Are you struggling to stay consistent or spend
WAAAY too much time creating different designs for various platforms each time you want to
post? No worries, I have a solution for you! I'm going to show you how to speed up the
whole process by using Canva templates! But, that's not all, I have a whole section
on how you can actually make money with them! Are you in? Let's do this! Hi my lovely humans, it's Natalia and welcome
to my channel where I share super actionable ideas on content creation for entrepreneur
and creatives. In today's video, I'm going to show you the
step by step process on how to create, use, share and monetize Canva templates. If you've not heard about Canva, check out
my 10-minute tutorial where I explain what it is and how to use it. But we're focusing specifically on Templates
today which are basically a shortcut to a great design. With Canva's simple drag-and-drop tools, it's
super easy to customize a template once it's created and it let's you create multiple similar
designs out of that one template. But before I get into the tutorial, let me
tell you WHY it's worth using Canva templates: - first of all, it's a huge time saver because
with templates, you can batch create content very efficiently and it makes creating content
is so much faster - the second reason is keeping a consistent
brand identity. when you create your own unique templates,
you can make them perfectly align with your overall brand image. this also means you won't need to use any
generic Canva templates and having your brand image all over the place
- and last, but definitely not least, you can actually make money with them by creating
your own digital products. make sure to stay to the end of the video
as I'll explain what you need to know to do it yourself. A word of caution before we start, because
I don't want to waste anyones time - Templates are a Canva Pro feature which means that are
not available for free users. I will talk about this a bit more later on
but there is an upside for those of you who don't want to pay for Canva monthly. If you sign up for a free Canva trial for
30 days, you can actually create your own templates and their are yours to keep and
use after the trial expires. If you'd like to try Canva Pro yourself, you
can sign up using my link which I'll leave for you in the description box down below. Alright, on to Canva! 1. How to create templates First, let's go to Canva and create a set
of graphics. Today, I'm going to design Instagram posts
for an imaginary lifestyle blogger. We'll start off with updating the Brand Kit
and this is where you can update all the components of your visual brand identity so your logos,
fonts and colors. A consistent brand identity is an important
component of your overall brand strategy and it helps shape how your brand is perceived
by your audience. If you'd like me to talk more about how to
create a consistent brand identity and how it can help you transform your business, let
me know in the comments below. It's a subject I'm very passionate about so
I can record another video for you. So once we update the Brand Kit, we'll be
able to use the exact same colors & fonts across all designs which will make our brand
easily recognizable. For the lifestyle blog, I'm going to go for
a rose gold palette and I've chosen the following colors to complement the style. Let's choose Old for our headings, Open Sans
for the subheadings and Open Sans Light for the body text. Next, we're going to create our design and
I'm just typing in Instagram Post to get the correct dimensions. Ideally, you'll want to have a variety of
graphics for different types of content or even your content pillars but for the sake
of this video, I'll just create a quote, a blog post teaser and a single tip post. You can then go ahead and design a few other
varieties of quotes, an educational carousel or other types of content that your brand
needs. Let's begin with a quote so I want a pretty
plain design with a few interesting elements. First, let's choose a background which will
be a bit more textured that a solid color. And since I'm going with rose gold as a theme,
marble will be a good match. This one looks good, so let's drag it to our
background. It's a tad bit too dark for my liking but
not to worry, I can manipulate it so since our background color is white, I can just
change the transparency of this photo and it will become brighter. 40% seems like a good fit. Next, I'm going to search for some frames
in the Elements. This one looks pretty good so let's add it. I'll stretch it out a bit to give the design
a little definition near the edges. Great, and onto the text. Let's choose this heading font which we've
previously updated in our Brand Kit since it's quite decorative and will work great
for a quote. I've got my quote ready here so let's paste
it. Brilliant, that's our quote here, but since
people may want to share it, let's make sure we include our IG handle or website so that
it can lead more followers back to us. I'm going to choose
the subheading this time. We could leave it there, but since it is a
quote, we can make it even obvious and add a special quotation mark. Canva has plenty of options for these in the
Elements but I want to use my own rose gold ones so let's drag them to Canva and they
pop up instantly. Alright, so onto the second template which
is a blog post teaser. I want it to revolve around a photo but not
like a classic Instagram Post which fills the whole space so I'm going to use a grid
to put it in place. Grids and frames are the best way to showcase
how customizable your template is. Although you can drag a photo over an existing
photo on the design and it will swap it, grids and frames act as a placeholder for your photos. This way, if you're sharing a template with
someone (which I'll discuss later in the video so make sure to watch till the very end),
they can have a blank design and not get distracted by existing pieces in a design. I'll place it just beyond the middle line. Great, now I'll change the background. I want to go for something sandy and neutral
to go with the theme sot his lightest hue is great. Next, let's add a box to make our little blog
announcement. I could go for a solid color element but I
want to stay on brand and use the same marble texture as with the previous design. Let's make it a bit wider, great, and since
I changed the opacity of the previous one, I need to add a white element below it to
have the same sort of effect here, too. Let's go to elements, pick a square, change
it to white and I'll just make it the same size as this marble texture. As you can see, it just kind of snaps in place
so you know it's in the correct position. Now, let's push it behind the marble, great,
unclick, select the marble and change the transparency to 40%. Onto the text now. Again, to stay on brand, I'm choosing our
Open Sans Light font for the New Blog Post subheading. Then, let's pick Old Standard as our heading
and let's say it's a blog post on 10 favorite books of 2021. I'm making sure these two are aligned properly
and that's us done with the text. But I want to introduce another element to
emphasize the rose gold theme, so let's search for rose gold again. Scrolling down... This leaf will work. Alright, let's rotate it, and here is a good
place for it. We can push it back a bit behind the marble
box and we're done with the second one. And finally, let's get going with the single
tip post. I'm not going to design a whole educational
carousel post here but if you'd like me to show you how to do it in another video, just
give me a shout in the comment section down below. I want to keep it very simple so let's go
ahead and choose this light pinkish background color. Great, now I'll get a white square in the
middle, as a backdrop for our marble. Stretch it out to fit the frame and hold alt
to make it smaller from both sides. Fab, now let's add the marble again... crop
it out to match the white square, alright, transparency down to 40% again, and we've
got our next layout. Now I need something to act as a heading so
I'll search for some rose gold washi tape. This one fits so let's stretch it... but I
want to crop it a tiny bit to make it more narrow. Let's go to crop, drag it from the bottom
and that looks great. Next, I'll add some text. It's Open Sans this time, let's make it bold
and all caps and let's say top 3 skincare ingredients. Ok, let's make it fit. I'll select both the elements and make them
bigger together. Great, now onto our 3 ingredients. Let's add a square element and choose a color. This darker pink is going to work and I'm
dragging the square into a rectangle. Alright, that seems to be the perfect size. Now let's duplicate it twice. Snaps in place, great and I'm placing the
lowest one where I want it to end up. Then, I'll select all three by holding shift
each time I click and now that they're selected, I'll go ahead to alignment and hit Tidy Up
which well, tidies it up and makes it spaced out evenly. I absolutely love this feature, makes it all
so much quicker. Now let's add the tips so text, Old Standard,
make it dark and italic and let's say retinol is going to be the first. And yes, for my skincare fans out there, these
are actually my top skincare ingredients so I may not be a lifestyle blogger but I love
me some retinol. Let's copy that, alright, and let's change
the text. Perfect, I like it but now love it so I need
more definition with some additional elements. Let's go through rose gold elements again,
scroll down and I actually like this one. So I'll rotate it, stretch it out, great and
again, snapped in place. So that's our last one here. 2. How to export & share templates
Alright, brilliant, so now that we've got our three designs, let me show you how to
turn them into a template. What you want to do is to go to the top right
corner here, hit the three dots and type in template. You then go ahead and choose a folder that
you want it to reside in, I could simply go for the team templates but this time, I'll
choose the Rose Gold Lifestyle Blogger template to keep all of these templates in one place. And that's as simple as that! You have your first template saved. If you want to share the template for others
to use, which I'll explain in a moment why it's worth knowing how to do it, you hit share,
then here at the bottom choose share a link to use as template and this way you have a
copied link to an editable design. You can share it with others and they will
be able to edit it as they please. When they click on the link, they see this
wee screen and they can click Use as Template and that copies it into their Canva. The great thing is, they don't need to have
Canva Pro to use your template. But beware, if you've used any Pro elements
or photos, they will have to pay for them when they go to export it so that's definitely
something to keep in mind if you're planning on designing to share. 3. How to use templates To use a template we've just created, we'll
go to the folder it's in (or just search for it in all your designs tab), and as you can
see, it's marked as a template in the top left corner so you know that it's not your
regular graphic. Let's go ahead and click on it and instead
of being opened as a design which would pop up in a new window in the Canva Editor, we
now have the pop up with two options - you can either Use This Template or Edit the Original
which means you can always play around with your existing templates and adjust them. But if you just want to create a new design
with this template, hit the purple button and this creates a copy of this template. By the way, before we hit that, you can see
that you can also share this template from this here so you don't need to actually go
into the Editor again to be able to retrieve the link. So in more general terms, how do I actually
use templates. Well, first and foremost, I use them to save
time and batch create content. Whenever I plan content for a month, two weeks
or a week, whatever timeframe suits, and I know what content I'm creating, I then go
to Canva to choose from a variety of different templates which I created at the beginning
and churn out tons of posts for different platforms from these various templates. This may be a lot of work at the beginning
but it's definitely a huge huge HUGE timesaver in the long run. If you'd like me to show you how I plan and
execute content for a month in one day, let me know in the comments and I'll record a
video for you And by the way, if you're working with clients
or thinking of starting your own social media agency, this is exactly what I would do at
the very beginning with them during the onboarding. You can initially create a bunch of different
templates in line with their brand, have your client approve them, and this way there's
no hassle when you're actually creating content for them regularly. My tip is to always create these templates
from scratch for yourself or for clients to make them as original as possible but I do
understand that not everyone feels very comfortable as a graphic designer in which case you can
use different Canva template sets so not just a bunch of completely different templates
but the ones that are available in a few versions. And even then, do change them, update them
with your brand colors and fonts, and your logos or elements, so putting it simply, make
them your own. And speaking of making things your own, that's
another reason why I use templates and how I use them. Any templates I create are helping me keep
a consistent visual brand identity and by having tons of those designed means they can
be infused with my overall brand image. Again, this is done with colors, fonts, logos,
elements etc. By the way, if you're creating your own templates
when you're testing out Canva Pro on a 30 day trial, they are yours to keep after the
trial expires and you're no longer a Canva Pro user. This is actually pretty amazing! You won't be able to share them, sell them
or create new ones as a free Canva user, but for content creation purposes, this can be
quite helpful to you in any case! There is another way to use templates and
that's actually to make money (katching!). You can actually sell templates to others
and create profit this way. This brings us to point 4... 4. How to monetize templates
Selling digital products is always a great way to create a stream of income and templates
work like a charm. You can create your own templates and sell
them on Etsy or Gumroad, use them to form sales funnels, offer them to your email lists
or sell them through Facebook Ads or on Pinterest. You can also use them as lead magnets and
try converting your followers into warmer contacts! But before you jump at this opportunity, make
sure you read through the Canva rules. There is a brilliant document which goes in
detail on what you can and cannot do and I'll leave it in the description box for you to
look through. It's called the Free Media License Agreement
and to give you a few pointers or a bit of a TL;DR: - all free media on Canva can be used for
free for commercial and noncommercial use BUT - you cannot sell unaltered copies of any
photos, elements, music, videos, templates created by Canva as a physical product without
adding any value. And the without adding any value bit is pretty
important. Basically, to give you an example, you cannot
go, choose one of Canva poster templates, play around with it and then sell it. It's just a changed copy. I'd say start from scratch, create your own
unique designs and then sell them. But of course, there's quite a bit more to
it, so if you're looking to sell digital products created in Canva, definitely read through
their guidelines carefully. Once you have your templates designed and
ready to sell, you can share it by creating a link as I showed you just a moment ago. Then simply create a nicely designed PDF with
this link to send to your customers. You can make it as a simple link or get a
bit more fancy and create buttons. Of course, you can simply send the links to
your customers in an email as well. 4. How to monetize templates
Selling digital products is always a great way to create a stream of income and templates
work like a charm. You can create your own templates and sell
them on Etsy or Gumroad, use them to form sales funnels, offer them to your email lists
or sell them through Facebook Ads or on Pinterest. You can also use them as lead magnets and
try converting your followers into warmer contacts! But before you jump at this opportunity, make
sure you read through the Canva rules. There is a brilliant document which goes in
detail on what you can and cannot do and I'll leave it in the description box for you to
look through. It's called the Free Media License Agreement
and to give you a few pointers or a bit of a TL;DR: - all free media on Canva can be used for
free for commercial and noncommercial use BUT - you cannot sell unaltered copies of any
photos, elements, music, videos, templates created by Canva as a physical product without
adding any value. And the without adding any value bit is pretty
important. Basically, to give you an example, you cannot
go, choose one of Canva poster templates, play around with it and then sell it. It's just a changed copy. I'd say start from scratch, create your own
unique designs and then sell them. But of course, there's quite a bit more to
it, so if you're looking to sell digital products created in Canva, definitely read through
their guidelines carefully. Once you have your templates designed and
ready to sell, you can share it by creating a link as I showed you just a moment ago. Then simply create a nicely designed PDF with
this link to send to your customers. You can make it as a simple link or get a
bit more fancy and create buttons. Of course, you can simply send the links to
your customers in an email as well.
