How to Sell PowerPoint Templates like a Pro in 2023
PowerPoint templates. We’ve all used them. But now it’s time to make some money from them.
The demand for professional designers who know their way around Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides is exploding.
To benefit from this demand, you don’t have to be a freelancer, a professional designer, or anything close.
No, if you know how to create high quality professional PowerPoint templates or Google Slides templates with a modern design, then you can sell your templates online.
This article will take you through the whole process from niche picking to promotion to making your first sale – so if that sounds interesting, then stick around for a bit.
What Are PowerPoint and Google Slides?
PowerPoint and Google Slides presentations are digital tools that allow individuals and businesses to create professional, visually appealing presentations.
These presentations can be used for a variety of purposes, such as business presentations, sales presentations, and educational presentations.
PowerPoint, which is a product of Microsoft, is a powerful tool that is commonly used for creating business presentations, pitch decks, and other professional presentations.
It offers a range of features, including slide layouts, free and premium templates, and the ability to add multimedia elements.
Google Slides, which is a part of the Google Suite of tools, is also a popular choice for creating presentations, and it offers many similar features to PowerPoint.
Both PowerPoint and Google Slides offer a wide range of templates, including modern designs and professional templates that are created by professional designers.
These templates often include clean designs, high-quality images, and free fonts, and they can be customized to suit the needs of the user.
In addition, both tools offer the ability to create custom slide layouts and edit the color scheme and theme design of the presentation.
One of the key benefits of using PowerPoint and Google Slides is their versatility.
They can be used to create presentations for a wide range of purposes, such as business plans, sales presentations, and educational materials.
In addition, they offer the ability to add multimedia elements, such as videos and audio, to enhance the presentation.
Overall, PowerPoint and Google Slides are powerful tools that can be used to create professional, visually appealing presentations for a wide range of purposes.
Whether you’re a business owner, professional, or student, these tools can help you take your presentations to the next level.
Why Should You Sell Presentations?
Not only are there many PowerPoint and Google Slides users, but there’s a huge demand for presentations.
Go to any freelance platform and you’ll see hundreds of people seeking help with creating a great presentation.
Might sound like you should consider being a freelancer.
That’s not what I’m suggesting since you can be much more profitable selling your own templates.
Real wealth creators know that trading time for money isn’t the way out of the rat race.
So, creating presentations and selling them online is a great way to scale and increase that hourly salary.
It’s one of the easiest ways to monetize the PowerPoint skills you learned in school, so why not use it to help yourself make lots of money?
How Much Can I Make Selling Presentations Templates?
It’s a question that’s hard to answer since it depends on various factors such as: how much you promote, how many templates you are selling, the prices of your templates, the platforms you use to sell, etc.
However, the correct answer to the question is an unlimited amount of money. The reason is, when your premium PowerPoint templates and Google slides are uploaded to the world wide web, anybody can purchase the right to download your templates.
But if you are asking “how much should I expect to make each month from selling presentation templates?”. Then you are asking a completely new and interesting question.
The cold reality is that when you are first starting out you won’t have an audience, meaning you will not receive any sales.
But building an audience is far from impossible, and when you’ve crushed the first milestone of 10 sales, the snowball will not stop rolling.
To be fair, you should expect to make between $500 to $1,000 a month after you’ve built an audience. And when you think about it, it’s not bad money for some presentation templates you only created once.
Where To Sell Your Templates?
You want the perfect place to sell your unique slides, but you don’t know where and how.
I’ve sold many personal projects, including any PPTX file you can imagine from data visualization slides and complex business concepts to professional slides with a minimal design.
Thus I can guide you through the benefits and downsides of the platforms listed below.
Etsy
Etsy is an online platform that allows users to sell handmade, vintage, and unique items. With over 60 million items listed on the site, the competition can be fierce.
However, Etsy provides a built-in audience and various tools for small business owners, including an online storefront, hosting, marketing tools, technical support, payment options, and customization options.
Fees
While the platform is free to join, it does charge fees for its services.
The platform takes a 6.5% commission on total sales and charges a $0.20 fee per listed product. Additionally, there is a checkout fee of 3% plus $0.25.
These fees can add up and take a significant portion of your profits, particularly as you sell more items.
Branding
Another drawback of Etsy is that it can be difficult to build a brand and establish a loyal customer base on the platform.
This is because the platform does not have built-in marketing features, such as coupon codes or email marketing, and it can be hard to stand out among the vast number of sellers.
As a result, it can be challenging to scale your sales on Etsy.
Gumroad
Gumroad is another online platform that allows users to sell digital products, including Powerpoint templates.
One of the advantages of Gumroad is that it offers additional features that can be helpful for sellers, such as the option to allow customers to pay what they want and the ability to offer free trials.
To sell PowerPoint templates on Gumroad, you can simply upload your presentation templates and offer them for sale or as a free download.
Many people are willing to pay a small fee for high-quality products, even if they are available for free.
Gumroad also charges fees per transaction, similar to Etsy. However, the fees decrease as you sell more products, which can help to minimize your losses as your sales grow.
Overall, Gumroad is a useful platform for selling PowerPoint templates and other digital products.
Payhip
Pahip is another great, but often overlooked, platform for selling digital products such as e-books, spreadsheets, templates, etc.
The platform is free to use, however, Payhip takes a 5% transaction fee, which is far better than Etsy and Gumroad when you are in the start-up phase.
If you expect to sell a lot they offer two subscription packages.
The first option is a plus package that costs you $29 a month. The other option is their pro package which costs you $99 a month.
With the plus package, the transaction fee per sale decreases to 2%, and if you go all the way and choose the pro plan, there’s no transaction fee.
Sell PowerPoint Templates With Your Own Website
A final option is to do all the work yourself from creating a website to building an audience and handling orders.
While this option requires some upfront work and some heavy lifts, it can in the end be worth the effort.
In my opinion, the benefits far outweigh the hard work, and just to mention a few they are:
- Brand: Creating a brand that people remember is easier with a website
- Fees: You keep the profit since there are no fees.
- Emails: You can collect emails
- Sell more: A website makes room for upsells
- Custom: More customization options
- Options: Provide different payment options, coupon codes, affiliate programs, etc.
- Control: You have full control
If you choose to go with this option you should choose the correct website builder platform, and the choices are many; Shopify, WordPress, Duda, Wix, etc.
If you want to know the benefits and how to get started with each platform, then click here.
Step 1 – Identify Your Target Market
This step is a classic, but one you simply cannot overlook. Many people try to be everything to everyone, which results in them being nothing to anyone.
Instead, it would help if you had a target audience that you want to reach with your templates and promotion.
How To Pick Your Audience
Picking your audience for PowerPoint templates can be a crucial step in creating and selling templates that are in demand. Here are a few steps you can follow to identify your target market:
- Define your target audience: Consider the type of person most likely to buy your templates. Are they students, professionals, business owners, or a specific industry?
- Research your competition: Look at what other template creators are offering and see if there are any gaps in the market that you can fill.
- Determine what makes your templates unique: Consider what sets your templates apart from others and how that appeals to your target audience.
- Consider the type of templates you want to create: Think about the types of templates that your target audience might be interested in, such as infographics, pitch decks, or social media graphics.
- Test your assumptions: One way to confirm your assumptions about your target market is to create a small batch of templates and see how they perform. You can also ask potential customers for feedback on your templates to get a better understanding of their needs and preferences.
Pro Tip
It might not be the funniest task, but just a little bit of data analysis can get you a long way. And it doesn’t have to be that complicated.
Go to Google Trends, and in the search bar you type the kind of template people might be looking for; professional presentation, pitch deck, business plan, free templates, sales presentation, etc.
To demonstrate I’ve typed in “Pitch Deck Template” below.
The search volume for this key phrase is rather consistent, and therefore a phrase I might include in my product description.
You just repeat this process until you have a feeling of what people search for and what Powerpoint templates you should offer.
Step 2 – Create The PowerPoint Templates
When creating the PowerPoint template there are a couple of best practices that should be followed;
- Clean design: The design can be anything, but it must be easy to navigate
- PowerPoint Tutorial: Show a video of you using the PowerPoint
- Slide master: Use the slide master if something needs to stay in the same place on specific slides
- Text boxes: Make text boxes with the text “insert text here”
Not all your beautiful templates need a video, but if it’s one of the more creative presentation templates, a video recording of how to use it would be appreciated by many.
Also, several people don’t even want to buy something that they haven’t seen used in action.
To demonstrate, here’s a video of me using some editable pre-designed PowerPoint slides.
Step 3 – Upload The PowerPoint Templates
Remember the platforms I talked about previously? Now it’s time to pick the ones you want to upload to.
My personal recommendation would be to choose multiple platforms. Might sound like a lot of work, but it’s not.
When you’ve taken the photos, recorded the videos, and written the product description once, it can just be copied into the other sales platforms as well.
By doing that you are not depending on a single platform and its audience, but on multiple potential audiences.
Step 4 – Customizing Store
If you use your own website, then now is the time for customization. Make the website aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
When it comes to other platforms like Etsy, Gumroad, and Payhip, your customization options are limited meaning you might not be able to change a lot.
However, a platform like Etsy allows you to change the cover image, which gives your Etsy store a more personal touch.
Whatever you can change to stand out and differentiate yourself from all the generic PowerPoint sellers on the platforms, do it.
Step 5 – Pricing The PowerPoint Templates
We all want to see the number of sales increase, but if that should ever become a reality, the right prices are a requirement.
So how do we price our PowerPoint templates, without underpricing or overpricing them?
Well, it is pretty simple. Look at other sellers who’ve only sold between 0 to 10 products.
Try to figure out if the reason they haven’t sold enough is due to low-quality templates, their prices, or the age of the store.
To find this information, Etsy is a great place to start because it shows the sales a store has made in its lifetime.
- If their product is low-quality, it’s not their prices that are the problem
- If the store is new and hasn’t established itself on the platform, then its prices might be reasonable too
- If the store is old and has great templates, then their prices might be too high
Also, look into stores that have sold many PowerPoint templates. What are their prices compared to the ones who haven’t sold a lot?
When you’ve determined this, you should sell your first 10 templates below the average price. In other words, your templates must be underpriced in the start-up phase.
Pro Tip
When selling online your trustworthiness is everything. Therefore, ask some family members or friends to buy your PowerPoint themes and templates, and leave a positive review.
This will also help you practice your sales skill when you have to pitch why they must buy it.
Step 6 – Promote Your PowerPoint Templates
If you thought traffic and customers will arrive at your store out of nowhere, you were wrong.
You must work for it, and promote your store on different media.
Maybe you choose to offer 10 free sales PowerPoint templates through your Instagram, or maybe you create a PowerPoint template design contest, where the winner will get unlimited downloads at your store.
No matter what you choose, keep in mind who you want to target.
Is it the manager in a blue suit who needs sales ppt templates, or is it the student who are screaming for a last-minute PowerPoint template for the final exam?
If it’s the first one, then a blog post might be a better fit than a video on TikTok. And the opposite is true if it’s the student you want to target.
Pro Tip
The algorithm on TikTok is crazy, and you can easily go viral there. Thus, it’s almost a no-go not to create a TikTok and post videos of your templates.
Imagine a video with 5 million views. If just 0,1% buy your $8-template, you’ve earned $40,000.
Below is an example of one of my PowerPoint templates on TikTok.
Wrapping It All Up
If you were in doubt about whether it was possible to sell PowerPoint templates and Google Slides designs, I bet you know the answer now.
Go to the Microsoft PowerPoint software or Google slides, and start creating your next template. When you don’t know how to proceed come back to this article, and find the steps.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it legal to sell PowerPoint and Google Slides templates?
Yes, it’s legal to create, sell, and distribute templates without paying any royalties to Microsoft or Google.
Anything you create within the PowerPoint or Google Slides software is viewed as intellectual property and belongs to you.
But there are exceptions!
Assuming that you’re employed and once in a while you must create PowerPoint templates at your job. These templates don’t belong to you, but to your employer – unless your contract specifies otherwise.
As a rule of thumb, this only applies if creating PowerPoint templates is a part of your job description.
However, I would always consult with my employer if I was in doubt, and you should do the same.
How do I sell Google Slides Templates?
In case you want to sell Google Slides templates you must create a “Certificate of Purchase “.
This isn’t something to worry about when selling PowerPoint templates, it’s only a requirement when selling Google Slides templates.
The reason is that with Google Slides the potential buyers are only provided a link and not a file, and you can’t just sell a link.
Therefore, we solve this problem by creating a file with a link pointing to the Google Slides template.
Here’s how you create a certificate of purchase:
- Once you’ve finished your Google Slides template, click the ‘share button’.
- Click the drop-down arrow under the ‘Get Link’ section.
- Pick the option share the file with ‘Anyone with the link’.
- To your right, you will be able to see a drop-down menu with the options “viewer”, “commenter”, and “editor”. Make sure to choose “viewer” mode to avoid the possibility of someone editing your master slide.
- Click the Copy link.
Can I sell other things than PowerPoint Templates?
Of course, you can, PowerPoint templates are not the only solution.
You can sell things like:
- Excel Spreadsheets
- Canva templates
- eBooks
- Gift wrap designs, etc.
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