How To Make Money Online Selling Notion Templates

It took me 5 days to learn, create and start selling them.

Confession: I’m a nerd about finding new streams of income, especially passive income and stuff I can do online from anywhere in the world. It’s kind of like a hobby of mine.

My main source of income comes from sales and if I were smart I’d focus all of my time and energy there. That being said, the art of creating something new is exciting and appealing to me.

Its not all about money anyways. A fulfilling life needs to be fun and engaging and I’m about as happy as can be.

Recently I created a new stream of income by creating and selling Notion Templates. I’m going to tell you what that is and how I did it, and its surprisingly easy to do.

What are Notion Templates?

Notion templates are pre-built pages that can be added to a Notion workspace to quickly add structure and content. They can be used for a variety of purposes, such as: Habit trackers, Grocery lists, Team knowledge bases, Editorial calendars, and Workout trackers.

Notion is kind of like a productivity and organization app. There are free and paid versions, and the app is available in desktop, mobile and online versions. Quite honestly, its the easiest and most versatile app I’ve ever used.

I literally logged into Notion for the first time on a Thursday, and by the following Tuesday I had sold my first templates to my email list by creating a LinkedIn planner.

Want to know step by step how I did this? Read on.

Step 1: Learn how to use and create in Notion.

It’s not hard, especially if you are good at online apps that help you build websites, spreadsheets and graphic design (or even Medium).

Once you sign up and create an account, you’ll have your first blank “Workspace” to start playing with.

You can start to play around with text, tables, headers, databases, toggles, images, links, sub-pages, creating a calendar, moving elements around within the workspace.

I was absolutely SHOCKED on how easy this is to do.

There are plenty of resources online and inside of the app itself teaching you how to use the platform. I’d recommend going to YouTube and watching a few videos covering the basics.

Once you get going you can find how to use new tools as you come across the need for them.

Step 2: Identify a use for Notion that would be valuable to your audience.

My audience is coaches and course creators. I’ve served this population for about 4 years now, helping them with sales, digital marketing, creating and launching courses as well as business strategy.

The most important part here is to think, how do I get my client from A to Z using Notion? How can I create a solution to a very specific problem that delivers a very specific solution?

My first Notion template was the Ultimate LinkedIn Planner, which was designed to help coaches, course creators and professionals get started on LinkedIn, the organize ideas and content, track leads and optimize their personal brand.

My second Notion template was a Small Business Planner for couches and course creators. The goal of this is to help these professionals keep their business organized.

The planner features a ‘home base’, plus content calendar, CRM (client relations management) section, a marketing section, branding section plus financial trackers (income, expense and profit and loss). They can easily track expenses for tax purposes too and keep important dates such as taxes and renewing licenses on hand.

What’s even better is after I created the first one with an ‘aesthetic’ executive look that is popular with my clients, I just duplicated it and changed the colors, images and fonts to create a ‘BoHo’ style Notion Planner. It gave me a 3rd product without much additional work.

I’ll close this section out by making it simple:

• Who is the audience you want to sell to?
• What is a problem that they are dealing with? My suggestion is to start with organization or productivity but really you could use Notion for almost anything.
• What is the desired outcome that you want to help deliver?

Step 3: Structuring and building your Notion Template

You may already have a ‘roadmap’, template, or formula you are using to help your clients out that is in PDF format or possibly a spreadsheet.

If so, just create a Notion template for it.

For this step, I found Chat GPT (pro) to be invaluable. I could tell it exactly what I wanted and who it was for, then the outcomes I would deliver then ask it to create an ‘outline’ and in seconds a very good iteration was created.

Sure, I would change or move things here and there, but it was pretty impressive!

I even used Chat GPT for a spreadsheet formula that I couldn’t figure out using Notion’s resources or on YouTube. I was pretty impressed that Chat GPT was able to guide me better than resources I found with Notion (including Notion’s internal AI chatbot).

My first Notion template was slightly messy because there was so much educational content on there, so I revamped it using a lot of ‘toggle’ headings which collapse entire sections down to make them more aesthetic and clean.

Once you are done creating your Notion template, you are ready to sell it. You’ll need to adjust the settings in the top right hand part of the page where it say ‘share’. You’ll publish it to the web and allow for people to be able to duplicate the template.

Once this is done, you just grab the share link and create a PDF document with the link and instructions on how to duplicate it (super easy). It’s the PDF that you sell.

Step 4: Where to market and sell your Notion templates

If you already have an audience like a decent email list or social media following around a topic, you are in a great position! I have a strong email list and all I had to do was send out an email and got a bunch of first sales.

You just need a platform to sell it on.

Here are a few ideas of how to sell your Notion Templates:

• Etsy- This is a great marketplace to sell digital products. While it can be quite competitive, is a low barrier to entry for someone who doesn’t have an audience. The key hear is to be able to optimize for search so you can use their traffic.
• GumRoad — I have never used this site before, but apparently its another great option for selling digital products.
• Notion Marketplace — This is a new ‘template store’ is ran by Notion and a great resource for people who are already inside the app to buy templates. Its easy to sign up and as a template provider, just go to the ‘template’ section inside of Notion and there will be a link to become a provider.
• Stripe and PayPal — if you are collecting payments using either of these platforms, its easy to create custom checkout pages or links.

My personal favorite is Etsy. I’m still pretty early on in my Etsy journey but earlier this year I listed a few lead magnets that started selling and was surprised by how easy it was to actually sell lead magnets that I was giving away for free in the past!

Something to think about:

Creating Notion templates for your clients can be a great way to add some extra income from people who are already buying for you. But you might think about even creating free Notion templates as a way to add value and brand stickiness.

Want to take a look at some of the templates I’ve created so far?

• My Ultimate LinkedIn Notion Planner
• My Aesthetic Modern Business Planner
• My BoHo Small Business Planner

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them. Also, you’ve got to get my free PDF the Online Business Playbook if you want to learn more about making money online and digital marketing!

Hope you found some value in this!

Simon