Canva is a popular content creation and design tool that allows you to create professional-looking images and graphics without having any prior design experience.
Many people know Canva as the tool you use when you want to design a poster, create a presentation, or make a cute card without having to spend hundreds of dollars hiring a professional.
But did you know that Canva can be turned into a revenue-generating machine that nets you a whopping sum every month?
Is your interest piqued?
This post is going to walk you through a few ideas for easy side hustles you can do with Canva to earn up to $15k per month from the comfort of your home. It will help you to make money, improve your life, and get one step closer to financial freedom.
Quick Summary
- Canva provides many opportunities that can be used to earn lots of money for yourself without too much stress.
- You can use Canva to design a variety of digital products including templates, websites, illustrations, and graphics, and sell them for a healthy price online.
- Some of the best side businesses you can start to make money using Canva are graphics and web design, social media management, print-on-demand, consultation services, and affiliate marketing.
- Some Canva-related side hustles require some dedication and skill to set up and may take a while to start yielding fruit than others.
- There’s no hard and fast rule for building a Canva-based business. No idea is superior to others, and success is dependent on how well you execute the idea and not the idea in itself.
Easy Side Hustles To Do With Canva
1. Design and sell stickers
Photo by Christina Morillo
There’s just something about stickers that makes people love them. When I see cute or interesting stickers, it’s hard to resist buying a few.
If you have some creative bone in you, you can earn a cool sum month to month easily by designing stickers with Canva, printing them out, and selling them online through platforms like Amazon Handmade and Etsy.
You don’t even have to ideate your sticker designs from scratch because Canva offers sticker templates that you can use to inspire and build out your own sticker designs. However, you’re free to use your original artwork if you have any that will translate well as stickers.
You can even buy designs of digital stickers from Canva, Creative Fabrica, and DesignCuts, turn them into physical stickers, and then list them for sale.
Unlimited Fonts & Graphics — Get access to our ever growing library of fonts, graphics, crafts and more. Creative Fabrica offers access to a vast library for Cricut owners. Lowest price. Embroidery, Knitting.
The beauty of stickers is that you can target them at different age groups from youngins to adults, increasing your revenue base. You just have to find a message, style, and design that will appeal to each audience’s tastes when creating stickers for that group.
2. Selling custom templates
The most valuable commodity for most people is time. They are happy to pay for things that help them save time or simplify complex tasks to make them more manageable.
On the other hand, some people may have the time but not the skill to design the template they need. And rather than spending hours learning how to do it for themselves, they’d rather buy one that’s ready-made.
You can build a million-dollar business selling Canva templates online. Just think of things that people would appreciate having a template for like planning a wedding or meal prepping and design a functional template to help them achieve this goal.
With Canva, you can create templates for various tasks and things including resumes, banners, infographics, ebooks, flyers, invitation cards, business cards, and social media posts.
Once the templates are ready, you can sell them on your blog, website, or an appropriate online marketplace.
3. Become a Canva contributor
As a Canva creator or contributor, you get to submit templates other Canva users can use when creating their designs. You get to keep 35% of the sales price every time someone buys your artwork so it’s a great way to earn money on the side.
Joining Canva’s Creators Program requires an application. The team will review your submitted portfolio and notify you by email if your work qualifies to be a part of the program.
Once approved, you can begin uploading your original stock photos, illustrations, stickers, artwork, typography, videos, icons, vector art, and graphic designs on Canva and generate passive income from royalties.
Canva doesn’t impose quotas or work limits on its Creators, so you can design whatever you want on your own time and upload them when you’re ready.
Signing up to become a Canva Creator will also allow you to network with like-minded artists, develop your craft, and boost your artist profile.
4. Offer design services
If you have a knack for design, you can leverage this skill to make up to $15k per month from Canva by charging people a fee to design stuff for them. You can set your own price based on your level of experience and the specific service you’re offering.
The design market is vast so there are different audience groups that you can offer your services to including small businesses looking for someone to create logos, email templates, Facebook ad banners, and ebook covers.
You can help people create eye-catching content for TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook to attract and engage their audience, design marketing materials, prints for t-shirts, project illustrations, and so much more.
You can choose to be a generalist; someone who can make any design the customer wants. Or you can pick a niche and specialize in designing products for that market.
Source for clients by advertising your design services on freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr or spreading the word through social media.
5. Create Canva-focused tutorials on YouTube
Photo by Joshua Miranda
Starting a YouTube channel where you discuss everything Canva-related is a great way to make a lot of money if you have an easy time being in front of a camera. You can show off your Canva skills on video and share your expert knowledge with people for free.
As people flock over to your channel to learn how to design stuff with Canva, they’ll subscribe to your channel so they don’t miss out on your new content.
Then you can leverage the size of your audience to earn money through YouTube monetization, affiliate marketing, sponsored collaborations, and sales of your services or products.
Keep in mind that you’ll have to build your following to reach 1,000 subscribers and about 4,000 hours of video watch time to qualify to earn money from YouTube ads. So it could take some time before you start getting huge financial rewards from this side hustle.
6. Launch Canva courses
Photo by Polina Tankilevitch
Are you skilled at using Canva? Do you know most of the tricks in the Canva playbook or have you developed hacks of your own? If yes, you can earn thousands of dollars a month teaching others how to make the best use of Canva.
There are two ways you can accomplish this. The first is using the organic route which means you take the time to build an engaged audience by offering Canva tips for free.
Over time, you will build a reputation for being an expert on all things Canva and you can start offering paid educational content for people who want deeper knowledge.
Alternatively, you can skip the audience and trust building and go straight to building an information-packed Canva course, create a sales page for it, and fire up ad campaigns to bring in interested buyers.
This method is the least effective and may bring you as many conversions as you might expect. Online learning platforms that you can use to sell your Canva courses include Skillshare, Udemy, Teachable, etc.
7. Make printable and digital products
Another easy side hustle you can do with Canva to bring home money without having to work your butt off is by creating digital downloads and printables and selling them on the internet.
The wonderful thing about digital products is that you don’t have to deal with the hassle of shipping and handling. You can deliver the purchased product to the customer’s email inbox or file folder almost in an instant.
Best of all, your margins are pure profit because there are little or no expenses involved in producing digital products. All you need is a Canva Pro account, a computer, or smartphone, and an internet connection and your new business is ready to be born.
Some examples of printables you can design using Canva and put up for sale include illustrations, calendars, workbooks, planners, ebooks, journals, digital stickers, invitation cards, habit trackers, and art prints.
Also Read: Side Hustle Stack Review
8. Create and sell designs for social media posts
If you know how to use Canva, it’s time to put that skill to work for you. How? By helping small businesses create visually pleasing content and graphics for their social pages.
Lots of brands are happy to pay someone to make engaging social media posts that appeal to their audience. If you do your research and market your services well, you should have no trouble pulling in multiple four-figure clients a month.
You can brand yourself as a social media manager, social media designer, or even a virtual social media marketer and offer your services to people for a fee.
With Canva, you can design, schedule, and manage the creation of social media content for clients to grow your revenue.
You can tweak everything from the color scheme to the typography and layout of the images and videos you create to suit each client’s needs and brand image.
Canva also allows you to create customized dashboards for each client so you know exactly where everything goes and what needs to be done, enabling you to manage each social media page effectively.
Also Read: Can You Use Canva Images For Commercial Use?
9. Sell low-content books
Photo by Charly Mova
You can make thousands of dollars every month selling low-content books that you made using Canva. Low-content books are any kind of book that doesn’t contain a lot of content and doesn’t require a lot of mental energy to create or consume.
Examples of low-content books include coloring books, puzzle books, children’s books, journals, affirmation cards, planners, notebooks, calendars, and workbooks. You can use Canva and other tools like Bookbolt to bring the design for your low-content book to life.
You can buy great-looking low-content book templates to base your book designs on instead of brainstorming ideas from scratch from Creative Market, IdeaOnce, Craftwork Design, and the like.
Once you’ve created a number of low-content books, you can sell them on Amazon Kindle, and other marketplaces that carry this kind of product, and start building a cushy source of passive income.
Some creators have reported making over $17,000 a month selling low-content books online, proving that it’s a lucrative hustle.
10. Make Canva websites
Gone are the days when building a website was a complicated process that required lots of technical knowledge and experience to accomplish.
These days, you can design beautiful functional, and mobile-responsive websites quickly with tools like Canva.
Canva’s prebuilt website templates help to cut down your web designing time even more so you can complete your tasks faster and take on more contracts.
You can design and publish websites for a host of purposes from sales pages to company websites and personal websites with Canva.
Designing websites with Canva is still a relatively new concept so you can swoop in, make a killing, and make a name for yourself before the field becomes oversaturated.
Leverage social media networks like LinkedIn and Twitter to find clients who are looking for web designers.
Gig marketplaces like 99Designs, UpWork, and Fiverr are also great options for sourcing freelance work for your website design business.
11. Start a Canva coaching or consulting business
Photo by fauxels
Canva might be an incredibly popular tool but there are still millions of people and brands out there that are unsure of how to maximize its features for the good of their business.
You can fill this gap and take home a lot of money in the process by launching a Canva coaching business and teaching others how to use Canva.
Offer consultation as a standalone service or layer it on top of a YouTube channel to diversify your income sources even further.
You will earn money from ads watched by the people who come to watch your channel content to learn more about Canva for free.
Some of those subscribers will be so impressed with your expertise that they’ll reach out to use your consulting and coaching service.
12. Set up a print-on-demand shop
Starting a print–on–demand business is relatively straightforward. First, you need to figure out what type of merchandise you want to have your artwork and designs printed on.
It could be t-shirts, mugs, keyholders, caps, socks, tote bags, and more. Next, you have to consider the audience that you want to buy these items then start creating designs on Canva that will appeal to them.
Once your designs are finalized, you can upload them to the print-on-demand platform you’re using like Sellfy, Teespring, and RedBubble.
Anytime someone buys an item from your online store, the print-on-demand service will print the product, package it and deliver it to the buyer, and send you your commission for the sale.
To increase the amount of revenue your PoD business brings in, focus on creating designs and products for popular niches like television shows, pop culture topics, special holidays, political movements, comic books, etc.
13. Join affiliate marketing programs
Canva has a dedicated affiliate program that you can join. It allows you to promote Canva content on your website, blog, newsletter, or social media profiles and earn a commission every time someone registers on Canva via your referral link.
Currently, the design company pays its affiliates $36 for every new user they bring to the platform. Granted, you might not make enough money to change your life as an affiliate marketer for Canva, but it never hurts to have a steady stream of additional income.
You can compound your efforts by signing up for other affiliate programs, particularly those run by major ecommerce brands like Walmart, Target, and Amazon.
Then pick the products you want to promote and use Canva to create attractive product guides, social posts, and even video content to advertise the products.
Conclusion
There are many side hustles you can kickstart with Canva if you’re willing to put in a little bit of work, apply the right strategy, and exercise some patience to scale your efforts.
You can experiment with a couple of ideas until you find something that sticks.
However, it’s better to focus on one hustle at a time and give it your best than trying to run multiple side hustles at a time and only give half your effort to each one.
Once you find a niche that works for you and brings in a decent amount of income, spend time building upon it and exploring all the opportunities in that line. Before you know it, you’ll be raking in up to $15k per month in revenue from your Canva-based enterprise.
Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing. I started my first e-commerce company in college, designing and selling t-shirts for my campus bar crawl using print-on-demand. Having successfully established multiple 6 & 7-figure e-commerce businesses (in women’s fashion and hiking gear), I think I can share a tip or 2 to help you succeed.