he’s calling to his friends to join in.

(01:03:27):
He takes guts to be your first

(01:03:28):
Follower. You stand out, be brave, ridicule yourself. Being a first follower is an underappreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that really makes the fire. Now here’s the second follower. This is a turning point, new it’s proof. The first is done well. Now it’s not a lone nut and it’s not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is new. We’re

(01:03:55):
Starting to build momentum.

(01:03:57):
Movement must

(01:03:57):
Be public to talk

(01:03:58):
About this. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers because new followers emulate followers, not the leader. So other.

(01:04:06):
Now here comes

(01:04:07):
Two more

(01:04:07):
People

(01:04:08):
Than three more immediately. Now we’ve got momentum. Look at the crowd. This is the tipping point. And now we have a movement tipping point. As more people jump in, it’s no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there’s no reason not to join in. Now you see how

(01:04:22):
People are starting to join in

(01:04:23):
This idea. They won’t stand out, they won’t be ridiculed, and they will be part of the in crowd if they hurry. And over the next minute, you

(01:04:31):
See the rest, everyone

(01:04:32):
Stay part

(01:04:32):
Of the crowd and see how it’s building because

(01:04:34):
Eventually they’d be ridiculed for not joining.

(01:04:39):
So I want to look at a couple of the quotes in there. A leader needs the guts to standalone and look ridiculous. So I recognize that not everyone wants to go on YouTube and publicly do videos. And actually, I’ve chatted with Enrika about this, and I think she would be comfortable with me saying this, but the idea that she likes supporting, right? I’m happy to be the front person of the band. She’s happy to help out in other ways, and I love that, right? Everyone has a different rule depending on what they’re comfortable with. And if you’re watching this and you’re like, yeah, I kind of want to join and help out, yeah, we’d love to have you, but yeah, right? Not everyone wants to be the lead singer. I couldn’t have done this when I was back in the classroom. There’s no way I would’ve made a YouTube channel.

(01:05:26):
But where I am in my life right now, I’m comfortable and I have the time to do this right? And I have the will and the passion to do this. I’m okay with looking ridiculous. I’m okay with the hard things. Actually, I’m not okay, but I choose to go forward and I draw strength from Enrika. But as people join in, it’s not about the leader, it’s about the movement. And that’s really important here because it takes guts to be a first follower. You stand out and you brave ridicule. Okay? And if you go back to the original website, I have the first draft of this slideshow lesson, and in the slideshow lesson I talk about the call to action just being about emailing TPT. But now I’ve added this part about a first follower because it actually has to be a public movement, which is what I took away from Derek Sivers.

(01:06:13):
What I sort of realized when we got into this conversation about power, because people don’t follow the leader, they follow the first followers. And I’m using that phrase first, followers as people who just join in and are publicly saying, talking about it. And it’s hard. I know she has broad shoulders and she’s, I’ve talked about this in a livestream before about some of the comments that whatever, but it’s an underappreciated form of leadership. And the other first followers, and there are people, they’ve emailed me and they said, I decided to share this here. Those are first followers because they’ve decided to share it in other places to get the conversation going. They see the value in this conversation, and they are leaders. I know that if I talk to Enco right now, she’s not going to say I’m a leader, but she is. Leadership doesn’t mean standing on the soapbox and talking, although it can.

(01:07:15):
Leadership is also saying, yeah, that’s actually a good idea and publicly supporting that, right? Not everyone’s able to be a first follower, but the movement has to be public because other TPT sellers follow other TPT sellers. They don’t follow me, right? Okay. So as more people move in, as more people start talking about how we need a new TPT seller dashboard, it’s no longer risky to talk about how we need a new TPT seller dashboard. Eventually we get that critical mass and eventually the crowd joins in because they’d be ridiculed for not joining in. And remember, this is an interesting conversation about power, about systems, about trying to make the pie bigger for everyone to serve. Teachers, students, TPT coaches, SEOT, preneur, TTPD sellers. There are a lot of people that I think we can win, win, win, win, win, win, win.

(01:08:08):
The end game is, I don’t agree with how we did it, but we do have a better dashboard now, which us sell our resources. And in order to get there, we need first followers. And if you are in a place where you are comfortable to share this video with other TPT sellers and asks who benefits, yeah, I invite you to have these conversations with your TPT crowds. Are you the next first follower? Some of you already first followers, some of you already shared it. And you don’t have to be a first follower. You don’t have to publicly make comments for or against. This could be a non-issue for you. This could be, for example, because of my life experiences, I hyper-focus on social emotional learning, and I give only to charities for student mental health. Where I focus the need is infinite. If your passion project is like climate change, right?

(01:09:13):
Focus on climate change. You don’t need to be a first follower for this. Or you might be thinking, yeah, Mike, I want to be a first follower, but I’m not in a place where I feel comfortable standing up and being heard. You know what? I’ll be a second follower or a third follower. That’s okay too. When I was in a dark place, one of the things, because I was used to trying to be an agent of change and trying to inspire students to be agents of change, and I remember one of my friends saying, it’s okay to rest. Now is not your time to stand up. And that’s okay. If you’re not in a mental health place where you can do this, that’s okay too. You don’t have to be the first follower, you don’t have to be public. But if you can, I invite you to be the next first follower.

(01:10:01):
The next ask is for everyone. And the second ask is to ask TPT to do a seller survey because we can talk all we want in TPT forums. They don’t get a sense of noise and scale. What’s noise, what’s signal, right? So because there’s so many TPT sellers who aren’t at TPT forwards or in the forums or in the Facebook groups, there’s lots of us, right? The only way for TPT to truly know whether this is actually something people are interested in and to know what we would like to actually see, I’m just one perspective. The only way to do that is through getting a seller survey. And so if you email support at TPT, sorry, if you email [email protected], ask them to do a TPT seller survey about the TPT seller dashboard and to try to make this easier for everyone, if you go to a free seller tool.com. So I’ll just click on that. There’s a button that says Ask TPT. You click on this link and it’s just a link to open up your email provider, and if you click on the link, you don’t have to do it this way, but it just says, can you do a TPT seller dashboard asking TPT sellers what we’d like to see in an updated seller dashboard? Right? Hi, TPT support. Can you do a TPT seller survey about the TPT Seller dashboard?

(01:11:28):
Thanks for considering. And then I hit send, boom, done. Message, send view message. There we go, right? Done. Takes less than a minute. Okay, so some of you, I don’t know how to make this full screen. Some of you might want to be more specific and that’s okay. So if you want to be more specific and you’re not sure what to ask about, one thing you might want to ask about is being able to see preview conversion rate on the product statistics page. Or maybe you’d like to see buyer location data, and maybe that’s important for you to be able to see where people are buying, maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’d like the ability to sort the conversion data so that you can quickly see, okay, I need to work on this. Or maybe you have another idea and I invite you to leave a comment below or talk about it in whatever forums that you talk about.

(01:12:37):
Change is hard, and I’m going to leave on this note. Yes, we have to change to make change happen, but change is incredibly slow. So while we are waiting, you can get a free do it yourself Google sheet at a free seller tool.com. Okay? We’ve made it to the end of the presentation. What do you think about the ideas that I’ve made? What am I missing? What did I get? What did I get wrong? Right? Thumbs up, thumbs down. Some of you might be saying, this is great. Thanks so much for making that. And regardless of where you stand on this spectrum, right, the question is always, well, okay, who benefits and who’s at a disadvantage? If that message is accepted, and some of you are still, you know what, Mike? I watched it all, but no, this is still unethical. This is still dirty and slimy, and that’s okay too. The question is still, who benefits and who’s at a disadvantage if that message is accepted. Thanks so much for watching and have a great day. We’ll see you in the next video. bye-bye now.

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