Make your graphic design portfolio stand out with our free guide’s key tips.
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As a graphic designer, you’ve been trained to apply your style and your visual intelligence to a wide range of products. If you’re like many designers, you primarily work with clients on specific projects.
In addition to your consulting work, what if you could also create and sell digital templates for the public? Design templates are an affordable solution for many people looking to improve the quality and effectiveness of their resumes and other digital materials. By selling these digital products on your website, you can add to the income you earn from your client work, create a passive income stream, and even market your services to potential new customers. Read on to learn more about how to choose which design templates to create, how to package them, and the sales process.
Identifying design templates to create and sell
By doing some preliminary research, you can get a sense of the existing market for design templates. You’ll find a number of online marketplaces where people buy templates created for a variety of design apps.
Some of the most common template types include:
Social media posts for popular platforms
Resumes
Presentation decks
Business cards
Invitations and brochures
Take note of which templates are the most popular. Your research will also help you figure out how to market and price your own work.
A few additional things to keep in mind as you study the market:
Search keywords that creators use in product descriptions and metadata, which help people discover the templates
Instructions that creators provide for how to use their templates
Common specifications, like resolution and file types
How creators handle permissions for fonts and stock photography
Packaging your design templates
Your market research will also help you identify popular template themes, such as birth announcement cards, social media posts for retail stores, and annual report e-books.
Discovering what already sells well is critical. If you’re going to invest your time and creativity into digital product designs, you want to make sure that you’re designing templates people want to buy. You will also gain a sense of gaps in the market—as well as how you can bring your own creativity and flair to make your own products stand out.
Many successful designers package multiple templates together to make them more appealing.
A few strategies for bundling include:
Creating identical templates for a variety of graphic design tools
Packaging social media templates for 10 to 15 posts around specific uses, such as seasonal sales
Bundling presentation deck templates for many different kinds of slides, such as introductory pages, charts, and staff biographies
If you want to sell workbooks, resume templates, business cards, or e-books, consider pricing them as standalone products. Customers tend to create and use these products on a one-off basis.
Selling templates through your website
After studying the third-party creative marketplaces to decide which types of design templates you should create, it may seem like a good idea to post your own templates on those sites to introduce the broader public to your work.
However, you can keep more of the revenue for yourself by selling templates through your own website. Furthermore, you can offer templates to your existing clients as a value-added service. For newcomers to your website, templates can serve as an introduction to your style and the quality of your work.
Many web hosting services, including Squarespace, allow you to easily set up an online store or a membership subscription to sell your templates. You will need to invest additional time and energy to market this new line of products through your social media channels or brand newsletter. In addition, consider improving the search engine optimization (SEO) on your online store so people are more likely to discover your products through online searches.
One last benefit of selling digital templates through your own website: People who buy your templates have immediate access to your online portfolio, so they’ll get a sense of the custom work you already do. Include a form or link on every product page so people who are interested in talking to you about custom work can schedule a design consultation or book an hour or two of consulting time.