How to Make Money With Canva: Selling Canva Templates as Digital Products

When I first heard you could make money with Canva templates, I was skeptical. I'm not a designer. I have zero formal training in typography or layout. The idea of selling "design work" felt like something only pros could pull off.

I was completely wrong.

Canva templates are one of the easiest digital products to create and sell, and figuring out how to make money with Canva changed the way I think about passive income entirely. Here's everything I've learned — including what sells, how to make templates fast, and where to sell them.

Why Canva Templates Are a Great Digital Product

Before I explain how to make them, let me explain why Canva templates are a particularly good digital product:

They solve a real problem. Most people know what they want their content to look like, but they don't have the time or skill to design from scratch. A good template does the hard work for them.

They have huge demand. Everyone with a social media account, a business, or a blog needs visual content. The market is massive and growing.

Low effort to create, infinite to sell. You make a template once and sell it unlimited times. There's no inventory, no fulfillment cost, and no limit on how many copies can sell.

Canva Pro templates are easy. With Canva Pro (or even the free tier for many use cases), building templates takes hours, not days.

What Canva Templates Actually Sell

Not all templates are created equal. Here's what I've found generates consistent sales:

Social Media Templates

Instagram carousel templates, Pinterest pin templates, and LinkedIn post templates are perennial bestsellers. People need consistent visual branding across platforms, and custom design is expensive. A pack of 10–20 matching templates that they can edit in Canva? That's exactly what they're willing to pay for.

Best formats: Instagram carousels (10–20 slides), Pinterest pin packs (5–10 pins), Instagram story templates.

Small Business Branding Kits

Local businesses — coaches, consultants, real estate agents, food businesses — constantly need branded materials but can't afford a designer. A complete branding kit with business card, flyer, email header, and social templates can sell for $25–75.

Presentation Templates

Clean, professional presentation templates for Google Slides or PowerPoint (exportable from Canva) sell consistently to consultants, marketers, and anyone who makes decks for a living.

Resume and CV Templates

Highly competitive but high volume. If you create a beautiful, clean resume template, it'll sell in large quantities because everyone needs one eventually.

Planner and Organizer Templates (Canva to PDF)

Daily planners, content calendars, budget trackers, and wellness journals can all be designed in Canva and exported as printable PDFs. These sell as both digital downloads and print-on-demand products.

How to Create Canva Templates That Look Professional

Here's the process I use to build templates that actually sell:

Step 1: Research what's already selling. Look at Etsy and Creative Market for Canva templates in your niche. Find the styles that have the most reviews and analyze what they do well.

Step 2: Pick a niche and stay in it. "Social media templates" is a category. "Instagram templates for fitness coaches" is a niche. The more specific you are, the easier you are to find.

Step 3: Use Canva's element library strategically. The free and Pro element libraries are extensive. You don't need to create original graphics — curating and arranging existing elements professionally is the skill.

Step 4: Build around fonts and color systems. The thing that makes templates look cohesive isn't the graphics — it's consistent typography and color palettes. Pick 2–3 fonts and 3–5 brand colors and stick to them throughout.

Step 5: Create variations. A set of 12 templates that all match is more valuable than 12 independent designs. Bundle everything into themed packs.

Step 6: Test on yourself. Before you sell a template, actually try to use it. Is it easy to edit? Does it look good with different photos? Is the text placeholder obvious? If it's not easy for you, it won't be easy for buyers.

How to Deliver Canva Templates

This trips up a lot of first-time sellers. You can't just send someone a Canva file — they need a way to access it and edit it.

The standard approach: Share a Canva template link. When you finalize a design in Canva, you can generate a "Template link" that lets buyers open the design and create their own editable copy without changing your original.

Deliver this link as a PDF or text file — buyers download the product, open the link, and they're editing immediately.

Where to Sell Canva Templates

Etsy is the most common starting point — it has built-in traffic and buyers specifically looking for Canva templates.

Your own store is where you want to end up, though. Etsy takes fees and you have zero control over the platform. Once you build momentum, moving to your own storefront is the right long-term move.

I use MadeThis.com for my digital product store. I can list my Canva template packs with clean product pages, manage instant delivery of the template links, and keep 100% of my revenue without marketplace fees cutting in.

Pricing Canva Templates

• Individual templates: $5–15
• Small packs (5–10 templates): $15–30
• Large packs (20–50 templates): $30–60
• Full branding kits: $40–80

New sellers tend to underprice dramatically. If you've built a professional-looking set of 20 branded social media templates, $35–45 is not expensive — it's a bargain compared to what a designer would charge.

Building a Canva Template Business Over Time

The real income from Canva templates comes from catalog depth. One product might make $200/month. Ten products, each making $200/month, makes $2,000/month. Twenty makes $4,000/month. The work is upfront; the income compounds.

Set a goal: create one template pack per week for three months. By the end, you'll have a catalog that can generate consistent monthly income from accumulated traffic.

Ready to sell your first Canva template? I set up my digital product store on MadeThis.com — it handles the product pages, instant delivery, and payment processing so I can focus on creating. Start free and have your first template listed in an afternoon. Try it here →