As an experienced web designer, you may be looking for opportunities to diversify your revenue stream and expand your audience. Selling premium website templates is a great way to earn passive income while opening the door to working with clients who may not be ready to invest in custom design services. 

We spoke with Circle member and GoLive HQ founder, Promise Tangeman, about how to successfully sell website templates. Read on for her expert advice.

Benefits 

While Squarespace has a great selection of free templates, your clients may want to get closer to fulfilling their creative vision and take things a step further with an expertly curated, premium template. This is where a template store comes into play, particularly for clients who are just starting out and want to differentiate themselves from the competition. 

The following are benefits of launching your own template store.

Build the foundation for a long-term relationship 

Template stores are the foundation for establishing long-term relationships with clients. After selling a template and installing a template, you have a great excuse to stay in touch and later re-engage with your customer about template updates and additional service offerings. As you learn more about their business goals over time, you can eventually reach out about custom design work when you know they’re ready to make the investment.

Position yourself as the design expert

Whether you’re working with a specific industry or within a particular web design niche, your expertise is essential to give your client’s website a competitive edge. With your keen eye for design and knowledge of your target customers’ goals, you can create templates with an elevated design at a fraction of the cost of fully custom websites. At the same time, you can establish yourself as an expert and go-to resource for future design work and branding consultations. 

Diversify your revenue stream

While most of your income may be earned through billable hours and time spent on a project, selling website templates can help you focus on your other business goals. Whether you’re someone who works on multiple projects at once or completes them one at a time, you can passively earn income through template store sales. This diversifies your business’ revenue stream, which is a key step in moving to full-time web design. 

Learn more about diversifying your revenue stream and other essential tips for transitioning your business from freelance to full-time.

Establish a profitable portfolio

As you create more templates and earn a profit, you’re simultaneously building your web design portfolio. This makes it possible to efficiently showcase more of your work to potential custom design clients.

Learn about creating an impactful web design portfolio.

Repurpose your content

If you have unpublished project drafts that you’ve already created, you can remove the customizations and transition the work into templates. Taking your past work to create a new product means your time and effort won’t go to waste.

Getting started

While a template store can create an outlet for earning additional income, creating your store takes active work, careful planning, and experience in running your own web design business. Promise recommends the following steps for seasoned designers who want to launch a template store:

1. Determine if selling templates is right for you

Template stores require a lot of work. In addition to maintaining your custom design services, you need to build and price templates, as well as promote, sell, and install them. You’re also in charge of managing customer questions, creating demos and tutorials, and making updates to existing templates as the platform develops. If you’re excited by the challenge of maintaining and reiterating on your templates and supporting resources, then it may be time to get your template store up and running.

Pro tip: If you think you’re ready to add premium templates to your service offering, try becoming an affiliate designer with another template store before launching your own. You can become an affiliate by submitting your designs to an established template store or by collaborating with an established store to promote their designs for a percent of the profit. By designing or promoting templates through an affiliate, you can see if there’s demand for your templates and iterate on your work without having to do the heavy lifting.

2. Define your audience

It’s important to determine who would benefit from your premium templates. Find an industry you’re passionate about and cater your work towards that audience. You can also look to your current custom design clients for inspiration. Who do you already serve? What industries do you work with most? What does that industry require in web design? Can you deliver it en masse?

Pro tip: Don’t try to make multiple templates for multiple industries. Instead, establish yourself as the expert for specific business owners and create templates for their audience. Business owners want designers who understand exactly what their websites need to be successful, so stay within your scope and create a product for a market that you already know.

3. Set up the store

Your Squarespace website already has integrations that make it possible to set up a store with the click of a few buttons. Lean into your expertise as you optimize your template store for your target audience. You’ll also want to create video tutorials or step-by-step guides for your customers that teach them how to use and customize a template after it’s installed.

Pro tip: The entire template-building process takes 30 to 40 hours total. Spend about 10 hours developing concepts and mood boards for your design, selecting stock photos, and planning the wireframe of your template. Then, spend about 20 hours designing and building the actual template. You’ll also want to devote a few hours to filming a well-produced tutorial and creating a guide for every template you design. It may seem like a lot of time to give to one project, but think of it as making an investment into the longevity and success of each and every template. Plus, the better the template looks and functions, the fewer updates you’ll need to make in the future.

4. Price the templates

Template prices range anywhere from $99 to $299, so consider the time and effort it takes to build each template before pricing them accordingly. In addition to selling premium templates, you’ll want to factor installation time, troubleshooting, and any demos or guides you create into the cost of each template.

Pro tip: It’s not necessary to heavily discount your templates to get sales or set yourself apart from other designers and developers. Customers are more likely to purchase a template that they feel is well-designed, functional, and easy to use, rather than one that is “cheaper.” Just like your custom design services, the price of each template is an all-encompassing representation of your value as a designer.

5. Market the store

Tap into your existing marketing efforts to promote your template store. With your target audience for premium templates in mind, you can use social media, email, webinars, and any other channels where you frequently connect with clients to announce the store and future template releases. For added visibility, you can even ask another designer or collaborator to link out to your templates on their store and offer them a percent of the profits.

Pro tip: Communicate the value of your premium templates wherever and whenever you market your store. Remember: These are not just your everyday templates; they are expertly built for a specific industry or created for a particular niche. Additionally, for a fraction of the cost of a custom-built website, your customer will stand out in their industry with something that looks and feels different from their competitors.

6. Sell, sell, sell

Once a client has purchased a template, you can transfer it to them by making them a collaborator on the trial site. From there, they can customize the website to fit their branding and business needs.

Pro tip: Provide video tutorials and in-depth step-by-step guides to show customers how to use templates. This not only gets ahead of troubleshooting, but is extremely desirable for a less tech-savvy customer who may want something to revisit in the future. You can also offer to video chat with your customers to walk through customization and best practices for an added fee. This service shows the value of your expertise and is a great foundation for future re-engagement.

7. Test for success

Your work is not over after you’ve launched your template store. To ensure that your efforts remain lucrative, you’ll want to gauge the success of the store by looking at the templates that sell and don’t sell. Treat your template store like any other important business venture and be open to reconfiguring templates to help them perform better. You’ll also want to take note of any customer feedback and use it to identify opportunities for improvement.

Pro tip: Oftentimes, a customer will avoid purchasing a template that looks too customized because they can’t visualize their own business fitting the design. With this in mind, you’ll want to create simple but effective templates that showcase your design skills without including too many customizations. If your customer is still hesitant, try sending them your pre-filmed tutorial that demonstrates exactly how they can mold the template to fit their needs.

A special thanks to Promise Tangeman, Founder and Creative Director of GoLive, for taking the time to offer her expertise and wisdom. Promise began selling premium Squarespace templates in 2014, manages a successful template store, and offers custom branding and design services. For more information about her business, visit golivehq.co.

This article was originally published October 26, 2022. It has since been updated.

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