Selling Resources- The Why and How...
I have been selling my resources for almost a year now and all I can say is I wish I had started sooner!
For years my colleagues and I have been downloading worksheets and activities from the American based site "Teachers Pay Teachers" . This is an online store where teachers upload resources to their own online store and other teachers can pay for them and download them. So when I came across Teacha! - the South African equivalent of TPT - I was thrilled.
It's really simple to figure out and if you struggle with anything the FAQ section is very helpful. I created a vender profile and started uploading. They do pay-outs at the end of every second month and how much you make is entirely dependent on how many resources you upload and how you choose to price your resources.
Isn't this a lot of work? Well not really, I only upload resources I'm making anyway. So if I create an assessment for my kids, I just save a copy as a PDF and upload it to the store.
Now for the Why...
There are a few reasons besides the obvious one of extra cash. Firstly, the more you upload the more people buy. I've noticed that people have started to request certain activities/worksheets/assessments and a little bit of demand has been created. Especially for things that are "South Africa" specific. Things like Afrikaans and isiXhosa activities, CAPS planning and SBA aligned assessments and frameworks etc.
Secondly, it saves time. It minimizes 10 grade 1 teachers, for example, creating 10 very similar assessments. One teacher makes an assessment and uploads it- the other 9 teachers get to use it without taking advantage of the poor soul who created the assessment. Its like fair sharing.
Lastly, it encourages you to improve on your resources constantly. There's also a fantastic magazine that Teacha! uploads every month. These magazines are full of ideas, thoughts, articles and bios around education in SA.
So if you've been thinking about it, go ahead, you've got nothing to lose.
There's a link bellow to my Teacha! store, as well as a link to the sign up page.