How to Make a Preview on Teachers Pay Teachers

Hey teacherpreneurs,

In this blog post, I want to talk all about product previews on TPT. I’m going to tell you what a preview is, answer the question of whether you need them, tell you how to make them and upload them, and help you protect them.

What is a preview?

If you’re new to TPT, you may not know what a preview is. Essentially, we are given lots of ways to help buyers understand our product before they purchase. We have the cover, thumbnails, description, and preview. The cover and thumbnails are small square pictures. The preview is often a PDF (although you can also upload a picture).

The difference between thumbnails and previews is the size. Thumbnails are very small and they are made slightly blurry by TPT in order to protect our work. Previews are big and clear close ups.

You can use a TPT preview to show a full page (or more) of your product. You can also overlap screenshots and show everything included in your product.

Do you need a preview?

The short answer is YES.

The slightly longer answer is YES YES YES!

TPT has confirmed that over 60% of buyers won’t purchase without seeing a preview. This is because buyers want to know exactly what they are going to get. Thumbnails are small and blurry. Descriptions are just words. Buyers need a clear visual look at your product to help them make their decision.

What holds people back from making previews is often laziness or paranoia of theft. My advice is don’t be lazy and miss out on those 60% of buyers. Theft, however, is a genuine concern. But don’t worry, we’ll talk about protecting our previews at the end of this post.

How do you make a preview?

It’s simple! You can create TPT previews using whatever program you use to create your products. Personally, I use PowerPoint.

I simply copy and paste some of my product into a new PowerPoint and use it as a preview. I often show a few full worksheets. Occasionally, I create a page with overlapping screenshots of all my worksheets so that a buyer can see how many activities are included. I save my PowerPoint as a PDF and upload it to TPT.

Here’s where to upload a preview on your tpt listing. The gray box is where you can upload your PDF or JPEG.

How do you protect TPT previewS?

A sneaky buyer could easily download, print, or screenshot a preview. They could lift clip art (which violates most clip artist’s terms of use) or edit your pages. That is why we must protect our work.

The first step is to add a watermark to your pages. I create a circle shape in PowerPoint and adjust the transparency (go to format shape) so it is slightly see-through but still colored enough to cover my work. I write the word ‘preview’ across the shape too.

Pro tip – Create a PowerPoint template with your watermark. You can copy and paste it into your previews, which is quicker than making a watermark from scratch every time!

Make sure you flatten your work so that the watermark has value and can’t just be removed. The free option is to simply save your PowerPoint slides as jpegs. Then re-insert the jpegs into your PowerPoint. This flattens the clip art and prevents editing.

It is also important to secure your work by password protecting it. Flat Pack and Adobe Pro are ways to flatten and secure your work if you are willing to invest.

I hope you’ve found this post about previews on TPT useful! If you’re looking for explicit tutorials, check out my TPT seller course.

P.S – I hope you’ve found some useful tips in this post! Sign up to my email community here or follow me on Instagram for MORE free advice. I also have lots of free tips in my TPT Facebook group.