How I Made $100K Selling with Canva (And How You Can Start Too)

Eleven years of trying to make money online. Surveys. Side hustles. Low-ticket affiliate offers. High-ticket affiliate offers. None of it really clicked until one thing changed: selling digital products created in Canva. That shift took Alston Godbolt from scrambling for income to crossing $100,000 in Canva product revenue, and the reason it worked is not what most people think.

It was not a viral moment. It was not a secret platform. It was a five-step repeatable framework that Alston built after learning he and his wife were expecting twins and realizing his current income was not going to cut it. This post walks through every step of that framework exactly as he laid it out, including the product he created, the pricing logic, the sales page structure, and the marketing approach that does not require you to feel pushy or salesy.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A method for identifying the right niche based on what you already know, not what is trending
A technique for breaking any big problem into sub-problems that become sellable products
The five Canva product types that deliver fast results for buyers and fast creation for you
A step-by-step sales page structure, including what sections to include and what price point to start at
Platform-specific marketing strategies for YouTube and TikTok that feel natural, not pushy
The real reason your first product is not about profit but about building an email list that pays you repeatedly
How to figure out which Canva product you should build first at finder.platformproof.com

Step 1: Find a Group of People You Can Help

The first mistake most beginners make is chasing money instead of solving a problem they actually understand. Alston is direct about this: if you do not have real knowledge, skills, or experience teaching people how to make money online, you should not try to sell a product in that space. You will spend years learning the subject, you will not come across as credible, and you will end up repeating third or fourth-hand information that does not actually help anyone.

The better move is to focus on what you already know how to do. Alston sat down and wrote a short list. He knew about affiliate marketing. He knew about software development. He knew a bit about parenting. He knew about college admissions. None of those felt glamorous or impressive. All of them had real audiences with real questions. That is the insight: if you know how to do something, there are tens of thousands of people who do not know how to do it and would pay to learn it quickly.

The exercise is simple. After finishing this post, take five or six minutes and write down things you already know that other people have questions about. It might be budgeting, cooking on a tight schedule, getting kids into competitive programs, home repair, job interview prep, fitness for new parents, tax prep basics, or any number of ordinary things. The goal is not to find something that sounds impressive. The goal is to find something real that a real person would pay a small amount to solve today.

Step 1A: Break the Big Problem Into Sub-Problems

Once you have a topic, the natural instinct is to build something that covers everything. That instinct will kill your product before you finish it. The better approach is to map out all of the sub-problems inside your main topic and then build a product that solves only one of them.

Alston used affiliate marketing as his example. When you look at affiliate marketing as a whole, it is overwhelming. But when you break it into pieces, you get a list like this: finding a niche, applying to affiliate programs, getting traffic and attention, building an email list, creating content. Each of those is its own product opportunity. Not five products eventually. Five products you could start building right now.

He landed on helping new affiliate marketers earn their first $1,000. Not how to scale to six figures. Not how to master SEO. Just the first $1,000. That specificity was a major reason people bought. When your prospect is staring at the whole pie, they freeze. When you hand them one slice and say you can finish this in a day or two, they reach for their wallet.

The rule Alston sets: when you find a topic you can genuinely help with, you should be able to list six to eight distinct sub-problems your audience faces. If you can do that, you have material for multiple products, not just one. Your first product is the smallest, most specific slice of that list.

Step 2: Think of Fast Ways to Solve the Problem

Speed matters on both sides of the transaction. The buyer needs to get a result quickly or they will abandon the product and blame you for it. You need to create it quickly or the self-doubt sets in and the project dies unfinished on your hard drive. Alston puts it plainly: money loves speed. The longer you work on a product, the more bloat you add and the more reasons you find to scrap it entirely.

Here are the five Canva product types he recommends, because each one delivers a fast result for the buyer:

Templates – Instagram story templates, wedding invite templates, save-the-date designs. The buyer downloads it, drops in their details, posts or prints. Done in minutes.
Planners – Fitness planners, meal planners, weekly schedule planners. The buyer opens it, starts filling it in, and has a working plan before the day is over.
Workbooks – Alston’s personal preference and the format behind his $100K product. The buyer works through it page by page and comes out the other side with a completed action plan.
Guided journals – Structured prompts that help someone process a situation, build a habit, or make a decision. Lower price point, high perceived value.
Cheat sheets – One or two pages that collapse a complex topic into what someone needs to know right now. These work well as lead magnets and as upsells after the main product.

He is not a fan of ebooks for first products because they tend to grow too large and take too long to finish. A workbook forces both you and the buyer to stay focused on a single outcome.

The product Alston built was the Two-Day Affiliate Marketing Workbook. At roughly 70 to 80 pages, it walked a brand new affiliate marketer through everything needed to earn their first $1,000 in commissions. It included a 10-minute product-finding exercise where the buyer identified five affiliate products to promote, a guide on where and how to apply to affiliate programs, and a checklist to confirm every step was complete. A reader could work through it in one or two sittings and end up with a real, completed business plan.

Before you open Canva, Alston recommends one preparation step: put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask what did you personally need to know, step by step, to solve this problem. Then cut everything that was not strictly necessary for the stated outcome. For the first $1,000 in affiliate marketing, you do not need email marketing. So he left it out. That decision kept the product lean, usable, and something a person could actually finish.

Step 3: Create It in Canva Starting From a Template

The creation step is where most people overcomplicate things. They open Canva, stare at a blank page, and either pile on features or close the tab entirely. Alston’s instruction is simple: never start from a blank page.

Go to Canva, open the template search, and type in the format you are creating. If you are building a workbook, search “workbook.” If you are building a planner, search “planner” or “meal planner.” Canva has both free and paid templates. Pick one that is close to the structure you want, then customize it. Change the colors, update the text, replace any photos, and build your framework into the existing layout. You should not be designing from scratch. You should be making an existing structure your own.

The most important rule about templates: you must make real changes before selling. Do not download a template and offer it as-is. Write your own instructions, build the product around your specific knowledge, and give the buyer something that reflects your point of view. When Alston built his workbook, the template gave him the page structure. Everything that made it valuable came from what he actually knew about affiliate marketing.

He also cautions against product bloat, and traces it back to a specific psychological trap: imposter syndrome. When you doubt that a narrow product is good enough, you start adding content to justify the price. More pages. More sections. More information nobody asked for. The product never gets finished. His rule: small and specific beats comprehensive and unpublished every single time. A $5 workbook that solves one problem and gets finished by the buyer is worth far more than a $49 ebook that sits unopened.

Step 4: Build a Sales Page That Actually Converts

You can host a sales page for free on Gumroad. Alston also offers his own tool called G-Bolt Systems, an all-in-one sales page builder and email marketing platform that starts at $17 per month. For a first product, Gumroad is a perfectly functional starting point that costs nothing upfront.

Here is the exact sales page structure Alston recommends:

Headline – State the specific outcome your product delivers. Be direct and concrete.
Sub-headline – Clarify who this is for and reinforce the core promise.
Current pain point – Describe exactly where your buyer is right now. Make them feel understood before you pitch anything.
How your product solves the pain – Walk through what the buyer gets and how it moves them from where they are to where they want to be.
Social proof – Include testimonials if you have them. If you created the product as a free resource first and got real feedback, use that. Even one honest review shifts the buying decision.
Guarantee (optional) – A refund policy lowers resistance at the moment of purchase. Include one if you are comfortable with it.
Order form – Make it easy to buy. Fewer clicks between interest and purchase means more sales completed.

On pricing: Alston’s strong recommendation for a first product is under $20, with a specific push toward starting at $5 or a similarly low impulse-buy price. His reasoning is grounded in how buyers think. A $49 product makes someone pause and calculate how many hours of their day job it represents. A $5 product bypasses that calculation entirely. They click buy without overthinking it.

If you over-deliver on that $5 product and actually solve the problem, something important happens. The buyer puts you in a position of authority and trust. They come back to you when the next problem shows up. And here is the thing about problem-solving: every solution creates a new problem. The person who follows the Two-Day Affiliate Marketing Workbook and earns their first $1,000 now wants to know how to scale from $1,000 to $3,000 a month. Who do they trust to help them? The person who already came through for them.

The deeper purpose of the first product is not maximum revenue per transaction. It is building an email list. When someone pays you for a digital product, you get their email address. You can ask them what else they are struggling with. You can sell them more products down the line. Alston frames it this way: you are getting people to pay you to build your mailing list. The first sale funds the relationship, and the relationship is what generates real income over time.

Not sure which Canva product fits your skills and situation?

Answer a few short questions and get a specific recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

Step 5: Market Without Feeling Pushy

Marketing is the step that stops most people. They picture used-car salesmen, spam emails, and awkward DMs. Alston reframes it simply: marketing is making people aware that you have a solution to their problem. That is all it is. When a laundry detergent commercial shows you a product removing a tough stain, they are not being pushy. They are showing you what they sell and who it helps. You are doing the same thing.

How you market depends on where you spend your time. Here is how Alston approaches two of the biggest platforms.

YouTube Long-Form

On YouTube, your main tool is the search bar. Find videos in your niche that already have strong view counts. Those numbers tell you what questions people are actively searching for. You do not have to reinvent anything. You look at what is already working and create your own version with your perspective and your experience.

Beyond the search bar, pay attention to the recommended videos that appear on the side and below any video in your niche. YouTube surfaces those because its algorithm knows they are relevant to the same audience. A video titled “I tried Pinterest affiliate marketing for 90 days” is both a content idea and a proof point that the audience exists and is active. Alston said he does this research before every video he makes.

TikTok Short-Form

TikTok requires a different approach because the awareness level of the audience is lower. Someone scrolling TikTok may not know what affiliate marketing is, or they may have a negative impression of it. But they do know they need another paycheck. They know they are exhausted from working multiple jobs. They know they cannot take on a third job. You meet them there, in the reality they are already living.

On TikTok, Alston talks about pain points, goals, dreams, desires, and the things people are thinking but afraid to say out loud. Here is the kind of content that connects:

Pain points: working multiple jobs and still not getting ahead, living paycheck to paycheck without any cushion
Dreams: making money without trading more time for it, having a real safety net in the bank, a nest egg just in case something goes wrong
Desires: going on vacation and feeling like it is paid for, being able to take a personal day without guilt or fear
Things they think but do not say: feeling guilty for missing their kid’s soccer game because they could not skip an extra shift

That content builds the connection. Then you introduce your product as the answer to something they already feel. Not a pitch. A response to something they are already carrying around.

Honest Drawbacks of This Model

Alston does not sugarcoat the timeline. He says plainly that this will not work overnight, and probably will not produce meaningful results within the first month. Anyone telling you that you can make six figures in 90 days with no prior knowledge, skills, or experience is lying to you. Those are his words, not an interpretation of them.

What this model actually requires is consistency and persistence stretched over real time. You will need to develop skills you do not currently have. That might mean learning how to write copy, how to edit short videos, how to design a basic sales page, or how to create content that speaks to a specific audience. You can learn those things for free or pay someone to teach you faster. Either works. But there is no version of this where you skip the learning curve entirely.

There is also the reality of the first product’s pricing. At $5 or $7 per sale, you are not going to see big numbers fast. The math only starts to work in your favor once you have multiple products at different price points, an email list of buyers, and a pattern of repeat purchases from people who trust you. Getting there takes longer than most people want to admit publicly, and Alston is one of the few who says so directly.

The upside is that the model is genuinely self-funding. Your first product builds the list. The list buys the second product. The second product pays for better tools and more content. The entire framework, from identifying your topic to having a published sales page and live product, can realistically be completed in a weekend. Not profitable in a weekend. Built in a weekend. Those are two different things, and the distinction matters.

The Five-Step Framework at a Glance

Here is the complete framework condensed into its most actionable form. Steps one through three can be done in a single afternoon.

Write down five to ten things you already know that other people have questions about
Pick one topic and list six to eight sub-problems your audience faces inside that topic
Choose the smallest sub-problem and pick a format (workbook, template, planner, cheat sheet, guided journal) that lets the buyer solve it in one or two sittings
Open Canva, search for a free or paid template close to your format, and customize it around your specific knowledge and framework
Set up a Gumroad sales page with a headline, pain-point section, product description, social proof, and an order form priced under $20
Pick one platform and start creating content that speaks to the pain points, goals, dreams, and unspoken thoughts of your specific audience

Find Your X

The hardest part of this framework for most people is Step 1. Not the Canva creation. Not the sales page copy. The question of what should I even build. If you are sitting there with a list of things you know but not sure which one to turn into a product, the Platform Proof Finder was built for exactly that moment. Answer a few short questions and walk out with a specific product recommendation based on what you actually know and who you can actually help. Start at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to have made money online before selling a Canva product?

No. Alston is explicit that you do not need to be a tech expert or have a long online track record. You need real knowledge of a specific problem, genuine motivation to help others solve it, and the willingness to develop new skills as you go. The product should come from something you actually understand and have done yourself, not a topic you picked because it seemed like it would sell.

What is the best Canva product format for a complete beginner?

Alston favors workbooks over ebooks for beginners. Workbooks keep you focused on a single, specific outcome during the creation process. They are also interactive for the buyer, meaning the person filling it in feels progress as they move through it. That satisfaction makes them more likely to finish the product and more likely to trust you enough to buy the next thing.

How much should I charge for my first Canva digital product?

Under $20, with a strong recommendation to start at $5 or $7. At that price it becomes an impulse buy that does not require the buyer to think hard, consult anyone, or calculate whether it is worth it relative to their hourly wage. The goal of the first product is not maximum revenue per sale. It is getting people into your world, onto your email list, and into a trust relationship where they come back for the next product.

Can I legally sell Canva templates I did not design from scratch?

Yes, with one firm condition: you must make real changes before selling. You cannot download a template and resell it without modification. Write your own instructional content, build the product around your specific framework, and make it reflect your point of view. Canva’s content licensing terms for Pro subscribers allow you to use their design elements in products you sell, but the expectation is that meaningful creative work has been added.

What is Gumroad and is it really free to use?

Gumroad is a platform where creators sell digital files directly to buyers. You upload your product, set your price, and get a shareable link to your product page. Gumroad handles payment processing and automatic delivery to the buyer. There is no monthly fee for the basic plan. They take a percentage of each transaction, which scales down as your volume increases. For a first product with no existing audience, it is the lowest-friction option available.

Why is building an email list so central to this strategy?

Because the real value of your first digital product is not the sale price. It is the email address that comes with it. When someone pays you, even just $5, they are signaling genuine intent. That email address gives you a direct line to people who have already demonstrated they trust you enough to pay. You can ask them what they are still struggling with. You can let them know when you release the next product. Over time, that list becomes the actual business.

How long does it realistically take to start making consistent sales?

Longer than most people want to hear. Alston has been doing this for eleven years and says plainly that anyone promising six figures in 90 days for a complete beginner is not being honest. Consistent results come from consistent content output, ongoing skill development, and a willingness to iterate when something is not working. Most people who see meaningful traction have put in six to twelve months of real, sustained effort before it starts to compound.

Is the TikTok or YouTube approach better for selling a Canva product?

They serve different purposes. YouTube long-form attracts buyers who are actively searching for a solution to a specific problem. They arrive with higher intent and are closer to a purchase decision. TikTok short-form reaches people earlier in their awareness, before they know what the solution is or even what to search for. YouTube converts faster per viewer. TikTok reaches a much wider pool. Alston uses both because they work at different stages of the same funnel.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How I Made $100K Selling with Canva (And How You Can Start Too),” YouTube, https://youtu.be/7nDb53ROmN8
Gumroad creator platform: https://gumroad.com
Canva template library: https://www.canva.com/templates
G-Bolt Systems all-in-one marketing software: referenced in video as Alston’s own product
Platform Proof Finder: https://finder.platformproof.com

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.