She Earned $1 Million Selling Squarespace Templates

Erica Hartwick was a freelance web designer before she started creating and selling her own website templates about six years ago.

In a recent interview (video + text), Erica reveals that she’s gone on to earn over $1 million dollars from selling 5000+ templates 🤯…

Check out Erica’s templates here.

She specializes in Squarespace templates. Squarespace is a popular website platform with more than 4 million users.

Erica made the transition from freelancing to selling templates in about a year…

It was a good few months of pretty solid work.

But her template business isn’t as passive as you might think…

I still work full-time basically, it’s just a business model that feels way less stressful and people aren’t relying on you and you can work in your own time and it’s passive to an extent, but you’ve still got to put the work in.

She has a team helping her out now, and they spend a lot of time on…

• Marketing
• Customer service
• Updating templates

🚀 Erica launched the business with 6 templates to a very small audience: about 500 followers on Instagram and 200 email subscribers.

Over time, SEO has become her most reliable marketing channel…

90% of our traffic still comes from Google.

Her site ranks in the top 3 for keywords like…

• squarespace sales page template
• blogging on squarespace
• squarespace favicon
• ads on squarespace
• squarespace redirect
• squarespace coming soon page

So her main marketing strategy is to create helpful content that Squarespace users will be looking for, and try to get that content ranking 📈

The majority of our sales definitely come through our own website and that’s because of all of the traffic we get from the searchable content we create.

She also puts out a lot of content on YouTube – the world’s second-biggest search engine – and has racked up about 1 million views on her 200+ videos over the years.

Another place Erica sells her templates is Creative Marketplace.

Her templates are priced a little higher there, and it seems there’s a good reason for that…

I know it’s a bit sneaky, but a lot of people will find our products on Creative Market, then go to our website and buy our templates from there.

Erica points to a common mistake freelancers make when they try to sell templates 👇

[they think] that the same marketing methods they were using for their one-to-one web design services will work for their template store, which sadly they don’t. 

So you need more of a “how many people’s eyes can you get on your templates” sort of marketing rather than a relationship-building, referral-building type marketing that you might have been doing before with custom web design.

One interesting thing I noticed while researching this story: many of the top keywords Erica ranks for are fairly low difficulty, usually less than 4/10.

And those are keywords related to an established platform with 4 million users.

It would be even easier to rank for terms related to smaller website builders.

One to keep an eye on is Framer.com 👈

I’m seeing them all over Twitter and YouTube lately.

Now is probably a great time for a designer to establish themselves as a Framer template expert 😉