The Easiest Way to Make Money Online: How To Create Canva Templates To Sell on Etsy

Learning how to create Canva templates to sell on sites like Etsy and CreativeMarket is hands down one of the easiest ways to make an income online. 

 

And not just any income – but PASSIVE income, at that. 😏

 

Don’t believe me?

In addition to my main Etsy shop where I sell Canva templates... I also set up a secret Etsy shop just to test out my strategies...

 

And within the first 30 days of opening up my NEW shop, I made over $1,000! (see screenshot below 🤑)

 

Now, in this blog post, I'm going to share how you can do this too! 

First, I need to answer...

Why creating and selling Canva templates on Etsy is so easy.

 

Learning how to sell Canva templates online is one of the EASIEST ways to get started with digital products for a few reasons:

1. You’re able to use Canva’s pre-made templates as a jumping-off point to create your own (I confirmed this with Canva and you ARE allowed to do this! You just need to change the template up significantly).
2. Canva has a TON of elements and features that will help to make your designs shine.
3. Canva is a super intuitive program, so you don’t need to be a pro designer to get started.

 

You have everything you need to get started in one place.

 

Oh and why are we using Etsy to sell our Canva Templates?

Well because Etsy makes selling Canva templates easy because you don't need to have your own audience! 🙅‍♀️

Your ideal clients are already searching Etsy for the products you're going to sell which means you can have an audience of ZERO and still be successful selling your Canva templates!

 

That's how I was able to make over $1,000 selling digital products on my secret shop (AKA no one who knew me knew about my new shop).

Ready to learn exactly how to make it happen?

Let’s get into the step-by-step for how to create Canva templates to sell for easy passive income!

Step 1: Search through pre-made templates on Canva to come up with your idea

 

You want to open Canva.com/templates in your browser of choice and start browsing their pre-made templates.

Don’t have an account yet? You can sign up quickly and easily, for free. 

 

The goal is not to copy Canva’s selection of pre-made templates, but to use them as a jumping-off point. Start searching through the templates and take note of what catches your eye. 

 

You’ll see a TON of categories - everything from presentation templates, to social media templates, to resume templates and more. 

 

One important caveat is that you want to pick a template from a niche that you’re already familiar with. This is going to make the process of creating Canva templates to sell on Etsy 10x easier. Plus, you’ll be able to design something of higher value if you already have experience with the industry!

 

For example…👇

 

📌 If you’re an avid pinner, maybe you decide to create a set of Pinterest templates
📹 If you’ve had a YouTube channel for a while, maybe you decide to create templates for YouTube thumbnails

📲 Or if you’re an Instagram enthusiast, maybe a set of Instagram story and post templates would be more your thing!

 

Having expertise and interest for your template topic will help you make products that can easily stand out amongst other similar listings on Etsy.

 

If you want to learn more about finding your profitable product idea, be sure to join and download the FREE Passive Product Workbook to help you map out your money-making offer!

 

Step 2: Validate your template idea and make sure it’s profitable

 

Once you’ve browsed through the templates and decided on your Canva template to sell, it’s time to validate your idea to see if it’s profitable.

 

The last thing you want to do is spend hours on creating a template in Canva only to release there’s NO potential for profit!

So keep reading to learn how to make sure your idea is a money-making one.

 

Again, Etsy is the best place to host your digital product and sell your Canva templates, because of their built-in traffic. 

 So, we’re going to use a tool called Marmalead to make sure that people are actually searching for the template you’re thinking of creating to make sure there is demand.

 

So, what you want to do is...

 

Search your broad keyword in Marmalead

(if you're interested, click here for the link to a 2-week free trial)

 

Let’s say you were thinking of creating an Instagram template for beauty brands.

 

First, you’re going to want to type in your more broad keyword – in this case, "Instagram template".

As we can see, there are:

• 402 monthly searches for this keyword
• 1424 people engaging with the keyword on a monthly basis
• And a competition level of over 50,000

 

This data tells us people are definitely searching for Instagram templates to purchase on Etsy!

And while the competition rate is high, that’s largely because so far, we’ve only searched for our broad search term. Not our niche one.

 

Which brings us to our next step 👇

 

Search for your niche keyword on Etsy

 

Next up, we’re going to head to Etsy and type in our more niche keyword (or you can call it your long tail keyword).

 

In this case, that might be “beauty instagram template”.

What you want to do next is take a look at one of the top sellers in your category.

 

Head to their listing, and scroll down to their reviews. Then, hit “Sort by newest”.

 

In the example of our Instagram beauty template, I can see one of the top sellers had 8 reviews in the 30 days (though only 4 are pictured here because the remaining 4 on on the next page).

Photo credit: design4social

 

With this data, we’ll be able to predict how many sales she’s making on a monthly basis.

 

How, you ask?

 

Well, on average, reviews are left anywhere from 2% - 10%

But instead of doing all that math, I'm going to be using my handy dandy profit predictor calculator that I created.

 

Pssst 🚨 you get access to this template when you join my 3-day challenge, Passive Product Payday!

To use the profit predictor calculator, all you need to do is enter the number of reviews left in the past 30 days (in this case, there were 8 even though only 4 were pictured) as well as the price of the product ($2.40). 

 

When you enter those numbers, the calculator will spit out its profit predictions.

 

It will tell you (approximately) what the seller could be making each month - both on the high end and the low end (so if 2% of people left reviews or if 10% of people left reviews).

 

In this case, the calculator tells us that on the low end, 80 sales were made in 1 month. And on the high end, 400 sales were made. 

 

In monthly revenue, that translates to anywhere from $192 to $960 on this listing over the past month, with the average being $576. 

 

Which means on average, this seller is making $576/month in passive income from one listing. 

 

Not bad, right? 😍

 

Just imagine how quickly you could make passive income if you had multiple profitable listings all pulling their weight!

Want to get access to the profit predictor calculator? Join the 'Passive Product Payday Challenge' here.

 

Step 3: Make better offers, effortlessly

(I'm serious about "effortlessly" 👇)

 

Ask yourself:

What can you do to make your template better than all the rest?

 

A helpful way to think about this is to strategize what you could add to your product that wouldn't take too much time or effort on your side – but would look like a BIG bonus to your customer.

For example…👇

 

Size Variations

 

Say you’ve created an Instagram template that’s 1080 x 1080, the standard feed post size.

Well in Canva, you could easily resize them to 1080 x 1920 (the Instagram story size) with the mere click of a button (see below).

Voilà! You’ve got a new product with almost zero effort!

 

 

You could make a whole new listing or add it as a bonus bundle to entice your customer to buy.

 

Style Variations

 

Another one of my all-time favorite Canva features hacks for selling digital products on Etsy is... 

The style palettes feature. 😍 

You can easily program different sets of styles (i.e. color palettes and fonts pairings) or choose from Canva’s default palettes to change your template design with the click of a button!

 

You can sell the same set of templates but in various styles to appeal to a much wider audience!

Okay, so quick recap!

At this point, you’ve:

• Found an awesome Canva template idea
• Have validated that it’s going to be profitable
• And you’ve brainstormed some ways to elevate what’s currently on the market 

 

Right now you’re probably wondering – how can you get the ball rolling? 🤔

 

Step 4: Launch baby, launch 

 And the BEST strategy I have for you to get that first initial boost of traffic and momentum is to have a launch!

 

When you first open shop, you’ve got zero reviews, and zero sales. 

 

So you’ve got to do something to start getting eyeballs on your shop, and a grand opening launch helps you do exactly that! 

 

During your grand opening sale, you want to heavily discount your product to get those sales coming in (my recommendation is 30-50% off, at first).

 

Remember, this is not the time to think about turning a big profit. It’s the time to get the Etsy algorithm to FAVOR YOU and you do that by getting clicks and sales on your new listing asap.

If your listing starts converting, Etsy will boost your listing higher in the algorithm which will lead to MORE traffic and sales even when you end your sale.

 

THAT IS WHY we do this grand opening sale... to help us build momentum to so we can make a big profit later down the line! (and by "later" I mean like 30 days later).

 

And if you have the budget, you could even run ads to get your listings visible quicker! 

 

Just make sure to check on your ads after a couple of days to make sure that they’re actually profitable.

 

When you complete all these four steps, you’ll be well on your way to a profitable Etsy shop in no time!

 

Learning how to create Canva templates to sell on Etsy isn’t as hard as you might think.

 

Take the time to put in the upfront work now so you can reap the rewards for years to come. Thank goodness Canva makes it super-duper easy!

Want to keep learning about how to create your winning digital product? 🏆

Catch my FREE training on the 3 Secrets to Etsy Shop Success.