Happy Holidays!

It’s our favorite time of the year: “let’s push this to 2025” season. This year has been a busy one for the Notion team, but we launched some pretty exciting updates for creators. Some of our favorites include suggested edits, Notion Sites and (finally) being able to reorder tabs. This year really ran the gamut from major product launches to small, but mighty, quality of life updates.

Arguably one of the most important launches for creators, and the one we get the most questions about, is Marketplace. Previously known as the Template Gallery, Marketplace is your one-stop shop for selling and searching for Notion templates—now complete with even more seller tools to up-level your template business.

We know a lot of you are interested in selling templates on Marketplace, but aren’t sure where to start. What makes a great template? What’s selling well already? How can we get started? Well, we decided to tap our in-house experts Sohrab Amin and Dave Menceles to create the Ultimate Guide for Creating Notion Templates That Sell. Sohrab and Dave are on the templates team at Notion, where they create and curate templates every day. Some of you might have even worked with Sohrab, who oversees Marketplace operations!

If you want to read their top tips, scroll to the bottom of this newsletter! If you have any specific questions about Notion templates, fill out the form here and we’ll answer them in an upcoming newsletter.

We are constantly amazed by all of the amazing templates creators have built—including the businesses around selling them. Special shout out to Jules Acree, who recently shared that she’s sold over 10,000 templates since she started her selling journey!

As we start (trying) to slow down for the holidays, we’re looking forward to cozy mugs of hot chocolate and cheesy holiday movies. Lexie will be heading back to her home state of Ohio, while Danielle holds down the fort in the Bay Area.

We hope everyone has a safe and wonderful holiday season!

—Danielle & Lexie

10 Tips for Creating Notion Templates that Sell

Employ these best-practices when creating Notion templates, and you’ll be on your way to creating a profitable templates business. We can’t wait to see what you create!
—Sohrab & Dave

1. Make sure your template solves a clear need for a clear audience

Business strategy 101, and it absolutely applies to creating and selling Notion templates. Based on Notion Marketplace data, the best-selling templates are those that are crystal clear in their utility and value.

2. Consider targeting a specific niche

Just as with your blog or Youtube channel, targeting a niche helps you bring more targeted value to users. There’s no shortage of general-use Notion templates that are broadly-targeted, so niching down can enable your templates to stand out from the crowd, get noticed and circumvent competition.

3. Your template doesn’t have to try to do everything and be everything

A great template can be a small and simple one, as long as it does what it sets out to do. When creating templates, keep in mind that they don’t need to solve so many problems, and often one very practical tool in a template is enough.

4. Keep your template layouts simple and focused

Clean and approachable template layouts foster focused workflows, and in turn, utility. Busy and cluttered template layouts can foster overwhelm and reduce stickiness. So it pays (quite literally) to employ UI design principles in template creation. Consider good practices like using visual separation between elements to create breathing room, and limiting the number of visual elements visible in a given viewport.

5. Sample data can go a long way

It’s often not entirely obvious what kind of data should go into a given Notion database included in a template, so it can help to include sample entries to give context about how exactly to use the tools you’ve built. Optimize by trying to make your sample data as relevant and realistic as possible.

6. Looks matter

Decorate your template’s pages and databases with meaningful icons and colours that help communicate intended use and help make navigation easier. Choose appropriate and descriptive icons for views and properties for quick context about what they do. Pick appropriate colours for the option values in your select multi-select and status properties to clearly denote their meaning (eg. orange for ‘needs attention, green for ‘Done’ or red for ‘blocked’). When decorating your templates, think about how to use design solutions to solve for product needs, and not just how to make things look pretty - which is, of course, important too!

7. Avoid property overload

The more properties, the better, right? Wrong! Depending on the types of properties you include, it can become a chore for users to populate them all during their day-to-day usage of the template. A surplus of properties can also be challenging to display in database and page views, even with the new Page Layouts feature. So when you’re building the databases for your templates, it’s often best to avoid including too many properties. Instead, aim to include the right amount of properties for the use case - only ones that will in fact be useful instead of superfluous - and not more.

8. Use views to offer deeper insights into data

Leverage the power of database views to offer different ways to visualize data in different contexts. By offering your template’s users several useful prefab views for each database, they can gain valuable insights from the data they populate into your template - insights they wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s also a great idea to make use of database Page Layouts to effectively organize the property metadata in database entries, highlighting key information and moving less important information out of the way.

9. Tell the world about your template

While the Notion template Marketplace has a ton of traffic every single day, the best-performing templates are ones that enjoy additional marketing outside of the Marketplace. Leverage your networks, release Youtube videos about your templates, publish blog articles and linkedIn posts, share with your newsletter subscribers. It’s also helpful to submit your templates to other bloggers or YouTubers to review, share and talk/write about your them and their utility. The more visibility your templates have, the more of them you’ll be able to sell - naturally.

10. Sell with Notion!

Now you can sell directly through the Notion Marketplace with the ‘Sell with Notion’ program! Enjoy added benefits like:

• Integrated checkout

• Payment handling

• Refunds

• Creator verification

• Template locking - to protect your templates against being duplicated and shared with unintended users

• Built-in audience and traffic

Some examples of top-notch creators and templates:

Creators

• https://www.notion.com/@handmethefork

• https://www.notion.com/@thomas

• https://www.notion.com/@koi

• https://www.notion.com/@firstblocks

Templates

• https://www.notion.com/templates/2025reset

• https://www.notion.com/templates/expense-tracker

• https://www.notion.com/templates/simple-weekly-planner

Get started with building and selling Notion templates today! Add an exciting and lucrative new revenue stream to your business, and turn your expertise into useful templates that can bring value to countless people. Click here to become a template creator!