Planners are one of the most popular digital products sold on Etsy, and for good reason. Planners are for everyone – students of every trade, parents in all stages of chaos, overwhelmed professionals who need to write everything down, brides who need an organizational system for their upcoming nuptials.
I’ve made over $100,000 selling digital and print-on-demand products on Etsy, including planner pages. This post will cover my best tools and tips to help you start selling digital planners on Etsy, even if you’re a complete beginner.
(This post contains affiliate links)
Digital vs. Printable vs. Physical Planners
When you search for planners on Etsy, you’ll see planners sold as either physical planners, digital planners, or printable planners.
Physical planners are complete books that you purchase and have mailed to you. This is not what we’re covering in this post, we are focusing on digital and printable products, but if you have the capacity to produce physical planners that you’d like to sell, you can apply many of the same principles from this post to your store.
Digital planners are planner pages used in a digital format, like a tablet. Lots of people prefer carrying around a tablet that has everything they need instead of adding a physical paper planner to the mix. This way you can open up your planner pages and write over it on the screen rather than print hard copies of the pages.
Printable planners are pages that your customer downloads and prints themselves to add to their physical planner.
The most common sizes for planner pages are A4, A5, and US Letter.
Types of Planner Pages You Can Sell
When I say “planners” in this article, it’s referring to low-content pages such as:
Daily, weekly, or monthly planner pages
Meal planning pages
Daily journal pages
Tracking pages for goals, moods, habits, etc.
Tools You’ll Need to Create and Sell Planners
You can create planner pages without spending any money, but if you want to do this professionally, you’re going to spend money at some point. Here are my favorite tools for making planners for my Etsy storesl:
Planify Pro
Planify Pro is the most robust tool out there for making commercial use planners right now. I’ve been using it for a couple of months and it’s my #1 recommendation for anyone interested in the planner world, even if you just want to make them for yourself.
Planify Pro provides premade templates for virtually any type of planner or worksheet you can think of – digital or printable – and you can customize them with as many colors, fonts, and graphic changes as you want. This is hands-down my top recommendation for aspiring planner sellers and in my experience it’s been worth every penny. I love that Planify provides recipe codes for each page design, so you can simply plug the code in and have every feature pop up on what you’re making. You can also automatically resize any of your files at the click of a button, so you can make a design and download it in A4, A5, and US Letter sizes.
Canva Pro
You can also create planner pages with the free or paid version of Canva. However, you cannot resell products made with their premade templates and graphics, so you’ll want to make sure to download fonts and graphics of your own to use in your designs (more on that in a minute).
If you’d like to try making planners with Canva, I have a simple workaround to avoid breaking any licensing rules – my free Canva Template Bundle, which contains 25+ elements for planners that you can plug into your designs however you want. They also come with a commercial license, so you can use what’s in the bundle to create sellable products.
As someone making money on the internet, you’ll probably want to spring for Canva Pro at some point. It’s an invaluable tool for creating social media and blog graphics as well as digital product mockups. It’s the #1 tool I use to create designs for my blog, print-on-demand store, and printable wall art designs, so it’s worth every penny for my business.
If you plan on using Canva to make planners, make sure also to check out Becky Beach’s blog and store – she sells PLR (private label rights) templates for a huge variety of products, including planner pages. This means you can purchase her templates and customize them for your own products. It’s a great way to fast-track your first products and get used to creating without starting from total scratch. Here are some of my favorites:
Safari Blooms Undated Monthly Planner (free!)
Baby Blooms Pregnancy Planner Template
Book Bolt
Book Bolt is another excellent resource for creating low and no-content books like planners, diaries, coloring pages, and journals, especially if you want to sell them on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This software will help you design a full interior for your book, research trends and niches in real time, and will even automate the uploading process so you can get published on Amazon as soon as your product is ready. You can also download your creations and sell them on Etsy if you don’t want to sell on Amazon.
If you sign up for Book Bolt, use the code AGIRLSGOTTAEAT for 20% off your plan.
Creative Fabrica
Creative Fabrica is what you need if you want to download and use your own fonts and graphics. Everything on their site is available for commercial use, so you can use anything you find here for your planner designs, regardless of where you’re designing them. If you’re using Canva, I especially recommend finding fonts and elements on here, then uploading them to your Canva brand kit.
Tip for sourcing on Creative Fabrica: think in terms of niche-based designs when downloading graphic elements. Sometimes, all you need is a few different elements to turn a design from a planner page geared toward a busy mom who likes floral designs into something for a student in med school. This is how you fill your shop with lots of items, by making small changes to each design, then targeting a different type of person with that design. This is extra simple to do with planners because you can keep the page structure the same and just change up a few words or decorative elements.
How to Make More Planner Sales
One of the main questions I get about selling planners or printables in general is, “but isn’t everyone already doing it? Isn’t it saturated?” In many cases, yes – but saturation is not inherently a bad thing, it just means you need to approach this endeavor slightly differently than what you originally think of when you imagine doing this for a living.
Saturation is good because it means there is a viable market of people who might buy your product. The reason the wedding industry is “saturated” is because there are literally always people getting married. Same with fitness – people are always trying to improve their health. And parenting – people are always having kids. So while the ever-present demand may cause some saturation, it also means you have a constant stream of people looking for products like yours, you just have to know how to make sure they find you and choose your products to buy. These are my best tips for getting your products to stand out from everyone else, regardless of saturation:
Niche Down Your Ideas
Niching down is not always something I recommend you do when you start selling online, often because I don’t want you to overly limit yourself if you have multiple ideas in your head – I want you to try them all, then make your next moves based on what’s working. But when it comes to planners specifically, I want you to consider niching down in a few strategic ways.
The thing about planners is that at the end of the day, they’re all some form of a boxed and lined grid that anyone can use for any purpose, as long as it’s formatted in a way that works for their brain and needs. This means that an engineer trying to organize their 80-hour workweeks could use the exact same planner as a stay-at-home parent trying to organize appointments, play dates, and activities.
So if you’re selling a generic planner page that could be used for either of those people, how do you get both of them to find you and choose your planner? Instead of making the generic planner, I want you to try making something specifically geared toward different purposes, occupations, etc. I want you to make a standard planner template that you like and can easily modify, then make a version that’s for a specific niche. So instead of making a generic daily planner page, you’re making a daily planner page for teachers. Instead of making a weekly meal planning page, you’re making it for families going on a camping trip. Instead of a basic journal page, you’re making a gratitude/prayer journal page.
THIS is how you get your planners to stand out: you convince someone that your planner is the one they need because it was made for someone in their exact position. This is also why it helps if you have experience with what you’re making planners for – I had a reader ask me if it was a good idea to make planners for med students since she’s in med school, and that is an EXCELLENT idea because they’re in the thick of it and know what someone in that position would want.
This doesn’t mean you only need to sell planners for med students or gratitude journals or camping-themed meal planners. If you want to create some more generic designs, you can add them to the same shop as well. They will complement each other because of the one thing they have in common – planning.
Doing this is not just good for standing out amongst the saturated crowd, it’s also good for your…
Etsy SEO: Learn It and Use It
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most crucial skills to learn if you want to sell anything online. SEO is a strategy that involves using keywords in your product titles, tags, and descriptions that are aligned with the keywords your target customer is using when searching for a product like yours. This goes hand-in-hand with making more specific items: when you’re making a specific product such as a planner for med students, you can use keywords like “medical school planner” instead of just “daily planner”. If you’re making a camping-themed weekly meal planning worksheet, you can use keywords like “camping meal planner” and “camping printables” instead of just “meal planner”.
The benefit to using Etsy, especially for beginners, is that they have a huge built-in audience of millions of people who shop on their marketplace. If you are strategic with your keywords and know your customer well enough (another reason it benefits to be your target customer), you can bring in tons of organic traffic with SEO, even if your competition has been selling for better or longer. People can’t buy what doesn’t show up in search, so do whatever you can to show up as best you can. Check out my full guide to Etsy SEO here, including which free and paid tools I recommend if you’d like some extra help.
Pin Your Products to Pinterest
Pinterest is my largest source of traffic other than organic Google and Etsy search. I don’t care if you have a personal Pinterest account or a professional page for your store, just get your products on Pinterest. Make a board called “Digital Planners” and pin to that board whenever you list a new product. This post has my best Pinterest tips.
Bundle Your Products Together
Another key to Etsy success is volume. The more products you have for sale in your shop, the higher your chances of showing up in search results and making sales. One way to quickly grow your search volume is to bundle products together. If you have an assortment of products designed for a specific group, bundle them together in one listing and offer the whole set for a small discount. This is also why I recommend getting specific with your products, because you can make one set of planners for a specific career, then make a few modifications and you have a whole new set that targets a different group, growing your reach even further and – as a result – your sales and income.
Ready to open your Etsy shop? Use my referral link and we’ll both get 40 free listings.
Check out my similar posts:
20 types of digital products you can sell on Etsy
My general guide to selling printable products on Etsy
Understanding Etsy SEO in 2021
How to sell physical products on Etsy without storing any inventory
Hi Mandy,
Long time reader, first time commenter. If I use Book Bolt, can I upload to KDP *and* download to sell on Etsy?
Thanks for reading! Yes you can do that 🙂
Who do you use for on demand printing?
I don’t do any print-on-demand with planners, but I use Printful for my other POD products. If you want to have planners printed I recommend having it done through Amazon KDP.
Hello! I have wanted to start an online business for so long and now is my opportunity. I want to sell planners and calendars on Etsy. I took your advice and signed up for Planify Pro. I am learning how it works! I keep telling myself I can do this. Thanks for the advice! I can do this! Lol.
Hi, thank you so much for this post. I will definitely be using your guides to move along. So if I were to use Canva. Would I make my planner (if it’s digital can It be any size?), after they purchase they would receive an editable link that takes them back to Canva and they can just download it as a pdf or edit it there?
You can either provide them with PDFs of the pages, or provide them with the Canva link where they can edit and download it from there as they please. They will just need Canva Pro in order to do that so I recommend downloading the file in sizes A4, A5, and Letter Size (the 3 most common sizes for planners) and uploading those to your listing as digital files.
Another question, if I want to make planners with different page sizes. Do I have to make two separate creations with two different page dimensions? Or is there a way for customers to alter the dimensions of the planner to fit their printer and their paper size on their own?