🚧 How to Make Webflow Templates that Actually Sell · The Bunker #82
In today's article we'll talk about 3 crucial things you have to do to sell more Webflow templates.
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I've been creating templates for Webflow for almost 5 months now, and I've honestly learned many extremely important things to consider.
Creating templates is something extraordinary for your business or your career as a designer.
Why should every designer create templates?
I think I prefer designing templates a thousand times over designing for a client.
Creating templates doesn't depend on any client, you don't have defined deadlines, you don't have a defined budget, you don't have to take calls, you don't have to do revisions.
And most importantly, you can do all projects in the way you like best.
Many times when we work with clients, we can't do what we would like because the client always has preferences above ours, and as designers, we often have to compromise.
Many times we end up designing even things we don't feel like doing, all to please the client (obviously).
One of the biggest advantages of making templates is that you are your own client; you manage everything yourself, you choose the project you want to do, with the style you want.
Furthermore, it's a passive income; you do the work at the beginning and then it can be sold as many times as you want.
If you manage to set up a business that revolves around templates, you've hit the jackpot: You'll do the web projects you like the most, and you can charge much more than what a single client would pay.
The Problem with Templates
The main problem with templates is that people focus too much on design, but like any other project, the business aspect is crucial.
The first thing you have to do is choose a category that works: And to do that, you have to avoid making templates in very saturated categories; ideally, make 4 templates in niche categories and 2 templates in popular categories.
This will give you enough information to know where to continue creating those templates. Niche categories always work much better because as soon as you make a cool, clean, and distinctive design, you've already won over the rest. There is simply less competition.
And just because it's niche doesn't mean you'll get paid less, far from it. In fact, by getting the majority of sales, you might even earn more than you would in a more saturated category.
The Name is Everything
One of the biggest problems in not getting templates to sell comes from a naming problem. If you're making a template for Notion creators who want to sell their Notion templates and you call it "Naztek," obviously it won't sell. But if you call it "Notion Templates Website Builder," it will be much easier to sell.
And this applies for several reasons:
SEO: You have to try to position your templates at the top of Google's ranking. Your templates will not only be bought directly from the Webflow marketplace but also from Google's ranking. When someone searches on Google for "website template for notion creators that want to sell templates," your template may appear first, even if it has the webflow.com URL first. You have to try to position your templates with the name. More on this in the next section.
Understanding: In the end, there are people behind the purchases of each template; don't make it difficult for them, be clear and direct about the type of template they are looking for and intend to buy. If you use a much easier-to-understand name, you will get the sale much easier.
Don't Overlook SEO
For some reason I don't understand, when we work for a client, we focus a lot on SEO, but when we make templates, we sometimes overlook SEO. I think it's because we don't give importance to the content, because in the end, it's a template where the first thing the client will change is the content.
And it's true that it may seem like it doesn't make much sense to work on the content of the website when the client will change it later. But this is a huge mistake — we create the website as if it were a real website to work as best as possible within Google's ranking.
If we use lorem ipsum, we won't be able to position our website correctly.
As I said in the previous section, sales don't only come from the Webflow marketplace. They also come from SEO on Google.
It's important to use keywords and prepare the template to position it as best as possible, not only in the marketplace.
Therefore, all the work of optimizing texts, images, SEO... speed performance, all of this has to be done equally in the templates.
And this is how we at Koala have managed to sell a ton of templates every month.
Cheers, Jordi Espinosa.
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