Last Updated 9 months by Emily Standley-Allard
If you’ve got a knack for design then you might be curious about how you can monetize such a skill. One of the most reliable methods is to actually start selling your products over the internet and directly from your blog or website. Not only is it super easy to set up a website that can sell digital products, but there are also a number of tools that make creating designs surprisingly easy. One such platform is Canva; an online drag and drop graphic design tool that virtually anyone can use. Regardless if you’re an industry professional or a hobbyist, Canva allows you to create a multitude of stunning, professional printables, posters, social media posts, digital assets, presentations, creations and designs.
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So in this post, we’ll be taking a look at how you can set up a website, create some gorgeous Canva templates and then get started selling them for passive income or to start a brand new career in just a few hours!
What exactly is Canva?
Canva is an incredibly popular tool, but there are still plenty of people in the world that don’t know much about the platform or how to use it.
Canva is essentially a graphic design platform that enables you to create social media graphics, templates, posters and a range of other visual content. It works on both mobile devices and online and you get access to millions of different images and illustrations to help you create stunning, fantastic designs.
There are also lots of templates available which can be used as learning tools.
However, you can’t use a Canva template, change a few things and then sell it as your own.
Not only is that illegal, but it’s also unethical and frowned upon in the community. This could give you a bad reputation and destroy your chances of establishing your business.
Do you need to be a design professional?
Absolutely not! Even with just a bit of design sense, you can start creating beautiful graphics with Canva’s easy to use tools. It has a huge library of assets that anyone can customize and use to their liking.
What can you sell with Canva?
You can sell pretty much any kind of graphic–and this is the hard part! Just deciding which kind you want to create.
You can sell website templates, templates for recipes, cards, posters, calendars, Holiday card designs, printables, eBooks, and even book covers.
Any kind of graphical template you can think of can be created in Canva and sold.
How much money do Canva templates make?
This varies depending on many factors. Quality of your product is important, but your reputation and competition also need to be taken into consideration. You also need to think about how much advertising you’re going to do and the types of customers you wish to attract.
It’s entirely possible to earn several hundred dollars a month from selling Canva templates–and that’s entirely passive income once you’ve submitted your template designs.
Every now and then, you might change your prices due to your growing reputation or you might decide to have a sales period which reduces your potential income but grows your audience.
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To give a rough number, one blogger I know started earning somewhere around $2,500 a month once she established herself and has around a dozen high-quality products on her website.
Some really ambitious bloggers earn up to a million dollars selling their digital assets on various platforms online!
This can always be scaled accordingly with more promotion and more products on your website–just be careful never to overload it with low-quality templates!
Quality always trumps quantity.
Setting up your website or blog for selling Canva templates
In order to start selling Canva templates, it’s best to have a personal website for your brand. Your brand could be a company name, it could be your blog name or it could even be your personal name.
Setting up a blog is simple and there are countless different hosting services that can provide you with a website for a low cost.
For the sake of this guide, we’re going to be using the combination of WordPress (the software, not the free blogging platform) and WooCommerce. Most web hosts support WordPress as a one-click installation package, making it simple to set up.
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Using WooCommerce
Next, you’ll want to find the Plugins menu on your WordPress dashboard so you can install WooCommerce.
This is an eCommerce plugin that allows you to post products onto your website with an easy-to-use dashboard and then start selling your Canva templates. The setup process is detailed and there’s plenty of support available if you’re unsure about something.
The setup process will also ask you for payment options. We suggest picking PayPal as it’s widely used and also Stripe if you plan to take credit card payments.
Using Canva Pro
While Canva is completely free to use, only the pro version allows you to share your designs as templates. This is essentially the deliverable which will be added to your WooCommerce product and then given to your customer in a PDF format so they receive what they paid for.
Get Started With Canva for FREE Today
Adding products to WooCommerce
Adding products is simply a matter of going to your dashboard, clicking products and adding something. You’ll be able to specify all the details of your product including a description, pictures and a price.
Make sure it is marked as a Virtual and Downloadable product.
Creating Canva templates that sell
With the main setup completed, here are a couple of helpful tips to assist you in creating beautiful Canva templates and promoting them.
Figure out what’s popular
You can spend hours designing something beautiful but it’s going to be useless if it’s not in demand.
Look at what’s currently top sellers in a place called Creative Market and try to tap into the same type of styles.
Once you have your website set up you can also link it to Creative Market and use that as a platform to sell as well.
Design templates that are in high demand and you’ll certainly see a bump in your sales figures.
Learn about basic design principles
If you’re a complete beginner to design then it’s worth taking inspiration from existing designs (as long as you’re not copying them!) and learning a couple of principles such as color theory and effective use of space and proportion.
Canva comes with helpful easy to follow tutorials to help further your knowledge to expand your business and profits!
Promoting your products
Even if you have a high-quality product that is in demand, there’s a small chance it will be seen without Get more website traffic
Make sure you’re using your blog, social media platforms and definitely Pinterest to advertise your product and designs.
There are thousands of bloggers who don’t have time to create designs they need like media kits, templates, ebook covers, social media posts, themes and more to use on their own blogs.
Get started with your new side hustle selling your fabulous creations today!
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