Create an Ebook in 30 Minutes with Canva (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

Today I'm going to show you how to create an ebook in Canva in under 30 minutes without spending a dime or being a professional designer. I'm James Allen. I'm a coach, a course creator, and someone who built a six-figure business by turning my simple ideas into digital products that sell while I sleep. Ebooks are one of the best ways to sell your knowledge and expertise online. They're easy to create, they can be sold to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and they can be automated, which means that you get to build this thing once and earn money around the clock whether you're working or not. So whether you want to sell your ebook, use it to build your email list, or include it as a bonus in an online course, you're going to walk away from this video with a beautiful branded ebook that actually gets people results and puts money in your bank account. Now, before we even touch Canva, let's map out your ebook structure and get a good game plan so it's not just pretty, but it's really powerful and actually gets people results. Now, you have to think about what the purpose of your ebook is. Is it to grow your brand? Is it to be a lead magnet? Is it something that you want to sell? How in-depth do you want this thing to be? In my opinion, the best ebooks are short, They're punchy solutions to persistent problems. So I want you real quick to think about what is this persistent problem that the people you're building this ebook for are dealing with. Let's say that I'm a financial coach and I'm teaching people how to get started with investing. What we'll do is we can go over to an AI tool like ChatGPT to help us create a really solid outline. So the prompt I chose was, you are a financial coach who teaches people how to invest their money with confidence. And simplicity. Write me an outline for a short and punchy ebook that teaches people how to get started with investing. Let's see what it comes up with. Okay, awesome. So it came out with a pretty decent outline, I would say. We have a couple little sections, an intro, why most people never start or why they hesitate with investing. That's good just to mention to people, uh, the mindset shift from being a spender to an investor, the golden rule of investing, pay yourself first, where to start, The 3-Bucket System, What to Invest In and What to Avoid, How to Open Your First Investment Account, The Sleep Well Strategy, and then the final chapter, The 5-Year Rule and Your Next Steps. And there's also a bonus they included, which was a 5-Minute Investor Checklist. Now, just something to know that if you are trying to build your email list with something simple, an ebook is a great option for people. But also this could be an ebook in and of itself, the 5-Minute Investor Checklist. Just saying. I think we should still include it in this ebook. So we're going to roll with this outline and see how we can expand on it and make it a really valuable resource for our people. Now, an outline is one thing, but we actually need the content. You can totally copy and paste this over to a document, or you can have ChatGPT help you at least create your first rough draft of your ebook. So what I like to do is actually take this piece by piece, and I will highlight the first section. And there's this little icon right here where you can reply to this in ChatGPT. So we'll click on that. So I said, this is great. Write out a first draft of this section for my ebook. If you tell ChatGPT to write out your whole ebook at once, it's going to get lazy because it's just too much text. So what I'd recommend is to take it one piece or one section at a time, and that will help you create a much better product at the end of the day. So let's see what it comes up with when I put this in. Chat wrote a simple little story that talks about the comparison between investing at 25 versus 35 and the impact that that can have on you. So this is really important in the ebook and then goes into a couple different pieces of money mindset and myths around investing. I think that's really good for setting the stage for our ebook. I would recommend to copy and paste this, put it into a Google Doc, which we can do over here. I like to have in my Google folder a lead magnet section, or you can have an ebook folder. And what we would do is create a Google Doc, copy, paste this over, get rid of the horizontal lines because I don't like those. And then I would run through this and I would adjust it to sound like me or expand on things and just add my little bit to this that I wanted to add. If I wanted to go into more depth with this or make it more valuable in some way with the myths, then I would go in and I would make my changes. And now what you're going to do is go through each one of these chapters and have it do the same exact thing. So right here, one more time. Awesome. So ChatGPT again got us a good first draft for chapter number 1. We're gonna add that over to our document in here. Boom. Again, I like to get rid of these, kind of reformat, change things up a little bit into my own writing style and my own voice and that kind of stuff. That's really important. ChatGPT is great for helping you come up with good first drafts. And getting the ball rolling with your project. It's going to help you write this ebook so much faster. Now, if you're really serious about turning your ebook into an automated income stream that makes money for you 24/7, it's not just about the product. It's about having a really strong system and simple system that takes someone from just discovering you to ultimately buying from you. I have a free training on my website that walks you through exactly how to do this, from building a great product, which we're doing here, to creating that simple system to sell that product for you whether you're working or not, and then how to drive traffic to your system 24/7 without posting on social media every day, running expensive paid ads, or hiring a big team. So you wanna learn how to earn your first $2,000 per month from digital products like this ebook. I'll put a link down in the description, or you can always go to profityourknowledge.com/masterclass. So I'm not gonna go through this entire thing and write out every single chapter for you. I think you have the idea, and really this is the work that you should be doing anyway. Once you've got your ebook written, then we can dive into Canva and help you really start bringing your writing to life. Now Canva is an awesome tool because it's free. There is a paid version, as I'll show you a little bit of what that can do as well. But the nice thing about Canva is that you're never starting from scratch. Canva has already done 90% of the work for you with their awesome templates, and they have a ton to choose from. So what we're gonna do is go into Canva. We can go over to Home, go up to the search bar, and we're going to type in ebook multiple pages. From here, we're going to have a big list of different ebook templates that we can choose from. Now I will say right here, you'll see Pro. With the little crown. This is only for paid members. If you are a paid member of Canva, you get access to a lot more templates and resources, and it is definitely worth it because I use Canva in my business just about every single day. It is an amazing tool. It's helped me make a lot more money and just be more professional in this world of online business. You don't need to pay for Canva in order to create a really awesome ebook. For example, down here we do not have the crown, but this is a really good template. You can also see how many pages you get. With different styles and whatnot, infographics, that sort of stuff with this one template. What I recommend is to choose a template that you can do the least amount of editing with. So don't overthink it because it's really easy to get lost in all of the different templates. Just find one that you like and then click on it and I'll show you how to make it pretty. Let's choose this one for now. I like this. The pages look nice. Great. Customize this template. Now for the name, ChatGPT came up with a name for our ebook, so I like to change it up here. And then we can also add it in here. And right here you can resize this. Okay, probably go like that. And we can make this a little bit smaller, kind of center it up a little bit. Boom. Maybe up a little. There we go. Looks beautiful. For the picture, we can double-click on it, or if you delete it, we have this frame that we can add. So if we go down to photos right here, we can type in something like investing. Cool. And this is pretty cool. We can kind of center that up a little bit. Boom. Maybe not the best picture. Kind of like this one actually. Boom, that looks great. And then we would change out this picture too and change out your name, all that kind of stuff. You can even click on the background And if you wanted to, you know, change up the colors to whatever it is that you wanted, uh, the black is kind of cool. I kind of like the green. And then you don't have to change all the colors as well on every single other page. Right here, we'd go through, leave this all the same. You can change out the title and whatnot, your name, that sort of stuff. And then from our outline that ChatGPT gave us, we can literally just copy and paste. Okay, so it's a lot of copy paste, but we can add in everything that we like from here into our ebook. And then here is your introduction. So I'd write out your name, add in your pictures. If you go to uploads off to the side here, you can add, add uploads and then plug in whatever pictures you want. You can delete these pictures and add in your own photos as well. But once you've got this figured out, then we'll move on to the next step, which is chapter 1. Okay, so we had already gone into our ebook and made this first chapter, which is our intro. So I'm gonna copy and paste this, resize it a little bit. Never start investing. Boom, just like that. And then we'll go in here and we're just going to start with this first section just so we don't overwhelm the message here. Make sure we format it so it looks good. Bum bum. Already looking a lot better. When I'm writing stuff, I like to have about 2 to 3 sentences long. I don't want to have a huge wall of text like we did before, because that just looks overwhelming. It's not as easy to read. So you want your ebook to be nice and easy to read. That is the first story. And then over here we can add in like the 3 myths as well. And you would go through here and fill out all of this information, plug and play, copy and paste it over here. Into your Canva account. Now, once you've built out your ebook and you're happy with it, now it's time to export this and start marketing it so you can get people picking this up, joining your email list, or signing up to buy this ebook. When you're happy with your ebook, we'll go up here to share and then we'll go over to download. Click on this right here and we want to click on PDF Standard, which is the best for documents and emailing. So that's clicked. We're going to make sure that all of our pages are selected. Which it already is, and then we'll hit download. Now something I like to do is keep track of all the different lead magnets and resources that I have in my own business. And I have one folder called lead magnet PDFs. And from here, I'm going to upload a new file, which is going to be my Investing Made Simple, right? And that's right here, we click on it. And now we can see this beautiful ebook that is already built out for us. And then if you want to share this with people when they go through a checkout page or they sign up for your email list, you wanna make sure that they get this link. So what we'll do is view it and go up here to the top to share. And you wanna make sure that general access is on, anybody with the link, and you want them to be a viewer, okay? From there, you can copy this link, we can open it up in a new tab and paste it, or you can send it to people, have an automated email when people sign up for your email list or they buy your product after going through a checkout page. And this is the link that you're gonna share for people to get access to your ebook. Now, another pro tip in terms of marketing your ebook is to go back into Canva where your ebook is. We're gonna go back to share, go back to download, but this time we're going to choose a PNG and we're only going to choose the current page, which is this front page. All right? And I'll show you what we're gonna do with this inside of Canva as well. So we're gonna download that. We're gonna go back home and in the search bar, we're gonna type in smart mockups. Now of course what they're going to do is make sure that the pro options look way cooler than the free options, but don't worry, there's still some great free options. Uh, one that stands out to me for our ebook is this one. Looks great. So we're going to stick with this. They have some other related options as well if any of these catch your eye, but I'm just going to roll with this one, which we can customize. So as a marketing asset, we want to make sure that our copy is actually sticking out to them. So we'd say, get starting with investing even if you only have $100, and then put my name down at the bottom, and then we'll delete this picture. We still have the frame here, so we'll go over to uploads. We have our photo right here, and then we're going to add that in. We could even click here. Now that we have this added in, Canva is actually going to recognize that with photo colors, so we can change up the background. And this looks awesome. So we would download this, and this could go on your website or on your checkout page when you're going to sell your ebook. So now that your ebook is ready to go, the next step is knowing how to sell it or use it to grow your email list. and to do that, you're gonna need a high-converting sales page. I dissected over 213 high-converting sales pages, and in this video, I show you the 3 key things that they all have in common. If you have any questions about setting up your ebook in Canva, let me know in a comment below, and I will do my best to get to you as soon as possible. Take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen, and I'll see you in the next one.