Entrepreneur: Becky Powell
Tilt: Literacy worksheets for teachers of young students
Scene: Sight Words Activities
Snack Bites:
- Becky started selling worksheets to teachers in a digital marketplace, Teachers Pay Teachers, while on maternity leave from her teaching job.
- Eight years later, the kindergarten teacher earns over $125K a year from over 400 digital products.
- Becky’s husband Jerome joined the content business a year after it started and now has his own marketplace of editable PDFs for educators.
Why We Stan: Becky picked a content niche that she knew would resonate and learned how to market herself by identifying the trends and keywords that resonate. She also focuses all her energy on a single platform.
The Story of Becky Powell
Selling worksheets for a few bucks to around $10 may seem like a slow way to propel big revenue. But teacher and content entrepreneur Becky Powell has done it.
She earned over $125K in 2022. In her first year in business – eight years ago – she earned $21K, according to CNBC.
Becky sells the worksheets on Teachers Pay Teachers, a popular platform for educator-created learning content and tools sold to other educators. It hosts over 7M teacher-created lessons and experienced over 1B downloads.
Teachers Pay Teachers gives creators 50% of sales. However, sellers who pay the $59.95 annual subscription – premium sellers – retain 80% of their revenue.
On Teachers Pay Teachers, Becky’s storefront is called Sight Words Activities. Her catalog includes over 425 digital products. She has earned 4.9 stars out of five from over 27K votes.
“I have worksheets that I created eight years ago that still yield thousands [of dollars] in passive income every year. Even when I find myself not able to create … the sales still come in,” she says.
Becky uses her kindergarten classroom as a lab for her small business, where she can test her ideas before creating the worksheets to sell.
Her husband Jerome, a full-time computer engineer, joined the business a year after it began. As Becky explains to CNBC, he helped her refine her brand and pick a focus – teaching children to sight-read.
He also taught her the importance of analyzing searches on the Teachers Pay Teachers platform to inform them about trending worksheets so she could insert those relevant keywords into her profile.
In 2019, Jerome created a storefront on Teachers Pay Teachers. Editable Activities sells over 170 products – editable PDFs for classroom activities. He has a 4.8 stars out of five from over 5K votes.
About the author
Ann regularly combines words and strategy for B2B, B2C, and nonprofits, continuing to live up to her high school nickname, Editor Ann. An IABC Communicator of the Year and founder of G Force Communication, Ann coaches and trains professionals in all things content. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
