How To Make Money with Canva: The Ultimate Guide to Creating & Selling Canva Templates & Designs on Etsy

Want to learn how to make money with Canva by selling your designs on Etsy?

You’ve come to the right place. 🙌

 

Over the past few years, I’ve made thousands of dollars by creating templates on Canva and selling them as digital products online. 

 

Throughout my years of experience, I’ve developed a Canva workflow that allows me to develop my templates quickly and easily. 

 

So if you’re finally ready to start creating and selling your digital products online and making money with Canva, read on to learn how I do it. 💪

 

You’ll learn:

1. How to nail your template aesthetic
2. How to figure out what to include in your Canva templates
3. Tips for keeping your templates organized
4. Canva design hacks
5. How to publish and share your templates with the end-user

 

Let’s go! 

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How To Make Money with Canva By Creating Templates

Now of course, before you even get into the Canva design phase, you need to have found a digital product idea that sells. 

Click here to see a list of 100 profitable digital product ideas that sell!

 

If you haven’t already found your profitable digital product idea, work on that foundational piece first. 

 

But let’s assume you’ve already done your research, and you’ve decided you’re going to sell Instagram templates.

 

In that case, there are two major things you need to decide on - your aesthetics and what you’re going to include in your templates. 

 

Canva Templates Aesthetics

When it comes to aesthetics, I’m mostly referring to the fonts and color palettes you’ll be using in your Canva templates.

 

My favorite place to go to find inspiration is the best-seller page on Etsy as well as Pinterest. 

 

I’ll have a look at what commonalities the best-sellers have with the templates ranking on the first page. If you were to head to Etsy right now, you’d find a whole lot of pink and neutral colors. So I know that might be a good place to start!

 

Once I have a basic idea of what kind of color palette I want to use, I can head over to both Canva and Pinterest.

 

Within Pinterest, I can search for things like “Pink color palette”. 

 

Within Canva, you’ll see a bunch of pre-made color palettes along the sidebar for inspiration. 

 

As you scroll over the Styles section, you'll find options to select from your Recent designs and Image palettes as well.

 

 

I can go through the same process with my fonts. Whether I want to search “Canva fonts pairings” on Pinterest or simply go to the pre-selected font pairings within Canva, both sites are great to find inspiration! 

 

🤔 Can I upload my own custom fonts when selling Canva templates? 

One of the best things about using the premade font pairings is that all of those fonts are available for free within Canva.

 

I recommend sticking only to Canva fonts rather than uploading your own custom fonts, because licensing can get messy. 

Licensing a font and uploading it for your own purposes is one thing, but using a licensed font in templates where people can manipulate the text is a whole other ball game.

 

A lot of sites where people sell fonts specifically say you’re not supposed to upload them within Canva and sell templates using them. If you’re *super* set on using a specific font in your templates, I’d recommend reaching out to the creator and getting explicit permission in writing to use their font in your templates. 

 

💡Pro Tip: Once you’ve decided on your brand fonts and colors, you’re going to want to save them and set up your brand kit within Canva. 

This will save you a ton of time so you’re not having to constantly search for certain hex codes or fonts! It’ll also allow you to easily change and customize styles with the click of a button.

 

What To Include In Your Templates

So you know you want to create Instagram quote templates. But how exactly do you come up with ideas for what to include in your templates? Where do you get inspiration?

Well, I like to draw inspiration from a few different places. 

 

Take inspiration from best-sellers

First things first, I like to head to Etsy and in the search bar, type in my keywords, in this example ”beauty instagram templates”. Then I find a few best sellers for that term in the Etsy search results.

 

 

⚠️  Important disclaimer: I use the best-sellers as inspiration. I never copy someone else’s templates. I don’t look at them or have them open during my design process. I look at them solely when I’m in research mode.

 

What I do is I take out my notebook and as I’m scrolling through the best-sellers, I’ll jot down what I specifically like about them.

 

For example, I might like the fact that a creator used curved text, or what they used a certain style of frame. 

 

I’ll go through multiple templates, across multiple sites (such as Etsy and Creativemarket.com) and just gather intel. 

 

Then, when I go to sit down and design, I’m just looking at my notes. I’m using my own creativity to come up with unique versions rather than simply copying someone else’s design.

 

Keep your ideal client in mind 

Another thing that helps my Canva templates stand out in the marketplace is that I draw from my own experiences and intel. 

 

I have a very specific target audience and niche in mind when it comes to selling my Canva templates. 

 

And I have a deep connection with my target client, so I know *exactly* what they need. 

 

For example, if I'm creating Instagram quote templates, I know that I’m creating them for online business owners, and more specifically, online coaches. Because I am a business coach, it’s easy for me to pull from my own experience of promoting my coaching business on Instagram!

 

My 3-day course, Passive Product Payday, will walk you through finding a digital product idea that combines your unique skills and experience with what the market’s currently craving!

➡️  Join Here To Find Your Profitable Digital Product Idea 

 

Keep Your Templates Organized

Now before you get started designing, I highly recommend you come up with a folder organization system. 

 

The last thing you want to have is a million messy designs crowding your Canva account. That’s why I recommend creating separate folders within your Canva to keep everything neat and tidy.

 

Here’s the folder structure I recommend. 👇

 1. Create a main folder titled “Your Template Name”

 

2. Within that main folder, set up three sub-folders.

3. Name those folders workbench, final templates, and PDF deliverables. 

One of these you’ll use to create your templates (Workbench), the other you’ll use once your templates have been finalized (final templates) and the last will be used to create the PDF your customers will use to download the templates (more on this later in the blog 😉)

 

Head to your "Workbench" folder and create a design inside of it and it will automatically save to that folder.

Also, you can always head to “File" to "Save to folder" and save it to the folder of your choice if you happened to create the design outside of the indented folder.

 

Canva Templates Design Hacks

Now that you’re ready to start designing templates so you can make money with Canva…lemme show you some of my BEST Canva tips and tricks! 🙌

 

Use Headings & Subheading

Here’s a tip that a lot of people don’t know about.

 

You want to make sure that when you're designing a template, you’re selecting the heading, sub-heading, and body font options.  

And if you’re using a Canva template as the starting point, you’re specifically replacing their text options with your heading, subheading, and body font options.

 

🤔  Why is this so important? 

Well, when your end-user gets the template and they go into their styles feature, they’re going to want to be able to change all of the fonts and colors at once.

 

This will *only* work, however, if you’ve properly used the headings, subheadings, and body font options, however. 

 

So don’t forget this important step! 

 

Tidy Up Feature

This is one of my all-time faves! 

If you’ve got a bunch of different texts or elements on the page, and the spacing just seems off, you can use the tidy-up feature. This will help to even out the space between the elements and make everything look far more polished and professional.

The Lock Feature

Another Canva feature that I frequently use is the lock feature. It can be easy to accidentally move elements around when designing.

With the lock feature, you can lock your background or other elements into place so they’ll stay static as you design and move things around!

 

⚠️ Pro Tip: Just make sure to unlock your layers before you share your templates with your end-user. While they can unlock layers themselves, it’ll be annoying for them to have to go through and unlock each element!

 

Use Canva Text Effects

If you want to elevate your Canva text and help your templates stand out, definitely take advantage of Canva’s text effects.

 

My go-to effect is called “Splice”. Splice allows you to hollow out your text and play with shadows! 

Other effects include curve, shadow, glitch, lift…the list goes on and on! 

 

Only Use Free Elements

If you’re wanting to make money selling Canva templates, it’s highly likely that you have Canva pro.  

 

With Canva pro, you have access to a whole host of premium elements. But you want to make sure you *don’t* include these in your template designs.

 

If you do, if your end-user doesn’t have Canva pro, they’ll have to pay $1 per element to use the elements. 

 

Which would be a MAJOR pain to your customer! 

 

When designing, you can filter elements by free and pro so you stick to free elements only.

 

 

💡 Pro Tip: If you find an element you like and want to find more in similar styles, you can right-click to see more elements by that creator! 

 

 

How To Sell Canva Templates And Share Them With Your Customers

So at this point, you’ve probably got a GORGEOUS Canva template design! 😍

 

Now it’s time to sell that puppy and start making money with Canva!

 

So what’s the best way to go about sharing and selling your Canva templates? 

 

Here’s my favorite way. 👇

 

First things first, you want to make sure that link sharing is turned ON.

 

Then, you want to click “Template Link”. Create and copy that template link. 

 

What I like to do is embed this link into a PDF receipt of sorts.

  

In my PDF receipt, I’ll include:

1. A button/link to access their templates
2. A hero image of my templates AND my profile pictures
3. A thank-you message
4. Links to all of my social media channels to develop the relationship further 

 

 

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After you create this document, be sure to download it as “PDF Print” so that all of the links save properly. 

 

 

 

Then, you’ll upload this document to your Etsy shop so that whenever someone downloads your Canva templates, they’ll receive this document in both a new window and via email.

 

From there, your customer has everything they need to start using your beautiful designs. ✅

 

So there you have it! My entire workflow for how to make money with Canva 💪

 

With these tips, you can create and sell Canva templates much faster.

 

And the more templates and products you can add to your shop, the more money you’ll make! 🤑

 

For more money-making Etsy secrets, watch my FREE Etsy Success Training! 📹