Creating Canva Templates to Sell on Etsy

1. Introduction: Let's use one of the biggest retailers on the Internet, and they have a really thriving sector for digital products. One of the most popular types of digital products to sell our Canva templates. And that's because Canada is a very easy to use platform. It's accessible to pretty much anyone with a computer. You can also use on your phone or your iPad or tablet. And they are pretty much infinite ways that you can create products and templates and things to sell using this platform. Selling digital products on Etsy can be a really great way to build a side hustle or an extra item of income if you are a creative or a designer, or just like using Canva, like lots of business owners do. And no matter what level of design expertise you have, there's probably going to be some type of products that you're capable of designing using these tools. My name is Rebecca. I own a couple of different SU, stores, mostly selling digital products and I use Canva for almost all of the templates that I sell, the ones that are editable templates that customers can buy an access for themselves. In this course, we're going to look at the entire practice of selling Canva templates on Etsy. So we're going to look at a list of different templates that you can create or different products you can create on Canvas to sell. I'm gonna show you how to do a little bit of research for that on Etsy. We're also going to look at best practices for doing this, for selling Canva templates, including some tips and tricks that I've learned over the years of selling them myself. I'll show you how to get the product from your Canvas account to your customer and deliver it in a way that's really professional. And we'll also go over some XY specific advice about selling templates on there. Now this course is a stand alone. You don't have to take anything else to understand it. But I do have another course that is on selling digital products on Etsy in a bigger picture way. So not specifically Canva templates, but that course has a lot more on opening your store, creating your listings, creating product photos and things like that. If you find that you want more information after taking this course and learning specifically about those Canva templates. So with all that being said, let's get into the course. 2. Types of Templates to Sell: The first thing that we need to know both are creating products for Etsy is what type of Canva templates are actually in demand on that platform. Because Etsy has so much organic traffic, it's possible to create products that sell without you having to do much advertising at all. But in order to do this, you have to start by figuring out what customers are already looking to buy, instead of trying to convince them to buy something that they don't want to do this, we need to do a little bit of market research. Luckily, it's possible to do a simple version of this, right within the ASC platform. The first thing we're going to do, and I'm gonna give you a demonstration of all of us in just a minute, is to do a broad search for Canva templates to see what is for sale. This will give us some ideas of different niches within the Canva template market. Next, we'll search more specifically for a type of Canva template that we might like to create. So this will show us the best examples of what is selling in that particular niche. After that, we're going to explore those best-selling listings for clues about what customers want. The review section is going to be really important here. So with all that in mind, let's switchover to screen-sharing to take a look at what we can find. To get started looking for inspiration on Etsy for different types of Canva template you can make. All you have to do is go to the search bar and just start by typing in a certain type of broad template category. So I'm going to type in small business canvas template and see what we get. Now, there's a lot of options here. We have x2i of over 6,499 results. So we're going to just have a little scroll through and see what kind of things would come up. So we have a lot of Instagram, we've planners. This is an invoice template, lead magnets, lot more Instagram, instagram, instagram. So we can see that social media is very popular here. We have thank you cards. That's he does flag things that are very popular. You can see popular now as listed here, we can also see that certain stores have a ton of reviews which usually correlates to a lot of sales as well. Now I'm going to go a little bit deeper with my research here. And I'm going to pick this product type right here, which is a line sheet for wholesale for Canada. And I'm going to go take a look at more details on that type of product. So let's type in Canva template. And this is much more specific. We have 269 results for this. And we can scroll down and see that there are a lot of different options here by makers, but they all kind of have a similar look, right? We, lined sheets are typically lot of white background. They're not super fancy design. This may be a slight exception. Product photos with inventory information below. If this was the type of product I was making, this is where I can scroll through and look at a bunch of examples of what is selling based on C bestseller, bestseller in this particular niche. You want to make notes on some of the common elements between them, like I said, the plain white background, the images I see there's a lot of circle images or square, not so many rectangles. As I scroll down, there's also a lot of these bundles. I can see these ones have multiple line sheets in them. So that might be something to think about as well. You also want to pay attention to the prices. So in general, I'm seeing them most items are around $10, but there are exceptions here we see these ones are 35, that's a little more expensive. This one's only five, so a little bit less, but the average price is around $10. Now the way that you can get a little bit more detailed information about what customers are liking or disliking. And both these products is to go in and take a look at on some of the very popular ones. For example, when I'm looking through these reviews with a lot of five-star love this template, but this one, this person said far too expensive for what you get. Now if that's the only person who mentioned it being too expensive, That may just be an anomaly for this person. But you something to consider that maybe they want more value in this particular product. This listing has a review here that is actually about misinformation. So the person who bought this listing thought that the stock photography included were part of the product. Now this is a bit unusual because typically when someone buys a template, they want to put their own photos in it. But in this case, they felt like something wasn't clear. This is just a reminder to us that being super clear, but what is included and what is not included is important for the listing. In this review, if this is a different type of product, of course, this customer says I love the font, but I had to individually type in every name and address instead of just uploading an Excel spreadsheet took forever. So either there was some misinformation about what the product was here for them. Maybe they misunderstood something or the instructions on how to use it. We're not super clear. As you can see, we can get a lot of really interesting analytics from the reviews that people have left behind our competitors products. It can give us an idea of things that we need to be really clear about. Things we might need to avoid are things we want to definitely include in our own listings. So that is one way that we can decide on a product to make and sell. Another way to find some inspiration is to look at the different templates that Canva already offers. These are common things that people are creating with the platform and therefore can be really good for options for creating your own tablets. But do keep in mind that you cannot sell a template that exists within Canvas library already, it's against their rules. You need to be creating designs from scratch. So even just modifying the pre-made templates is a no-go here. So here I am logged into my Canva account and you can see that this is the template section. Then he go right here and you're logged in. It shows you a ton of different options and even just hovering over, this is going to show you a bunch of categories, social media, personal, business, et cetera, with different suggestions of things that you could make. And all of these are templates that you can create yourself. If you just scroll down this page here and recommends a bunch of common ones to you. These are typically the most popular things that will make that I'd recommend some things you might like. Here you can see this is inspired by some different slideshows I was making. This is different people who are creating these Canva templates. So see, you really can't sell these because they were made by somebody else or rather you can't resell them onto Etsy. There's also trending ones which can be helpful if there's inspiration. You can see real estate is something that I find quite popular right now. Graphics for real-estate agents. You can also find what's new or just other documents that you might want to look at. And even if you scroll through different categories like here, these are A4 documents, so they're just sort of regular page size things. You can see there's a ton of different examples here. We have school science projects, we have monthly assessments, safety plans, different kinds of different project reports. So you can get a lot of inspiration, just been browsing through these. And again, you don't want to take any of these and resell them, but they can give you ideas of different categories of templates you can use as a sort of reference for you. I have identified four different niches within the Canvas. Template market on Etsy that you might want to look into as a starting point. These are by no means the only types of Canva templates that you can eight, but these are some of the more popular ones that I have seen. The first niche is business templates. So these are resources that are useful to business owners, particularly small business owners who run product-based online shops. These templates are generally for print materials, meaning things that are printed out and included in orders or used in branding or organization. You can also make products that are useful for creative businesses who work with clients. They often need templates for the info that they delivered to the clients. So some examples of these types of products, our business cards, thank you. Postcards that go into packages or other inclusions that go with, with discounts or promotions, think, uh, get mailed out. Planners, workbooks and worksheets, report books, slideshows, media kits, onboarding documents, branding, kids, feedback, forums or pamphlets. And other related niche is social media templates a little bit similar but slightly different niche here. These are extremely popular. I would say this is probably the most popular template market there is. You will see thousands of options already for sale on Etsy. However, the demand keeps up with the supply. So there's actually still a lot of room to grow here. Some examples of social media can be Canva templates are instrumented posts, Pinterest, pin graphics. You can make banners or headers for all the platforms, facebook, Etsy, LinkedIn. You can make Instagram story templates or story highlight covers, and you can do YouTube thumbnails, examples. Pretty much every platform out there social media platform has attended content that you can create a template for. The key to gaining visibility here in this particular niche is to avoid creating products that are too general use. You want to identify certain niches of user that would walk these templates. So for example, templates for real estate agents or for salon owners or her book editors. Business owners who want to make their social media presence more professional and simple to execute are the primary targets for these products. The next Nietzche I've identified is publication templates. So these are templates for people who have information they want to present very nicely to their audience or the customers. There is some overlap here with the business templates. Folks who need the publication templates are not just business owners. They could be renders, that could be bloggers creating a cookbook, that could be volunteers making annual reports, lots of different examples. So these templates are for products that are printed or are shared and digital form. Some examples of these are coursework books, cookbooks, resource books, lead magnets, informational e-books, activity books for kids, coloring books, travel guides or a lead policy guides to. And the fourth niche that I've identified here, our event templates. So these are templates that helps somebody run an event because as we all know, big events like parties or weddings or conferences require a lot of signs. Almost everything in this category is meant to be printed either at home or professionally. So some examples include invitations, table signs are please cards, directional signs, health and safety signs. You could do posters or banners. There's also the idea of making games are customizable gains like activity sheets for kids or party games like bachelorette party games was a very popular. You could also make sign in sheets or promotional materials for event. So these niche product ideas are by no means exhaustive. Of course, there are plenty of other ideas you can come up with, either on your own or just by searching on Etsy like we discussed. So in the next lesson we are going to look at what kind of materials you will actually need to create these templates to sell. 3. Materials Needed: The great thing about creating templates on Canvas to Sal is that you don't need very much to get started in this quick little lesson, we're just going to look at the things required to get started. First step, you are going to obviously need a Canva account. Now up until early 2021, the ability to create a template that you can share or sell on Canvas was a feature that was exclusive to pro subscription users, but now it is available to everybody. So you don't actually need to have a camera Pro account to make this kind of product and sell. The pro account does unlock more graphics for you to use, but as we will discuss in the next lesson, I don't recommend actually using those. Canva is not just where you will create your files, is also where you're going to store them. So it's a good idea to keep your files organized so that you never lose or excellent delete a file that you're linking to on a product on ESI. There are apps for Canva, for both the phone and also the iPad. I don't actually recommend doing you're designing work on them unless you don't have another option. The app has gotten much better in the past year or so and it has pretty much all the functionality of the desktop version. But I find that it's much more challenging to get the design correct and adjust everything on the small screen. So if you have the option to do it on a desktop, that might be easier. The next thing that you're going to need is an online store, a place to sell your templates? Now Etsy is the option that we are discussing in this course. But of course there are other platforms out there like Creative Market or you can make your own website as he doesn't have any ongoing subscription costs. Instead, you pay a small fee every time you list an item for sale, then when you make a sale, they take a small percentage of that. This works well for digital products sellers as we can sell our designs multiple times. And therefore, most of the sales who make a pure profit, ESI accounts are very easy to set up. Keep in mind that when you do, you will need one product listing ready to go to open your shop if you don't have one already. So this is why I recommend designing your first product ahead of time. So you are able to do that opening process smoothly. The other optional element that you might want for your templates are some graphics or illustrations. Canva comes with a large collection of graphics that you can use for your products. However, you might decide that you want something custom for whatever you're planning. In which case you can import your own artwork into Canva and use them on your templates. I would suggest this only if you yourself are an artist or an illustrator. I don't recommend using licensed artwork in templates. This is because most of the graphic licenses that you get when you buy a license for art by that beyond NC or on Creative Market, they don't allow you to create products that somebody else can edit and modify using your graphics, use licensed. So you'd want to be extremely clear on new licensing terms if you're going to do anything like that. So with all that being said and a Canva account in hand, we are ready to start designing. And in the next lesson I'm going to share a series of design tips that will help make the process of creating your templates a bit easier. 4. Design Tips: Since there are literally thousands of different types of templates that you can create for Etsy, I'm not able to show you a step-by-step how to create them all, of course. But we are going to go over in the lessons up my design tips to help you create better products with more efficiency. My first suggestion is something that we already briefly touched on, which is only using Canvas free graphics and fonts. If you have a Pro account, which many designers do, you have access to? A wide range of graphics and fonts that are available only through these subscribers. You can use these to make end-products. No problem. Like you can use it for things that you export and use for other things. The problem is that when you create a template using these products, your customer may not have a Pro account and if they don't, they won't be able to use the template exactly as you intended. The images that you use, if they're for Pro uses only, will have a watermark on them and then Canvas will prompt the customer to pay for them before they can export the project. It's very easy for pro users to overlook this when they first start creating templates because you're not used to graphics being restricted. So let's take a quick look at how to identify and filter for those free images to use. This is an example of a invitation that I found a template for already in Canva. So there's gonna use this as our example. Now I'm going to pull up the Elements tab and we're going to try and look for things that are free to use. It's simple to do while you're going to do is click here and type in something. So I'll just click on book. Here's an example I used before. And once you've typed in your keyword is little, sliders show up and we're going to click on that. And then here you can specify what you're looking for. The best thing to do is to just go down to price and click on free, and then it will filter out nothing with Pro will show up. And that just makes it really easy to make sure you're not including anything that your customers can't use it for their design if they don't have a Canvas account and you never know if, if your customers have a Pro account or not. You can also filter with other options here you can choose static versus animated. I find that one really helpful, especially because the lumped together some of the animations like this one down here, along with just the static images. So that's really simple. That is how you find, make sure that you're not using any pro images for your design. There are also limitations about the fonts that you can use, whether you're pro or not. So to do that is you can't exactly filter the same way, but if you just click on the text that you want to edit and click on the fonts. You'll see that if you scroll down, there's a small crown here that indicates that this font is a Canva pro exclusive font. So you want to make sure that you are not using any of those in your design when you are making something for a template to sell. And luckily, there are tons of fonts here that are accessible without the pro account. It's probably maybe a 5050 ratio. So you can find fonts and death that everybody can use and then your template won't have any limitations on it. My next tip is that once you've got a great design made, you can create additional product listings. I making color variations. For example, if you designed an ebook template with a blue theme that you might want to make the same version boat with it in pink or maybe beige or another color. To do this, you can manually go a copy of your template file and adjust all colors. But another option is to use the styles feature within Canva. If I wanted to change some of the colors in this design here I can go in and click on the elements individually and change them of course, but that can takes long time, especially if you have multiple pages. So a feature that Canva offers is styles and spring over here on the left-hand side. And if you scroll down, they have all the different trending palettes that you can pick. If you go into the All category here it has paired color palettes with fonts. So if I click on one of these, it's going to change the font and the color palette of my design. Now that kinda looks pretty good. What are the features they offer is shuffle here. So if I keep clicking that same place, it's going to use that same palette and fonts, but gonna give me a few variations to choose from within it. So you can filter around, play with that. If I just wanted to change the fonts that would go up here into the Phi category. And it's going to show you some pairings that look nice. And maybe this one here. And we not for the header there, maybe this one looks better. And then if you want to just change the colors, you just go into the color section and pick some of these. So it's as simple as that. You can also create your own branding kids as I did here with some old different brands I made before. And you can have your own custom ones put in there. This can be a really great way to add variations to your design if you want to make multiples in different colors schemes to create separate listings for them. Next, you will want to ensure that you have done the research to get the sizing correct for your design. Some products require very specific sizes. Banners for Facebook pages or covers for e-books. You want to do the research ahead of time to figure out what the correct dimensions are for your product so that your customer isn't left with something that doesn't quite fit. Canvas does have a Resize tool where you can adjust the dimensions of a design, but this is another pro, only feature. So many of your customers may not have access to it. That's why it's key to get the sizing right the first time. My last tip in this lesson is a bigger concept. One, there are two ways to build a cohesive template store on FC. So you can either build a store that sells one type of template with many variations, or you can sell many types of products for one specific customer. If you're gonna do the first one is cell one type of product, then you're going to want to spend your time getting your core design optimized before you start creating variations with different colors or themes or aesthetics or purposes. An example of this is a shop that sells only media kits for influencers. That's basically a PDF that shows their statistics, sort of their follower account and what kind of brands they work with, stuff like that. They use them to pitch brains on partnerships. So you'd want to have a pretty good grasp on what makes immediate kit successful and then create variations for different niches of influencers. So that can be mom's artists, fashion influencers, cooks and foodies or other different kinds of niches. The other type of store where you are catering to a specific person requires you to really understand who that customer is and what they need. An example of this could be serving in the jewelry makers. These types of entrepreneurs are usually found on Etsy as well. And they need business cards. They need inserts for their packages, social media templates, backing cards for the earrings, necklaces to be packaged on, and lots of other types of files. In this case, you can be a one-stop shop for everything they need to create a cohesive branded experience for their customers. Either silos store can be really effective and it will appeal to different personality types. If you like creating lots of different types of things, then the second segment you'd better for you. Or if you prefer to go get really good at one thing and then reconnect and realize that a few times then the first option might be best. So with all of that in mind, you can create the type of product that suits you and your store in your design skills. And once you have that completed template, you're going to need a way for the customer to access it. And in the next lesson, we're going to look at preparing the deliverable for your template. 5. Preparing the Deliverable: After you have completed your awesome template, you're going to need to make it accessible to your customer. Now when you sell a digital product on Etsy, you're able to upload up to five files per listing that become accessible to the customer after they make the purchase. In the case of a canva template, the item that you need to deliver is actually a URL. And since that's not an actual digital file, you need to create a document to allow that customer to obtain that URL. So the first thing you're going to need to do is to get that URL from Canva. All you have to do is go up to the Share button when you have the design looking the way you want, and you click on that, it gives you the option to share it with other people. But you just want to go down to here and click on uses as a template. And it's going to give you a link, copy that, and that's it. Now you can paste the link wherever you want it to go. So once you have that URL on hand, you need to create the deliverable document. You have a couple of options here and feel free to be creative about it. It's really flexible. The simplest option would be to just create a text document that includes the link and maybe a little bit of informational text. My preference is to go a little bit more formal and to create a branded PDF in Canvas. This is my professional for your customer and it also gives you the opportunity to provide things in the document as fellas URL. So here's an example of the deliverable PDF and a use for one of my Etsy shops. In terms of the design, I've mirrored the branding from my shop in the header and the logo, and I've also included that logo at the top of the page. There are three key pieces of information here that I include. I include the URL for the template as imbedded hyperlinks. So just says click here for access and that's a link for them. I'm also an affiliate for Canvas, so I include a link for the customer to sign up using my affiliate URL if they don't have an account yet, some of them well, that some of them won't. And I also run a mailing list for this particular niche. So I have a link in there offering some additional free templates for anybody who signs up. In terms of the text itself, I include some instructions and also a prompt to send any questions to me via Fc conversations. You don't have to include all of these things, but I think they have a lot of the customer experience and they are part of why I think I have so many happy customers. So other things that you could add in the same space are you going to do discount codes to encourage return customers? You could include links to your social media or your Facebook group. If you have one, you can include other affiliate products that might relate to whatever the templates about if you have them, ultimately, this deliverable document is just one step in creating a really great experience for your customers. Now in the next lesson, we're going to look at a few other things that you can do to ensure that you have happy and returning customers to your store. 6. Customer Experience: Customer experience is something that occasionally gets overlooked by digital products colors because we have less hands-on interaction with our customers then physical product sellers. For the most part, people are going to purchase your listing, download the file, and go on their way. Even. So I think it's really important to take a few steps to ensure that your customers are happy. And we can also ensure that there's no confusion about what they're purchasing ahead of time. First of all, I think there are three important things that you should include in your product description. Number one, we want to make sure that it's very clear that this listing is for a kanban template, emphasize to the customer that they will need a free Canva account to use it. I like to mention Canvas in the product description, but also the title of the listing. And I put the Canva logo on my listing images just to make it super visual. Second, you are going to want to clearly state that the customer will receive a PDF. Most of your customers are totally going to understand what they are purchasing when they buy a digital product or a template. However, there is always a chance that your customer is buying this type of product for the very first time. So I like to state that they will receive a PDF with instructions on accessing the template upon purchase. And third, you can remind your customer about your refund policy. Most digital products are not returnable or fundable because there is no way to track if the customer is really using the file after the downloaded. Your refund policy should be on your shop page already. But I like to include this just a very simple sentence at the end of my listing just to make sure that there's no chance the customer has missed it. Something else that you might want to consider that you could include in your deliverable file is to create a video tutorial showing the customer how to use an edit the template in Canvas. This can be a very simple screen recording like I got a few times here in this course. And you can upload that to YouTube as an unlisted video. That way only people with the link will find that video. These tutorial videos are mostly going to be used by people who have never used Canvas before. So keep this in mind. You might want to demonstrate things a little bit slowly. Show the process of opening the PDF deliverable, clicking on the link, and then opening up Canva with the template, as well as showing specifically how to edit your template. The last customer experience tip I have for you is to create a few different mock-ups for your product listing. Ads to suggest that you add as many images as possible to your listings, including the showing the product in use and in context. This can be a little bit difficult for us as digital product sellers because we don't have a physical object to take photos of. So I recommend that you go into when you do your research, look at what other creators in your knees or your tape a product are doing. And off. Usually the images for digital products include text along with mock-ups of the template as a finished product. You can see some examples here of listing images that I've created for my store selling journal templates for Canada. They both have the Canva logo on them. You can see the teal circle. And since this is a journal template, you can see the very first image has a mock-up that looks like an actual book. I've projected the page onto a book image. And the second one shows all of the pages in the template with a drop shadow behind. And I made these graphics in Canada. I've also included a text with some of the key information on these images. These give a customer a pretty clear idea of what they are receiving. So now in the next lesson, let's wrap up with just a couple of Etsy specific. 7. Etsy Tips: As we mentioned earlier in the course, you can sell your Canva templates on lots of different platforms. But we have been talking about Etsy in particular. So to wrap up the course here, just a couple of little tips for making your job managing all your listings even easier. First, I recommend that you set a high number of for your inventory for each item. This means that when your template cells, you're listening doesn't go inactive but continues to sell. This is useful because you won't have to worry about locating listings that had been sold out, especially if you're managing your shop on Etsy app, on your phone and just find a little bit more challenging on that app. They'll be charged a re listing fee every time you renew, which is around 20 to 25 cents depending on your country. It just means that this will be more automated for you and you don't have that lag in between when a product cells and when it's available again. Next, if you are selling a one of a kind template, make sure that you price it accordingly. One easy example of this is if you were selling a canva template for a logo design, you may not want to sell each logo more than once. In this case, you should ensure that the price for the design balances out what the average market price for this type of eigenvalues, along with how much you need to be paid for your time and creating it. If you do sell one of a kind templates, you should make sure to feature this highly in your listing description and possibly even in your photos. This is a selling point for a lot of people who are seeking unique designs that they are not going to see anywhere else. And tip number 3, remember that you don't necessarily need a 1000 products in your store, but it is a good idea to build up a collection of listings in your inventory, rather than trying to rely on just one or two great designs. The more products that you have listed at sea, the more likely that you will be found in searches. Remember that it's important to think of the 80, 20 rule when it comes to your store. This rule states that 80% of your sales are going to come from 20 percent of your inventory. Odds are that not everything you list will take off and make use of. But you have to keep building up your inventory to increase the number of viably profitable sales. Now this all being said, the important thing is not to give up if you don't see sales for your templates right away. Customers like to see stores with multiple products as they look more established and serious, even if you don't have many sales yet, perseverance is really key when it comes to running an Etsy digital products store. And with all that being said, we are now at the end of the course. So I hope this was helpful in teaching you how to create an income stream through ETC and Canada together. If you want to learn more about running a digital product shop, including what to write in your listing descriptions, have to do more advanced keyword research and a lot more. You can check out my other course which is called build a successful digital products on Etsy. Now for the assignment for this course you just finished. I would like you to take a stab at creating your very first template that you might like to sell. You can use the tips from earlier lessons on researching on Etsy and when you've got something pretty neat created, then why don't you take a screenshot and upload it to the course so that everyone else can see it too. If you did enjoy this course, I would really appreciate it. If you left a review, I read all of them myself. And it also helps other students to know that this is a useful course for folks who are interested in this topic. Thank you very much for joining me on this course and watching, and good luck with your next creative project.