How To Create and Sell Canva Templates (Step By Step)

So, I discovered this simple way to turn Canva designs into templates that you can then sell over and over again. And the crazy part is once you learn how to do this, you'll be able to make templates in minutes that you can then sell for years. So, in this video, I will show you step by step exactly how to make these templates and then how to sell them. All right, so first let me show you what a Canva template actually is and how it works if you're not familiar with them. So, I was recently sent this link by a friend of mine, and you'll notice that this is actually what's called a Canva template. So, I can click on this right here, and this will actually open it up on Canva. And you can see that this is a design for some sort of social media post, maybe for like a travel agency. So, if I click on where it says view template, this will actually enable me to use it in my own Canva account and edit it however I want. So, I can click right here, and we'll press play on this. And you'll see that this is what the result looks like once you have it all finished. It's pretty nice looking design. And so what I can do is I can fill this in with everything that I want. So for instance, let's say I wanted to change up these photos right here. And in this case, I wanted a photo of this dog. I can just go ahead and drag in that image and that will then fill it in right into that template placeholder. Let's say I want to change this text. So I can highlight this and change it to travel, whatever I want it to be, and go to each part of the template and change it however I want. But notice that the overall structure is staying the same. I don't need to design the entire thing. like add these elements like this up here or these down here. I can keep the general font, which I really like, and just go ahead and change the words and the actual photos. And that's really the key with this with these templates. You're not creating a final design for the consumer or for your customer. You are providing them a template that they can then fill in exactly the way that they want and customize it to exactly their liking. All right, let's get into it now. And I'll actually show you step by step how to create one of these templates yourself. Now, you may be tempted to come in here and search for something like, let's say it's a wedding invitation. You may be tempted to open one of these up and then to click on design. And let's say you really like this one. And you might say, "Oh, I really like this one, but I'm just going to change up some of these flowers and the font and then I'll sell that as a template. " But you are absolutely not allowed to do that on Canva. That's a big no no. You don't want to get in trouble with them. So, never come in here and start with one of these pre-made templates. These are designed by Canva. They are owned by Canva. So, you cannot just change them and then sell them yourself. However, what I do is I sort of use these as a template for my templates. Let me explain what I mean. So, this right here is not a design we can use like I just said, but it does give me the general framework for what a wedding invitation should look like. The right sizing, all the different elements that we need like we need the names of the bride and groom or groom and bride and bride. We need the date and we need the location as well. So, it's really helpful for sort of having that in mind with when you're creating your own designs. And so, what I'll do now is I'll actually click here where it says add a page. And then that will create a new page with the exact dimensions that we need. Now, from here, all you need to do is fill it in and create the nice design that you want. So, think of it like this. Just pretend for a moment that you are creating this for an actual client of yours. They asked you for a wedding invitation. just create them a nice wedding invitation. At its core, that is what a template is. However, one key with this is that when you are adding different elements, you need to make sure that all the elements that you add are free elements. And that's because if you use pro elements, in other words, ones you can only get on the paid plan, then when someone actually downloads the template and starts using it themselves, they're not going to be able to use the pro elements, and there's going to be watermarks all over it, and they're going to be really upset with you. So, don't use any of those pro elements. I'm going to go ahead and delete this one. And then what I'll do is I'll come over here, and let's say I'm going to add flowers. So, I'm going to search for flowers. And then on this little menu right here, you can filter by free. And you see you now only have the free graphics. And you see there's a lot of them right there. Even on the free plan, you still get a ton of great looking graphics that you can use. So what you want to do now is actually design out the entire thing. Again, as if you're creating it for a client. Now, another really useful thing to have are these frames. So if you click on any of these frames, these are like placeholders for images. So you see it just has this sort of generic placeholder for an image. So for instance, let's say I wanted to throw in this image right here, which are which is someone who's proposing. You can just drag it in there and it'll automatically fill that frame. So that

is what you want. And what's cool is that I can leave that in there and leave that as part of the template. And then anyone can drag any photo on top of it and it will automatically fill it in on top of that. So I'm going to quickly build out a nice looking design and then I'll get back to you in just a moment. All right, so this is what I came up with. Obviously I didn't spend a lot of time on this. You'll want yours to look a lot nicer than this, but this will just give you a general idea. So a couple things I wanted to point out to you. First of all, right here, all these fonts, these also need to be free fonts as well. So, anytime I have a font, if we click up here, I'm using the one called seasons. But again, click on this filter and you'll be able to filter by free ones. So, do not use the paid ones for this. Another thing that's really helpful is if you come up to file up here and settings, I like to show rulers and guides. That way, we'll be able to see all this on the sides like right here. And that will just help you keep everything looking really, really nice. And another really important thing to do before you start sending this to customers is actually to lock the different elements. So elements like this, we don't want this to move. Once you have it where you want it, you want it to be exactly there. And oftent times customers like they might come in here and they might accidentally move it and then they get frustrated that doesn't look the way that it's supposed to look. So, what you want to do is you want to right click on it or on my MacBook, I'm holding down control and clicking. And then you want to scroll or come down to where it says lock. And for this one, I'm going to click on lock. That way, I'm not going to be able to move this one at all. Now, for other ones, like this one, I don't want to lock the entire thing. I just position. So, in this case, I will do the same thing. Rightclick it and over on lock, I'll select lock position only. that will prevent anyone from moving this, but they'll still be able to change whatever the text says. So, they'll be able to change a name, and you want to make sure you do that for every single element in here. Now, the next step is we actually have to prepare this for a potential customer. So, right now, because we kind of pretended that we were doing this for a final client, it actually has real information in here like names and dates. So, we actually need to put in sort of placeholders for all of that so that it's really clear to them what it is they need to change and there's not going to be any mistakes because you'd be surprised how many people like if you leave a date like this just as a placeholder, you'd be surprised how many times people will actually leave the placeholder text and then print out like a 100 copies of this with the wrong date on it. So, we want to make very clear to the customer what it is they have to change and what it is they don't change. So, in this case, I'm going to put up here groom and I'll change this one to bride. And I'll just put in here a general thing saying date. And then I'll put in here at time. And on the next line, I'll put in location. So, let me just go ahead and finish that up real quick. And now we have placeholders for everything. So, it's really clear to the customer what they have to change and what they shouldn't change. So, the next thing you have to do is you have to test everything. Pretend you are a customer coming in here trying to use the template and basically you want to try to break it because customers will always find a way to break the templates. So you want to find a way to break it and then make it so that it can't be broken. So for example, let's say the bride has a really long name. I don't know. Let's just put a bunch in here. Look what happens. It suddenly jumps to the second line. We don't want that because it's locked. We can't expand this. So we need to fix that. So what I'll do is I will unlock this. Now it's a little bit finicky uh Canva. First I have to lock it completely and then I can unlock it. And now what all I have to do is just drag this text box to make it wider. That way it's always going to stay on that one line while still being centered. And I'm actually just going to make it the entire width here just in case someone has a really long name. But then I'll just change this back to bride. So you see it's still in the center right there. Uh not quite. Let me fix that. There we go. Just like that. And then I'll go ahead and lock it again. So again, I'm going to click on lock here, but lock position only. So now if they put their name in there, even if it's a long name, it's still going to fit on that one line. And you want to do the same thing for everything else in here and just see if anything else breaks. So again, try to move everything. Like, can I move these? Nope, I'm not moving those. But oh, this one moves. So I got to remember to come in here and actually completely lock that one as well. Now, once you're totally happy with the way that it looks and everything is locked and everything is responding exactly the way you want it to, I'm going to come up here and delete this first one because again, we're not going to use that one. So this is the final template. And now we can actually share it. So I'm going to click on the top right here where it says share. Now, what you don't want to

do is click on copy link. That is not the way you want to use this. Instead, what you want to do is click on see all right here. And then you want to click right here where it says template link. That is what you need, the template link. So, by clicking on this, that will actually create a link just like the one I showed you before. So, I'll click here where it says create template link, and then I'll go ahead and copy this. And let me just open an incognito window and I'll go ahead and paste that in. And you can see exactly what this looks like. Here it is. It says a template created by Paul J. Lipsky for you. And it's exactly the same as before. I can click on view template and I would have to log into the account to actually be able to use it. But it would function the same exact way that other template I showed you worked. All right. But you're not done yet because you don't want to just send someone the link. It doesn't look very professional. You want to have a nicel looking page where they can actually access the template. So, let me show you what I mean. I'm going to come over here to Canva and I'm going to click on create on the top left here and I'm going to search in here for the word download. And you're going to see this design right here called download page. Going to go ahead and click on that one. And then on the left under designs, it should automatically fill in saying download page. You can choose whichever one of these you like. I like this one right here. It really depends on what it is that you're selling, but I think this is a really nice template. And so now what I can do is I can actually fill this in with relevant information to exactly what I sold them. So this is what they're going to get when they actually purchase from you. So the most important thing here is this button right here. In this case, it says download ebook. We're going to change that to download template. And then right here where we have these three dots, I can click on this and click on link. and I'll paste in that link. It's already in my clipboard. So, I'll just paste it in. Click on done and then done. So, now when someone clicks on that, that will then take them over to the template design inside of Canva. And another thing I'll do is like I'll change this photo right here and put a preview of what it is that they're buying. Come back to the original design which is right here. And I'm just going to download a copy of it. So, I'll click on share and download a quick copy of it. And then returning back here, I'll just go ahead and upload that design. And then I'll go ahead and bring it in and just put it right here so they can see like, hey, that is what you're about to download. You're about to download this template. What happened here? All right, let's redo that. Download template. So, something got messed up here, but I'll show you how to do it again. I'm just going to paste in that link and click on done. There we go. And of course, obviously, I would change up all of this as well, just kind of describing what it is. But then you can click on share for this one. And this one you actually want to download as a PDF. So change this to PDF. And then go ahead and download it. And also click here where it says flatten PDF. That's really important. You want to make sure you click on flatten PDF and then click on download. And then when someone actually buys it from you, what you're actually going to send them is this. It's going to look really nice and professional. they'll be able to click on download template and then they'll be able to access the actual template for them to use. Now, before we move on and I show you how to actually start selling these templates, if you're learning something about Canva or if you've enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. That lets me know that you want more content like this and it'll let you know anytime I make another video about Canva. All right, let me actually show you now how you can start selling templates like this. And there's a lot of different places you can do this. I'm going to show you Etsy because I think it's one of the most straightforward and simple ones to use. And a lot of people come on here to actually buy templates. So, for instance, I'm going to search in here Canva template for let's say a travel guide and we'll see all of these sort of editable travel itinerary templates for Canva. You see, they all say digital downloads. So, you're not actually buying a physical product. It's all these things that you can edit in Canva. as you can see right here. So, let's go ahead and do the same thing. You want to start obviously by creating an Etsy account if you don't have one already. And then you can actually come to the shop manager up here on the top right. Now, from here, you want to add a listing. So, I'm going to click right here where it says add a listing. And then again on the top right here where it says add a listing. Then you want to search in here for what it is that you're selling. So, in this case, it's a wedding invitation template. And you see it comes up right here, even though I spelled it wrong. And then I can click on continue right here. Now obviously you want to select where it says digital file. You're not selling a physical item. Then who made it? I can say I made it. And this is a supply or tool to make things. And then when was it made? It's made this year. And then click on continue. So now you want to fill in all of this information. Some key things

that you want to keep in mind. I'm not going to walk you through all this, but the key things to keep in mind is that things for the title, you definitely want to hop over to Etsy and see what other people are using for their titles uh because a lot of times you're going to be able to copy some of the same keywords. There's lots of different ways you can do this, but this is pretty much the simplest way. So, if you do wedding invitation template, we can kind of see exactly what people use. So, definitely including something like editable. Am I saying that right? Editable. Sounds a little weird, but you get the idea. Editable wedding invitation. And definitely including the word Canva in there makes a huge difference as well. So, I would definitely throw that in there. You definitely want to upload images, not only of the template, but what it could finally look like as a final product. And luckily, you can do all of that inside of Canva. You can create mockups like this. And I also do think it's helpful to include the Canva logo on the listing as well, like we saw on the other one, or here it is right here as well, because that really lets people know that, oh yeah, this is something that I can easily edit in Canva. Now, another key point that a lot of people on Etsy mess up or don't realize is that in the description, you definitely want to put that you'll be able to use this even if you're on the free plan of Canva. A lot of people don't do that on Etsy. I think that's a mistake because Etsy buyers a lot of times they'll jump in, buy one, uh this the seller's not good and they put too many pro elements or paid elements in there and then the buyer gets burned, they return it, they cancel it and they come to look for a new one and they want to make sure the new one is one that they can use. So definitely include that in the description. And for the price, you definitely want to look at what other people are selling for. But I'm seeing a lot in like the $7 range seems to be pretty good range for doing it. And then of course, you actually want to list it up and fill in everything in here. Now, before we wrap up, I do want to share some important mistakes that you want to avoid. First, again, always make sure you test your templates. Even after you create the link, use it yourself as if you're a customer and make sure that everything actually works. Make sure that every single element can be edited exactly the way people want and that they can't break your template at all. Now, once you have a winning template and maybe on Etsy you start selling it, definitely make variations on it. If you see that wedding invitations aren't doing well, but maybe travel guides are, make more travel guides. So, the more specific you can get, the better generally you're going to be as a seller of templates on platforms like Etsy. And finally, remember, always abide by Canva's terms of service. You never want to break their rules, and that can get you in a lot of trouble. So, always follow their rules. So, that's the complete process to create these professional templates using Canva and then sell them pretty much passively. Now, if you enjoyed this video, then you're going to love this video right here where I cover seven genius ways that people are making money with Canva AI. So definitely click on this video and I'll see you there in just one