Over the past year I’ve noticed a lot of online business owners who are taking a template from Canva’s template library, customizing the color scheme and maybe making a few minor tweaks to it, and then redistributing the templates to their own audience.
What you may not know is that when you do this, even if you’re not re-selling those templates, you are hurting Canva Creators financially… and the Creators are often individual small business owners, just like you.
So I wanted to share a bit of insight that may change how you’re linking to Canva templates inside of your freebies, courses and other resources for your audience.
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I’m not a Canva Creator myself, but I do know a lot of them, and it was a real eye-opener for me when I learned how Creators are compensated.
In a nutshell, Canva Creators only earn royalties based on their content’s performance, so each time you click on the “customize this template” option in the Canva template library, the creator of that template earns a royalty.
That means that if you are making a copy of a template and re-sharing it from your own Canva account rather than linking to the original template, you are actually taking money out of that Creator’s pocket.
I have seen this happen with some regularity when an online business owner will grab a bunch of templates they like, maybe change the color on them (sometimes they don’t even bother with that step), and then they redistribute the templates as part of a list building opt-in, or as a bonus in a course or membership.
Honestly, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen an opt-in page for a freebie or a sales page for a course that lists a Canva template bundle as part of the bonuses and I immediately recognize one or more of the templates in that bonus as belonging to a Canva Creator that I personally know.
If there are templates that you want to share with your audience, by all means, make a “recommended templates I love” list or a “top Canva templates to use for lead magnets” list or whatever the theme might be.
BUT… in that list, link directly to the templates themselves in Canva’s library. That will ensure that you are supporting fellow business owners who have put blood, sweat, tears and oh so much time into designing beautiful templates for the rest of us to use.
So how do you get that link?
To link directly to the original template, go to the template library and then when you click on the template thumbnail that brings up the template information page, you can copy the URL from your browser bar.
