Designing digital products like Canva templates offers a fantastic opportunity to generate lucrative passive income. If you have a flair for design and are willing to invest some upfront time and effort, you can transform your creative skills into a reliable revenue stream. Imagine turning your artistic passion into a steady flow of income while you focus on other pursuits. Here’s an engaging and comprehensive step-by-step guide to help you convert your Canva templates into a thriving passive income source.
Why you should sell Canva templates?
There are plenty of reasons to sell and create Canva templates as a creator. Let’s took into them.
1. A lucrative stream of (passive) income
First, creating Canva templates can be a great source of revenue for online creators. Why? Demand for Canva templates is extremely high. Because it’s so easy to use, Canva has become an incredibly popular platform for businesses and individuals alike, with 135 million monthly users. That’s a huge pool of potential customers! And this massive user base is constantly on the lookout for new Canva templates for all sorts of things.
You can make a Canva template for pretty much anything from day planners, to résumés, to research briefs — you name it. If you can create a unique product that solves a problem and fills a hole in the market, you stand to make a lot of cash.
And the best part? Selling Canva templates is a source of passive income (the best kind in our opinion!) Because of its digital nature, you only need to produce a Canva template once. From there, copies can be sold and used by your customers ad infinitum. That means you get to spend less time producing what you’re selling (and zero time replenishing stock, maintaining an inventory, or dealing with shipping logistics), and more time doing what you love — or taking some well-earned R & R. Sounds sweet, right?
2. Boost your design skills and creativity
Making money is great and all, but that’s not the only reason to start selling Canva templates. Producing Canva templates for purchase is also a great way to hone your graphic design skills and master the popular platform, itself. As a creator, you know there’s always room for improvement, whether you’re fine-tuning your skills or coming up with new and exciting ways to execute your ideas.
By honing your design skills and getting a handle on Canva, you stand to start creating even better, more useful Canva templates, which you can charge more for. Who knows, maybe you’ll start a Canva empire? Which leads us to our next point…
3. Build your business
Canva could be ground zero for a massive business opportunity. Because it’s so intuitive and easy to use, many creators look to the platform to create their very first digital products (i.e. Canva templates.) Once you’ve got the hang of the platform (and a few devoted customers), one Canva template might become five — or a dozen. And a few hundred dollars a month might become thousands.
Most popular Canva templates to sell
Social media templates: These include graphics and layouts for posts, banners, and any kind of platform-specific features (e.g. Instagram templates for Stories or Reels covers).
Website or blog templates: These includes logos, headers, post layouts, backgrounds, footers, and more.
Workbook and worksheet templates
Ebook templates
Calendar and daily planner templates
Journal templates
Presentation templates: These might include infographics, graphics, whiteboards, charts, and more.
Event templates: These include invitations, menus, place-setting cards, and more.
Greeting card and gift tag templates
Marketing and advertising templates: These include signs, flyers, brochures, posters, placards, business cards, and stickers.
Résumé templates: These include templates for CVs and cover letters.
How Much Can You Make Selling Canva Templates
Answering this question is never easy. How much money you can make in any kind of business depends on a number of factors.
Are you first offering the appropriate products to the right customers? Understanding your audience is important.
Furthermore, do you even understand how product promotions operate? Are you even marketing your products enough?
So, the amount of money you may generate from selling Canva templates ultimately depends on:
- your level of expertise in creating good designs
- how many products you have in your store(s) and how frequently you add new products
- how well you market your products
- the categories of templates you offer, and
- How do you set the pricing?
Where Can You Sell Canva Templates?
1. Etsy
Etsy has been the internet’s marketplace for handmade goods, craft supplies, and vintage items for over 15 years. But did you know you can use the platform to sell digital products as well? Recently, Etsy has become a robust marketplace for digital products, from knitting patterns to — you guessed it — Canva templates. Need some convincing? Currently, a search for “Canva template” yields over 420,000 results on the platform.
Key features
Online marketplace with over 94 million buyers
Easy-to-use interface
Integrated digital storefront
Limited marketing features including discount codes and coupons, and customer reviews on PLPs
Built-in sales and traffic analytics tools
Pricing
Free with a $0.20 fee per listing and an additional 6.5% transaction fee per sale, plus regional payment processing fees.
2. Gumroad
Gumroad is content creators’ go-to platform for selling their digital products directly to their audience. Why? For one, the platform is super easy to use and comes chock-full of features to that help you sell your digital products from A to Z.
In a nutshell, Gumroad is an e-commerce platform that allows creators to build their own personal digital storefront (no domain or website needed) easily. Simply upload your Canva template, set a price, and Gumroad will handle the rest. The platform also allows you to set your own currency and supports a range of payment methods, so you can sell to customers all around the world and get that bread. It’s that easy
Key features
Easy-to-use interface
Digital storefront builder
Embeddable “buy now” button for your own website
Tons of customization
Subscriptions and pre-orders
Built-in analytics and marketing tools
Pricing
Free with a 10% transaction fee per sale (plus credit card processing and PayPal fees).
3. Creative Market
Want to put your Canva templates in touch with 9 million potential customers, instantly? Then Creative Market is the spot to be. This online marketplace caters specifically to design-focused creators (like Canva template makers), allowing them to sell to a massive market of businesses and individuals looking to buy design assets such as Canva templates.
Creative Market functions as a marketplace, allowing creators to set up their own online storefront within the platform itself. From there, all you need to do is upload your Canva template and let the platform’s search engine connect you with buyers
Key features
Online marketplace with over 9 million customers
Integrated online storefront
Built-in sales and analytics tools
Pricing
Free with creators earning varying commission rates per sale (at least 50%).
5. Your website
Last but not least, your own website is a great place to sell your Canva templates. Why? Well, first, it’s likely that your following is already familiar with your website, either using it frequently to access your content or have perused it to learn a bit more about you and your offering.
Secondly: your website, your rules. Many creators’ gripes with e-commerce platforms like Etsy or Creative Market is the lack of customization they offer. And we all know that for creators, branding is everything. By selling your Canva templates through your website, you control the look and feel of your online storefront, as well as your customers’ experience through the purchasing process.
In order to sell Canva templates through your own website, however, you will need need a few tools. You’ll either need to subscribe to an online shopping cart app (like DPD or Stan), or a platform that provides embeddable checkout widgets (like Gumroad or Squarespace). After that, it’s smooth sailing!
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