Making Money With Teachers Pay Teachers

I came across this interesting reader tip on one of my favorite savings blogs, Money Saving Mom, about a site called Teachers Pay Teachers. I had never heard of this one before even though it has existed since 2006. This company offers a really interesting way for teachers to earn money selling their educational materials. So if you are a teacher/educator, you may find you can make some good extra money by using this site.

How It Works

After creating your account, you can upload your some of the materials you use in your classroom like lesson plans, worksheets, tests, activities, etc. that you feel would be useful to other educators. You do have to upload the first item for free as a sample, but you can charge a fee for the rest. If someone buys any of your items, the items will be sent as an instant download to the buyer and the money (minus the percentage that goes to Teachers Pay Teachers) goes straight to your account.

You can also sell non-digital items as well, but you are responsible for shipping them to the buyer. You will be reimbursed for the shipping cost when you get your payout.

The Fees

You can sign up at Teachers Pay Teachers with a free basic membership that costs you nothing. This membership gives you 60 percent royalties on your teacher created items along with a 30 cent transaction fee that additionally gets deducted, or you get 85 percent royalties on used goods minus a 99 cent transaction fee.

If you find that you’re really benefiting from Teachers Pay Teachers and you’d like to earn more royalties on the things you’re selling, they do have a fee-based membership that costs roughly $60 a year that gives you 85 percent royalties on everything with no transaction fees at all.

Your Store

After creating your account, you’ll be given a unique website address that will go straight to your store on the site. This is a showcase of the items you’ve listed and you can even choose which items you want to be featured.

Getting Paid

Teachers Pay Teachers sends out payments quarterly with Paypal.

Feedback

Apparently some people are doing pretty well with Teachers Pay Teachers. You can read the comments on the post at Money Saving Mom I linked above to read what a few others had to say. A few of those people also mentioned being mindful of copyright laws before you sell anything. If you are selling any digital items that weren’t 100 percent created by you, like for example if you used some clip art created by someone else, you could possibly get into trouble.

Signing Up

If you want to go ahead and sign up for free, you can do so here.